The Parable of the Cheese Burger- a lesson in complexity – with apologies to Waldo Jaquith
So, let’s assume you want a cheeseburger. This craving is a driving force in your life. It must be satisfied, right now. What do you need to do, to eat a cheeseburger?
Simple:
– Drive to your favorite burger joint. Wait in line. Order a customized cheese burger from the talking menu board. Pay for your delicious cheese burger. Remove the delectable morsel from its packaging and consume the savory treat. Elapsed time – a few minutes. Compared to minimum wage its cost is about 30 minutes of labor.
Harder:
– Go to the supermarket and purchase all the items needed to make a cheeseburger. Go home and turn on the stove – get the buns toasting in a pan. Put the ground beef into a bowl with a pinch of garlic salt. Mix it up and make a hamburger patty. Pull the toasted bun out of the pan and put the hamburger patty in. Put the bun on plate. Wash the veggies, put a couple of lettuce leaves on one bun. Flip the hamburger patty and put a slice of cheese on it. Slice the tomato and onion and put a couple slices on the lettuce. Get the ketchup bottle and put some on the other bun. Drop on a couple of pickles. When the cheese gets melty, put the hamburger patty on the bun. Put the other bun half on top and eat. – For the sake of a tranquil household, wash the dishes and wipe the stove down. Using our minimum wage standard, the cost is over an hour of labor per cheese burger if you make several at once.
Really hard:
– raise some cows and chickens. Dig and fertilize an acre of ground. Plant some wheat and a vegetable garden. Feed, protect and water the garden, the chickens and cows. Harvest some tomatoes, garlic, onions and cucumbers. Then, go milk a cow and make cheese. Ferment grapes or apples into wine (I guess you’ll need a vineyard or orchard too) and the wine into vinegar. For good pickles, distill the vinegar. Now make the ketchup and pickle the cucumbers. Take a short break. Now go and harvest the wheat and butcher a cow. Grind the wheat into flour and add a couple of eggs, some salt and water – proof some dough to get the yeast growing – mix your starter into the dough and let it rise. Finely mince some of the beef into hamburger. Build a fire in the bread oven and one in the rocket stove. Harvest the rest of the vegetables then wash the tomatoes, lettuce and onions. Bake the bread, fry the hamburger. Select a couple of lettuce leaves. Slice the tomatoes and onions. Pull the bread out of the oven and slice your loaf in half. Put the cheese on the hamburger. Put the ketchup and pickles on one side of the bun and the lettuce, tomatoes and onions on the other side. Pull the hamburger patty with the melty-cheese out of the pan and put it on the bun. Put the two halves together and enjoy.
Using the minimum wage reference, the cost is over a year’s worth of labor and doesn’t include the infrastructure, equipment or expertise required.
What might cause you to use one method over another? Most people in the USofA will opt for the simple one. Frugal in both time and labor. Quick and easy, its a no brainer. But
If you remove the natural gas going to the grill in the restaurant, the burger joint can’t cook hamburger. If you remove the electrical power, then the supermarket can’t sell you the groceries. If the power outage lasts long enough or is widespread enough, then you are left with having to make all of the ingredients yourself.
Heck, I’m still trying to figure out how to get lettuce and tomatoes to ripen at the same time.
<For those who don’t garden; lettuce is a spring and fall plant and tomatoes are a summer treat. This is why cheese burgers are a more modern food – generally the tomatoes and lettuce come from widely separated geographic areas>The point I want to make here is that all three examples have the same complexity. When you buy a cheeseburger at a fast food restaurant, you are offloading the procurement and prep work onto them – very convenient. If something breaks down – say the gas is shut off – you can’t get a cheeseburger from the burger place now. If you still want a cheeseburger, you have to do more of the work yourself requiring more skills (cooking) and more infrastructure (a kitchen) and more logistics planning (a trip to the store with a shopping list) and more time (by an order of magnitude) – so you go to the store and get the groceries so you can make one at home. If the power goes out for a length of time and now the store is closed… and you still want a cheeseburger, it can take months for you to grow and process everything. It can take a long time to learn how to raise cattle or grow wheat. Doing this on your own – same cheeseburger, same complexity – may be nearly impossible for a typical, modern person to accomplish. The loss of infrastructure, skills, power sources and transportation can push our technology all the way back to an equivalent of the 1850’s. It is easy to look at something as mundane as a cheeseburger and completely miss how easy and marvelous they are. Many of us, myself included, have a blind spot for this - its called the normalcy bias.
There is another tiny hitch here;
We weren’t born in the 1850’s and don’t know how to live in those days before electrical power and the internal combustion engine. We don’t have an 1850’s infrastructure anymore. And, population density is just a bit higher than the 1850’s <1,300% higher>. In the aftermath of a serious disaster, don’t count on there being a lot of cheeseburgers. Or anything else you haven’t planned for and readied in advance. I can live without cheeseburgers. But not without water, food, shelter, etc.
Interesting factoid – cheese burgers weren’t invented until the 1920’s.
Note: The reason for measuring the costs scaled against minimum wage in the USofA is to highlight the amount of work and effort required for acquiring calories. As of Feb 2019 a pound of rice, delivered to your doorstep, is under $1US per pound – a fraction of an hour’s worth of work at minimum wage. One pound of white rice has roughly 1700 calories or about %75 percent of a single person’s daily requirement of calories (not nutrition). The takeaway is that calories are extremely cheap now, compared to foraging (can be seasonal) or growing your own (will take months) and all this, during an emergency. In the aftermath of an emergency, it can take weeks for help to arrive – until then, you are on your own. I would rather be on my own with a cheeseburger than dreaming about a cheeseburger.
https://waldo.jaquith.org/?s=cheeseburgerhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-impracticality-of-a-cheeseburger/
