I love food.
I love it and will consume and consume till my stomach and waistband creak in quiet concession that mutually-assured destruction will be achieved the instant I reach over for the last pizza slice.
I guess I’m just hungry. Both hungry for the zest of new and exciting foods as well as the more familiar – though no less thrilling – home dining experience. At home, you’re getting all the traditional dishes you could ever want. However, there comes a time in everyone’s life during which they become aware that there’s some limit to the variety of lunches and dinners on offer. The cook(s) in your family probably has a certain tried-and-tested method when preparing meals. You imagine – just for a moment- what it would be like to drift apart from the culinary bubble you grew up in. In spite of almost 2 decades spent eating mum’s food to my heart’s content, I have been guilty of such a desire. Over time, even the most sumptuous of spreads can become tedious if stirred, sifted and sieved by the same hand.
You begin to crave new experiences. The whim to tackle food that is foreign to your dining table. This intrinsic desire to rebel is testament to the fact that you have been cooped up and fed on a steady diet all your life. Adolescence lowers our inhibitions, it increases our impulsive burners. You resolve to hit up fast-food joints – to defy authority and their countless studies on the long-term consequences of fried chicken and chips. We crave variety, hence the lack thereof must make everything taste just a little too bland. And in a world where there are around 40 000 McDonalds alone – almost 5 ‘Golden Arches’ for every single city on Earth – such figures are a clear indication that mass affordability and abundance. In the 21st Century – slow-release poison or not – fast-food is a roaring success.
Soon, before we ever acted upon those plans to run away and join the field of competitive eating, the time to flee the nest comes of its own accord. Home-cooked meals may no longer be an option, let alone the norm. At first, we are euphoric as the prospect of not having to chew through our mother’s (questionable) attempt at a medium-rare steak, is a deeply satisfying one. The beginning of a new consumption era. Instant Noodles and the occasional takeaway. On-demand grub can be considered a default option unless one is motivated enough to commit to cooking 7 days a week. Of course, living in Halls of Residence can also mean that someone else may be around to cook for you, but isn’t that sort of recreating the ambience of homemade meals all over again?
Combined factors of reduced time, willpower and money render ‘Cup A Soups’ and basically anything with a microwave label the new go-to option. As a student, one can perhaps enjoy a rare outing to some lavish restaurant or – better still – a medium-priced all you-can-buffet. However, such days are to be marked with a fat cross on the calendar because, liberating though they may be, we have been conditioned from an early age to conform to the status quo – to ‘shut up and eat our greens like every other kid’. This equates to mass consumerism along the ready meal aisle, regardless of potential alternatives.
Besides, our barren wallets simply cannot stretch far enough to accommodate any such entreaties of the stomach.
2 minute Mac and Cheese may be all very well and good for some. but for those still pursuing their gastronomical sweet spot, microwaveable dining may be a harrowing synonym for mundane dining. Even if one can afford to live off takeaways, how long before the sweet and sour sauce is too sour, or the duck strips lose their texture? Day after day, from disposable fork to disposable fork, the very monotony we sought release from returns to haunt us in an unconventional manner. Only this time, it’s not just our palate that is at risk, but our physical health also.
But before I land a brand deal with Joe wicks or Balance Box, this post isn’t about dissuading you from going all-in on the Mighty Meaty 2 for 1 special. As it happens, I’m more interested in the conception of an analogy to help illustrate my real motivations for writing this. To clarify the parallel between food and facts, and how to escape the rut. I like to call it the Information Consumption Complex.
Infoodmation.
I love knowledge.
I love it and will consume and consume until the bags underneath my eyes and brain creak in quiet concession that mutually-assured destruction will be obtained the instant I click on that last technology review.
When you’re younger you ask your parents and family about everything. Pretty much the entirety of our childhood can be distilled into a series of extended response questions. Incidentally, it can take but a few years at best to realise that their parents actually do not possess all of the answers. The capacity to believe the weird and the wonderful – our ‘gullibility’ is heightened due to the fact that whenever something unorthodox comes to light – instead of being told to pause and ponder – the topic simply gets appended to an already long list of concepts we’ll ‘get when we’re older’. This can put an unceremonious end to the plethora of why’s and how’s. We then spend some time wallowing in a form of self-pity derived from our relative incompetence at perceiving the world around us.
Until we discover the internet.
On-demand information. Infinity pools of knowledge beneath one’s fingertips. A glimpse through the rose-tinted looking-glass of limitless serendipity. Suddenly our ‘insatiable’ urge to ask ‘why’ can in fact be sated by the reassuring presence of the Google search engine. It can get so much that when adults tell us something that doesn’t quite add up (too much television gives you square eyes, anyone?). Instead of stimulating our neural pathways to be critical vis-a-vis the legitimacy of their statement, we say ‘ok, I’ll just google it’. Of course, this is eventually discouraged also. “You won’t have your phones in the exam”, they say.
Yet, as technology gets smarter yet more straightforward, tapping into its resources becomes a reflex. The world wide web becomes an oracle to second-guess our every notion. It takes no amount of measurable effort to glance down at our phones, tap in a few keywords, and watch the display light up with a wealth of curated responses. As habitual creatures who religiously frequent the path of least resistance, Siri has never sounded sexier. Finding the answer is quick, easy and definitive; the triad of salient arguments justifying an exponential rise for the internet extravaganza.
However, it may one day dawn upon on the children who grew up with smartphones that, instead of perpetually looking online for answers, we may actually have to start coming up with some of our own. Soon it will be time to flee the nest in pursuit of such noble truths.
Now, having our family sitting adjacent to us may no longer be an option, let alone the norm. At first, we are euphoric as the prospect of not having to sit through our father’s (questionable) monologues on ‘staying focused’ and ‘finding our feet’, is quite the liberating one. We have new teachers. An extended panel of guides and mentors to ensure we do indeed ‘find our feet’. Nowadays, many Universities record their lectures, offering students the chance to watch them online at their own pace. On-demand classes. Unless we are deeply motivated and committed to turning up at for the 7:45 “Introduction to the mechanics of Dark Solitons in Bose-Einstein Condensates” 7 days a week, flipping on our laptops and tuning into the live stream, proves a far more viable option.
Living in Halls of Residence can mean that someone else may be around to check over your work and corrections, but what use will they be in the Exam Room? Also, don’t they have their own classes to sleep through?
Combined factors of reduced time, willpower, and freedom render second-hand textbooks, hours poring over dated articles, and fruitless back-to-back email correspondence with academic advisors the go-to option(s). As a student, the only time one can anticipate even an ephemeral sense of accomplishment is when some convoluted idea in the module clicks into place a little (considering everything else that allegedly happens at Uni, that’s saying a lot). However, sporadic ‘eureka’ moments are to be marked with a fat cross on the calendar because – exhilarating as they may be – the undergraduate minds that have been conditioned to ‘shut up and memorise the quadratic formula’ simply cannot stretch far enough to accommodate such entreaties of the higher education syllabus.
For once, the internet may not have all the answers – or it may have too many answers. Whatever the case, our analytical reasoning isn’t quite up to the mark of scouring through the vast swamps of data contrived by the web and its machine learning algorithms. Extracting only the most relevant pieces of information from said data is a skill that is often taught, though rarely learnt.
In follows that, when it comes to food – and, incidentally, the virtual world- it’s not hat we can’t find what we’re looking for; it’s often the case we are spoilt for choice. it rests upon our frail, frail shoulders, to make the right one. We often claim that the problem is that we are inundated with options, and often they aren’t exactly what we’re looking for. Consequently, we set up filters. We filter our searches for the concepts most relevant to us. We restrict our shopping to ensure a diet more suited to personal needs. However, evaluative literature has demonstrated that implementing better filters does not diminish the sense of overload; it intensifies it.
“It’s not information overload. It’s filter success.”
Signal vs Noise
Information overload actually takes two forms. One is called ‘situational overload’ and the other, ‘ambient overload’.
Celebrated Author Nick Carr is the one responsible for coining such terms. He defines situational overload as the classic ‘needle-in-a-haystack problem’: “You need a particular piece of information – in order to answer a question of one sort or another – and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information. The challenge is to pinpoint the required information, to extract the needle from the haystack, and to do it as quickly as possible.” When people are complaining that they can’t find the answer, they are usually referring to situational overload. However, according to Nick, the phrasing of their complaint might be a little problematic.
Whenever a new information medium comes along,” he begins “we tend to quickly develop good filtering tools that enable us to sort and search the contents of the medium. In general, He makes a case that, although the amount of information available to us has exploded in recent years, the problem of situational overload has continued to abate. Alas, there are still moments where our filters strike hay instead of the needle, but for most questions, most of the time, search engines and other digital filters, or software-based, human-powered filters like email or Twitter, are able to serve up relevant, reasonable answers in the blink of an eye.
Carr argues that situational overload is not the problem. “When we complain about information overload, he explains, “what we’re usually complaining about is something known as ‘ambient overload’. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email inboxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.
The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.
So what to do about this?
slow down.
The Tipping Point
2020. Obesity rates are soaring. Work-related stress is on the rise. There’s so much to be consumed and swallowed whole out there. It is truly the age of convenient commerce.
We get tired of buffets because all-you-can-eat goes from fun to nauseating it takes to finish the entree. In the same respect, we can only stare down the infinite chasm of information for so long before we just can’t take it anymore. At this point, we could package the food in small takeaway boxes, tuck this away into our fridges and enjoy them in your own time – just could take distilled notes and package them into bite-size chunks for sustainable and prolonged consumption. But even refrigerated food goes off eventually. The note-taking process goes stale from time-to-time. we have to slow down. Go easy on the extra fries. Mediate the impulse to pull that all-nighter. Our wellbeing is on the line. And our overall happiness very much falls into that bracket.
Nothing stays enticing forever. But addiction thrives off our inability to grasp such a fact. The more we eat, the more we have to eat. the more we scroll, the more we have to scroll. Knowledge is power, but even the best system’s fall apart with an infinite supply. Suddenly, 3 double-decker cheeseburgers and 36 Wikipedia links later, we are back on the banal cycle of ‘eat, eat, eat, repeat’. Life becomes an endless trudge through the oozing slime pits of trifling routine. At this point, you seek the opposite of complexity. You just want it all to make sense. Your childhood ambition to plunge ever deeper into the unknown is now inverted by the urge to actually your findings. To dumb down what you’ve learned- to cut back on the bite-sized and the deep-fried. There’s only one thing for it.
Time to go home.
Full Circle
So, you crave home food now?
This antithetical truism is loosely based on the psychological phenomena that you tend to miss what is no longer readily available – despite the fact you may have completely overlooked its existence when the ladle was within arm’s length. As well as being the whole idea behind Passenger’s – ‘Let Her Go’, the notion invites a few more interesting implications.
If food and knowledge are truly on parallel lines, it holds that home-cooked meals are the equivalent of timeless anecdotes; tips and tricks of the trade from the people closest to you. Just as you often fail to acknowledge how much you missed your mum’s cooking till it’s on a plate in front of you, It’s easy to forget about the impact that speaking to those that know you on a personal level can have. Despite the best efforts of Scienorld to prove that fundamental proof that logic is what convinces the ‘rational human’ to change his or her mind, Some of our most fundamental hopes, dreams and beliefs are gifts from those we love. Our true religion – embedded in the heart by the very few with unfettered access.
“Facts don’t change people’s minds. Friends and family do.”
The voices of our nearest and dearest are also far more likely to ‘hit different’, as it were. Let it be said that I enjoy the conveyor belt of insightful tidbits as much as the next man, though if it came to choosing between traditional Japanese dining vs Yo Sushi, I know where I’d rather be.
The question is, where are you going?
We leave home, nauseated at the very mention of chicken casserole – though it is with the very promise of the same casserole that we are lured back, many years later. So try for balance. If you get bored, eat more takeaway food. And every once in awhile, go to the best buffet in town. This virtuous cycle of consumption hint toward the revolutions of a wheel that sustains the paradox of ‘Information Consumption’ itself. It keeps both spokes of overload -situational and ambient – in check. Maintaining this sort of feedback system is critical as too much of anything can prove detrimental toward long-term satisfaction – To achieve the recommended daily dose of ‘infoodmation’, ensure you strike an equilibrium between organic and processed. And remember – go home once in a while. Whenever your digestive tract has been put through its paces, know that there’s nothing a solid helping of grandma’s apple pie, followed by her best advice – can’t remedy.
Bonus Round
After you indulge in sweet childhood memories, you don’t have to leave it all there. Take a classic recipe that is known and loved, then tweak it a little with some extra herbs and spices. This is akin to obtaining some profound knowledge/advice, absorbing, assimilating, and ultimately adding to it – superimposing your own insights. No two experiences are the same, though – with a little tinkering – the same bare-boned wisdom can take on many relevant forms.
Make it personal.
Finally, and you’d better hear me out this, why not take some of that inspiration from your favourite dishes and make something from scratch. Not just blindly following some recipe – but crafting one yourself. Not just a Cook anymore, but a Chef. To create your own food – your own ideas – is to assemble everything you’ve learned, every morsel of wisdom you’ve ever acquired over the years, chop it up finely, and let it simmer slowly as the creative juices ebb and flow. There could be no better way to savour the meal. No better way to take it all in.
Locate → Consume → Create.
Just some food for thought…