I chop a pretty good amount of garlic. Simple pasta saurces have a been the core of my weeknight cooking since I learned to cook for myself in college, so I’ve gotten comfortable doing it. Pull a couple cloves off the bulb (probably at least one more than the original recipe called for), slap with the knife blade to loosen the skin, slice off the bottom, peel, slice once down the middle to get a stable base and then chope to desired level of fine-ness. Certainly something I’ve done hundreds of times by now.
Whenever you have a relatively simple task that you have to do frequently it becomes a candidate for automation. Chopping garlic is rote enough that there are many options on the market to ease the toil. There are a variety of tools and tips and tricks for peeling the garlic (those skins are always tricky). One can buy specialized presses or manual or electric food processors designed to speedily mince the cloves. Of course if you would prefer to skip the whole enterprise there’s always jarred minced garlic, or garlic paste, or garlic powder. There’s probably even some fancier options out there I haven’t had the opportunity to try (I’d like to tour an industrial kitchen sometime cause I bet the tools they have are really neat). By hook or by crook the application of technology promises to reduce the toil of rendering garlic suitable for my pasta sauce.
The problem with these for me is not that they don’t work (although I never could get the hang of some of them), but that I honestly just enjoy chopping garlic. Having it done it this often I know how to do it more than well enough for my own needs. My technique isn’t perfect, but it’s comfortably my own. At the end of the day there aren’t that many things in a kitchen I can comfortably do on autopilot, but chopping garlic isn’t something that I need to think about a whole lot. I can just let my hands go to work and that feels satisfying.
I think it’s important to point out that I think having the option to reduce the strain (physical, mental, organizational, financial) involved in everyday tasks is good. I worry at times that I seem like a bit of a luddite, cursing technology for stealing the intricate beauty of my craft. My pasta sauces may have fresh garlic but to that I’ll happily add canned pre-crushed tomatoes. I like my bagged shredded cheese, pre-measured taco seasoning, and store-bought tortillas just fine. And you’d better believe I’m putting the whole mess in the automatic dishwasher when I’m done.
Automation puts projects that would otherwise be out of my reach firmly in the realm of achievable on a weeknight, and that does largely improve my life. I read an interesting article on Garlic in a Jar that makes a great point about a snoody attitude towards technological “shortcuts”. Especially in the kitchen, focusing on the importance of cooking “from scratch” without automated aid is mostly a high status performance. We shouldn’t deny creativity merely because it uses methods we think are insufficiently classy.
At the same time though, automation can only reduce toil if there’s toil to be automated away. Work that we appreciate or even love doesn’t benefit much from automation. Adopting automation requires investing money in equipment and time enduring the friction of retraining. If all we’re getting for our investment is shortening the parts of our work we enjoy so we can spend more time on the parts we don’t, its no wonder automation gets a bad name.
I’m reading Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s new encyclical which addresses among other topics the relationship between automation and human dignity. I appreciate the way it frames technology as powerful but fundamentally amoral. Technology has the potential to raise standards of living around the world, and to unlock new and unexplored realms of creativity. But that same power can also be used to drain the joy out of life and sacrifice it at the altar of efficiency.
Work is going to be a part of my life, but I want to be able to enjoy it. And that requires recognizing that sometimes doing it the way I like to do it might be more important than doing it as efficiently as possible. We analyze new and novel forms of automation always judging based on efficiency, but I thnk it’s going to be increasingly important to highlight other considerations. Otherwise we’re liable to spend billions of dollars on automation for the parts of life everybody would rather just keep doing anyway. I might be enlightened or I might be a Luddite, but either way I’m chopping my garlic by hand.