What's a recipe? It tells you how to make something. A list of ingredients, instructions, and approximately how long it will take. They even add a nice little flow chart:
But if you stop and think about it, all the ingredients don't pop into existence. They have to get made too. And what about the ingredients that go into the ingredients? You can see where this is going...
Gives new meaning to the phrase "making something from scratch."
There's something about living in modern society with the pervasive feeling of remove from the origins of everything around us. I push a button on my phone and something shows up at my door in a box. I stand in the grocery store and pick up the platonic ideal of a tomato and somewhere inside, I know that tomato is 1000s of miles from where it started.
We try to counter the feeling with eating organic and shopping local, going minimalist and Marie Kondo-ing our sock drawer.
As you drill into what makes up the things that make up the things that make up the things, it starts to drive home the enormous way our modern society saves us all time and money through the enormity of its scale.
So much so, that something simple and everyday like Eggs Benedict, becomes essentially impossible if I were to try and do it entirely (and I mean entirely) by myself.
For example
Spending 4 years raising pepper plants so you can grind a little pepper on top
Saving 29 cents by raising a chicken yourself, rather than buying it at the store. As a raiser of chickens, I can confirm that the primary reason to do it is because you enjoy it, not to save money or time. It does neither.
I love the unhinged idea of spending 6 years growing an apple, so you can spend 6 months making vinegar, so you mix 2 tablespoons of vinegar into the water for the poached eggs to stay together.
Seeing it all laid out this way feels like a kind of miracle that something like Eggs Benedict is able to exist at all. On the other hand, it's a little depressing to see laid out the tremendous human effort and environmental toll it takes to make something so small.
It's kind of an ambiguous feeling. But I think the next time I order and Eggs Benedict, I'm going to try to appreciate it a little more while I'm eating it. For sure, I'll finish the whole thing.
