- Waldo Jaquith – On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.
One of those things that no-one stops to think about. We think about how the world changes in ways that make things that were impossible into possible, but we don't think about the ways that we are given new ways to combine the already-possible. A century ago, we had tomatoes, lettuce, beef, cheese and bread, but it's not until recently that we could combine them with any kind of practicality.
Nice idea but it doesn’t really stack up as some of his commenters have pointed out.
I don’t think he’s suggesting it was impossible, and it’s not the notion of possibility, so much as convenience that interests me – while it might have been possible at almost any point in human history (post the discovery of America, anyway), it would have been somewhere between difficult and potentially expensive, and an outright folly. William Gibson’s maxim “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” springs to mind.
Personally, I’m just looking forward to the day that food technology distribution advances to the point that I can afford a water bath for my kitchen. And maybe a centrifuge.