The Microwave Economy

There’s a curious passage here about a chandelier which is not as colorful, complaining that “you see how synthetic the crystals actually are.”

The crystals are, of course, synthetic. They are always synthetic. They are glass, made by artisans in workshops or by workers in factories, but made using chemical processes nonetheless. The question is whether you are allowed to call them “crystal”.

But the author’s reaction is, “Oh, the chandelier is not good enough” rather than any alternative reaction which might range from “oh, of course it wouldn’t be high-quality crystal, my friend isn’t rich” or “oh, what a tacky chandelier” or “why do you even have a chandelier like that in the first place?”

Getting high-quality furnishings (fittings, doors, etc) in a house requires you to have an opinion on what quality means for hundreds of aspects of your home. It’s not a problem you can simply throw money at. If you want to throw money at something in your home, there are plenty of suppliers for sinks, countertops, doorknobs, and cabinets that are happy to take your money. They won’t necessarily give you something much better, just something more expensive. The US also is in the bizarre position where land is relatively cheap, and we’re naturally tempted to get massive homes.

The author never really returns to the introductory point about microwave meals. If you prioritize high-quality food in your life, you will take the time to learn to cook. If you care about interior decoration, you will spend time shopping for the right furniture. But, ask yourself if you really care about this stuff or if you are trying to keep up with the Joneses. It can be liberating to not care, to buy Ikea furniture and ready-made microwave meals.

I enjoy eating good food as much as anyone - too much, perhaps, given that I am overwheight.

And yet if I could just stop eating, I would give it up in an instant. If I could somehow change my body so it syntetized the nutrients it needs from water, CO2 and sunlight, I would do it immediately. I would gladly give up my sense of taste and my digestive system, if the process required it, provided that I am still able to do all the tasks I do every day, and that the resulting alterations are not repulsive to my peers or myself.

I find eating very pleasant and very enjoyable, but I don't think about it as something that "makes me human", the same way I don't think about ... "excreting the residues" or "having colon cancer" as deeply human. To me it is impossible to ignore that it is first and foremost something I am fundamentally obligated to do in order to prolong my existence, and I would give it away just not to have that obligation/dependency.

I also happen to think that a lot of the impact we have on the environment and other species comes from our need to eat. It would be extremely beneficial to the biosphere if we all ate more plants, but it would be even better if we stopped eating altogether (or, if we only needed eating while growing up).

To some extent the affordable alternative to the "microwave culture" is to surround yourself with good quality artifacts from earlier versions of it. I cherish a nesting set of Pyrex bowls in avocado green that I got from an elderly lady at a garage sale. Or a couple of "Flint Stainless" brand kitchen utensils that give me more satisfaction to use than any other alternatives. Or the cast iron pans in multiple sizes that are our primary cookware. Or the mismatched knives, some of which came from the thrift store. Or the framed art posters, some of which were curb picks. All those items were once generic, but having been removed from their era, are now interesting and distinctive.

Even the house. I like the style of it, but it was built in 1970 in what was then a cookie cutter exurb out in farmland. But it has a 60x100 foot lot and mature trees in the front and backyards. Sure, it has the "paper thin doors" derided in the article, but it also has long-strip oak hardwood floor in most of it, again, high-end generic at the time, practically unobtainium now. You can have even more character by moving further into town, of course. But I don't want to move outward to the land of engineered floor joists and PEX plumbing, even if both actually work better and aren't just cheaper to make and install.

None of the principal rooms' furniture contains any particleboard. But here I was lucky to have had an artisan father who made over half of it. Still, junk can be affordably avoided for the rest as long as everything doesn't have to be a matching set.

Paint - after once painting a room in what ended up pretty close to "builder beige" I resolved never to do that again. The latest bathroom repaint is in a kind of orangey peach. A bit of WTF on the part of the spouse (who tolerates, and even appreciates, most of the above) initially, but even she likes the splash of colour in our lives now.

As for the microwave: We have that of course and boy is it handy for reheating leftovers. But there is a toaster oven next to it that is used more. Did you even know how good toaster ovens can be? The thermostat in mine is spot on accurate (I checked with a thermocouple probe). I've baked cakes and pastries in a succession of toaster ovens, sometimes outside on the deck on hot days.

This article actually hints about how optimizing everything leaves no room to ... live? enjoy things? and above, all, resilience.

That comes back to what N. N. Taleb called "antifragility". When something is really optimized, it will completely break away as soon as there's the slightest change in its environment. To be able to adapt, you need to keep some legroom. Some superfluous things that may change purposes when the need comes.

A microwave economy sprouts from believing Sears catalogs were ritual artifacts and leads to Google defining our language. The convenience-craftsmanship spectrum seems orthogonal to these and decorating habits.

Also: door knobs that beep? I guess I am going against the currents of society if that and owning a microwave is "all the same" household fixtures.

I've been eating mostly microwave meals (Factor75 & Freshly) for the past year, and found that they taste slightly better when baked in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

Freshly only lists microwave instructions, so it's probably a bad idea to bake the plastic, but my Corelle plates are rated for 350°F, so I can flip and bake those directly. Corelle/Vitrelle is an interesting material. It's lightweight, microwave/oven compatible, and the couple times I've dropped it over the years, it just bounced, though supposedly the tempered glass can violently explode.

On some level, it is due to the "invisible hand" as it were, that market forces in our current system optimize for convenience because that's what sells. On the other hand, it certainly isn't once the alternatives to the microwave-wares are eliminated because they don't sell well. An obvious example of this are SUV sales in the US. Car companies continue to sell non SUV vehicles in other countries where SUVs are too big but in the US where sprawl in abundant, SUVs sell more so car companies no longer sell them. But the thing is that was a decision the car companies made.

Regardless, you're not going to like this suggestion but fundamentally the issue OP has is with capitalism. While capitalism more or less created the wonders of modern life of convience we have, it also destroyed the naive, idyllic past(at least for some) and continues to do so as businesses look for more and more to commodify and more efficiency to exploit in order to maintain profit levels. The article is geared towards individual action to find more spice in life, I guess, but like that figure from the scirep paper, the whole market of stuff you can find out there just like the SUVs are focusing in on the efficient which is outside of your control.

Also microwave meals are typically high on salt.

In Europe we have microwaves everywhere, but we don't use them to heat industrially prefabricated food; instead we re-heat food we made ourselves, or got at a restaurant.