Cookbook Survivor Resolution + "All Quiet" + Men and Doctors + The Checklist Manifesto
Monday Miscellany
I think this was a slightly less successful visit to the Grand Central Market’s cookbook.
I started by making the bread pudding, because it was actually the most complicated of the three jobs. When I’m looking at recipes, I often think in terms of “number of separate bowls, plates and pots I’m going to be using in rapid succession” as a rating of complexity and hassle. (Not the least because our division of labor in the household is I cook/spouse cleans and I want to think carefully about the mess that results, but also because deep cleaning of the stove and kitchen is something we both work on, and the more complicated the recipes are, the more than needs doing when that rolls around.) The bread pudding had a high amount of complexity because it had a custard for the bread and then a caramel to go on top.
When I was in middle school, I took an after-school class on cooking (one of several occasions where I was pretty much the only boy in the room) and we did one day on caramel and candy-making. I remember being astonished: you mean sugar is caramel? That it just turns into caramel if you heat it in a pot? I also remember being astonished when a small bit of caramel plopped up on my hand and gave me a bad burn: holy shit that stuff is hot. Plus, as many chefs have discovered, when it burns, it’s a damn mess—and some glooped over onto the bottom of the stove and did so. There’s one of my jobs for today. Anyway, the bread pudding was pretty glorious for all that.
The drunken noodles not so much. One part of that was my choice of rice noodles—it just wasn’t a good brand and they stuck together rather badly. Should have been a broader noodle. Otherwise it was a fine but not great recipe for a classic dish. (The cast iron wok got a workout after all this week.) The pressed cucumber salad, it turns out, is really just cucumber + fried chickpeas + avocados with a simple dressing. The special gimmick for it is supposed to be vacuum sealing peeled cucumbers overnight, at which point they supposedly become “almost translucent”. Even if I had a vacuum sealer—and I am not going to have one—I don’t think I would bother with that. The bright green of cucumbers with their skin still on is one of their aesthetic virtues. Anyway, it was an ok salad, but I’d probably jazz it up a teeny bit in some fashion if I were making it myself.
We watched the new version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” over the weekend. It’s very good, but I hope it doesn’t win the major Oscars it has been nominated for. Those nominations are at least partly about it being a Very Serious film that happens to speak to something in the zeitgeist, namely that there’s a war going on in Ukraine that has a horrible material resemblance to the First World War.
I keep thinking about the differences between the war in Ukraine and the Ethiopian-Eritrean War of 1998-2000. The latter war also had a distressing resemblance to the grotesquerie of trench warfare in Europe and its revolting waste of human life, but the world paid little attention to it. That’s partly because it was in Africa and of little strategic concern to the United States (at that point in its brief moment as the sole global superpower), but also because there wasn’t ubiquitous video and reportage from on-scene journalists. It happened out of sight, and so was out of mind.
Both wars are a demonstration that neither technological change nor military doctrine moves so relentlessly onward that we will never again waste human lives over and over a few yards of movement to traverse a destroyed asset of no value. In both cases, there’s no doubt about whose fault that is (unlike World War I): Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Afwerki didn’t gain the political traction he’d hoped from destroying so many of his men to no gain, but there he is, still in power. I have to hope that Putin will eventually suffer for what he’s done—surely someone can find a window that he could fall out, since defenestration seems so easy in Russia—but there’s every chance that he will be in the end like the German officer in “All Quiet”: eating an elegant meal while men die for no reason at all.
The Well column at the New York Times takes up the often-asked question of why men, especially older men, don’t go to the doctor.
It’s a strange thing to read a well-meaning essay where you are named as a social problem, stranger for an older white male professional who rarely has to deal with that sensation. I recommend the experience to everyone as a clarifying exercise that puts extra muscle on the observation on DuBois’ famous question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Like DuBois, I find it takes my normal ease of answering away.
Partly because the burden of an answer is always put on the desk of the problem—and yet the need for an answer plainly doesn’t come from the problem but from somewhere else. Who needs older men to see doctors more often and presumably live longer and better if they do? Presumably people who would like us to live longer and better. Why would they? Who knows: public health advice never starts there, with a socially deep and profoundly felt sense of care. Perhaps because we are embarrassed collectively to act as if we do care when our health care system, our economy and our social institutions so blatantly do not: not about older men, not about women, not about people of color, not about anyone that the discourse of public health names as a problem.
The Well column says: find a doctor you trust. I have had doctors I trust, but they’re hard to come by and have become harder still as my health insurance has become worse and worse in terms of what it provides, while the major health care system in my county has become a dumpster fire that my elected officials and the county’s major employers all just watch helplessly. “Find a doctor you trust” feels like a ridiculous commandment from the outset. How? Where? How long will I be allowed to have one? And of course I’m afraid even if I can find one. Afraid of being judged rather than treated, afraid of hearing the truths I can feel in my body. Why isn’t that a problem on the desk of doctors rather than a problem on my desk?
That’s the problem with being a problem: the problems that make you a problem never get named as such.
Speaking of doctors and problems, I was re-reading Atul Gawande’s excellent The Checklist Manifesto recently. An emeritus colleague of mine put me on to Gawande’s writing some years ago and I have tremendous appreciation for Gawande’s clarity, even when he’s writing about complexity.
And yet, I kept having one thought as I worked through it: the idea that a simple thing like a checklist can manage complexity is at the root of some of the worst failures of neoliberal organizational culture as well as some of its proven successes.
Gawande accurately anticipated that there would be resistance to checklists from professionals who deemed themselves too experienced, too competent, to need such tedious rote procedures—the “fuck it, we’ll do it live” mindset.
But what strikes me is that in most organizations, experienced professionals are increasingly hemmed in by rules and procedures that present themselves as being as effective and necessary as Gawande’s checklist but which are in fact disguised vehicles for delivering a potentially contentious ideology or value-system that the people making the rules do not want to discuss or debate. The checklist spoke to the central objectives of professional labor: don’t crash the plane, don’t kill the patient, don’t get the client prosecuted for tax fraud, just because you forgot a procedure or operated on the wrong thing. There’s no debating any of that: no lawyer wants to miss a settlement because they misfiled, no professor wants to have students who can’t work in a lab because the professor forgot to teach a basic skill, no doctor wants to kill a patient because the doctor didn’t wash up before surgery. So a checklist is a brilliant way to satisfy commitments that are beyond question.
It’s just that when you have a success like that, it tends to attract all the managerial thinkers who want to enforce their own preferences as if they were also beyond question. That not only saturates a working environment with commandments, but it degrades the value of functional instruments like a checklist—and that general spread keeps us from considering whether we are in some cases trying to keep over-engineered excessively complex, and entirely too big institutions from operating rather than finding ways to reduce their scope and reach.