Welcome, Ven a gozar!

Looking around my world these days I see an awfully large number of assemblers every where I go. I am starting to wonder, when I think about the average American family if we do not assemble it also. Perhaps mine is an isolated perception, and the rest of the country is more normal, I am not sure though.

My first observation of assembly happened at a Grocery store of all places. I happened to be in the bakery section early one morning picking up some bread. I noticed that most of the breads could be grouped into a few main groupings. First there is the old standby bread, soft and mushy white air bread. This is followed up with soft, and mostly white, wheat air bread. Finally there is an assortment of more diverse breads, some of which are actually quite different from the rest.

I have noticed that most of the wheat and white breads taste the same. If you look closely at the ingredients label, you may see some have raisin, or other (they do not use the word) coloring, to make the bread look more like wheat bread, so they technically dye white bread made out of  processed wheat - how convenient. More diverse breads are for the most part only diverse by what is added to them, not the basic bread itself, unless it is a sourdough, rye, or some such bread. The rest are the same basic dough with different seeds, and things added to them.

This brings me to the particular morning I mentioned above about assembly being everywhere. Cookies, and pastries made by the ‘bakery’ within the store all taste about the same. There were some boxes of commercial dough out in the customer area waiting to go into the ‘bakery’. The boxes of dough stated on the label, all the uses this particular batch of dough was good for.

Care to guess what it said on the dough box label? The label explained how different breads, cookies, pastries, doughnuts, etc, could be made from the same box of dough by adding different flavorings, and cooking methods. Now, I understand that dough is really just dough, but having made my living by cooking once upon a time, I know there should be some minor differences between each type of dough used in different bakery products.

For example, if I buy a chocolate cake doughnut, it should not have the same texture and flavor of a soft chocolate cookie, right? Wheat and white bread should have different tastes, and nutritional values? An apple turnover and a cherry strudel should have more differentiating them than the sugared fruit inside? I am afraid this is no longer the case if you are buying from a major grocery store. Everything is assembled with only a few variations from the main product.

Looking around, I noticed most places we eat are no longer restaurants, they are food assembly centers. Nothing is cooked from scratch at these places. All that is done is like the Value Added Reseller in the computer industry, a few modifications are made to the original product, and it is sold to you at a higher price. The ‘cook’ opens a plastic bag of something, heats it up, and feeds it to you in one or more forms.

It is not only happening in fast foods, but more upscale establishments too. Is your stuffed potato really stuffed, or was it assembled in a manufacturing plant somewhere? How about those vegetables, did they come from a fast frozen bag already flavored? How about your fish, wasn’t that caught and processed on a boat somewhere around the Arctic Circle? Your steak is probably the same way all they did here was add value by heating it for you.

Assembly is probably happening in more areas of my life than food. I would guess my company and the way it functions is an assembly too, made up of actual company people, supplemented by contract companies who hopefully offer a better service for less.

So what about American family’s of today? Is the typical American family, a real family any more, or is it an assembled product too?

Comments (0) Jan 06 2008