Using what you're given

Recently my parents sent out a WhatsApp message to our family group with the following picture:

These all needed to be turned into juice.

I volunteered some help, and the next day, H (my daughter¹) and I went up to help. I manned the knives, and H helped turn the cranks on their manual apple grinding and pressing tools. This was, all told, a reasonably pleasant way to spend the day². Also it produced apple juice, which is OK if you like that sort of thing.

Shared physical tasks like this are quite a pleasant way to spend time in company. I’ve talked about this before, with the example of podding peas. You’ve all got a task, and you can talk or not as you wish, and this enables a very pleasant pace of conversation in a way that you often don’t get when your primary purpose is conversation.

Some idiot on Twitter has been using this sort of thing to argue that we should abandon washing machines, which are apparently exploitative, and go back to handwashing our clothes communally because it would create this sort of shared environment. This is obviously a bad idea. Washing machines are great, and only a complete tool would think otherwise.³

But gardens aren’t a bad source of such tasks. I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on one for my food (supermarkets are also great), and a younger me would be shocked to hear me say this, but I am starting to get the appeal.

But that’s not what this piece is about really. It’s about abundance.

This specific experience that mum and dad were dealing with of “help! We’ve got too many apples!” is something I call “forced abundance” - when you’ve got a huge amount of a good thing forced upon you whether you like it or not.

It’s very much not just apples, this is what gardens do. When I asked to use the apple picture, dad sent me this:

For me though the thing I always associate it with is berry season. If you’re used to fresh berries coming from the supermarket, you’re probably used to consuming them in fairly restrained quantities⁴. They’re not necessarily exorbitantly expensive, but they’re expensive enough that you notice the price.⁵

But in berry season with my parents’ garden, dessert every day is a giant bowl of berries that would probably set you back £50 or more at the supermarket.⁶ By the end of it it’s almost, but not quite, enough for you to be sick of berries.

I think if you price in labour and such it’s not obviously economically a huge saving to have a berry garden.⁷ Picking is time consuming but not especially onerous, but there’s a lot of labour that goes into maintenance before that. I’m not here to sell you on the value of berry gardening.⁸ What I’m pointing at is the unusualness of the experience: If your source of food is “on demand” like a supermarket, you’ll rarely⁹ experience a glut like this, because (within the limits of your ability to afford it) the amount you receive is entirely up to you.

And, for the most part, this is probably good. It’s certainly convenient. “Oh no I have too many berries” is certainly a nice problem to have, but it’s undeniably an inconvenient one. Too many apples even more so - apples take up a lot of space. Most of the time, people are busy and don’t want to deal with this, and that’s legit.

But there is, I think, something missing as a result. Having the world throw things at you and force you to catch them is the source of a lot of creativity and, if the things are positive ones, enjoyment. It’s a gift from the world, and it’s on you to recieve it.

This feels like an important part of the human experience that, by its nature, is hard to deliberately seek out - you can only create the conditions for it to happen on its own, and be open to it when it arrives.

One upshot of forced abundance is also that it leads you to discover things that you would otherwise never have thought of, because it presents you with practical problems to solve that lead you to discover new, and general, things. For example, there’s a great recipe I invented¹⁰ back in 2020, largely as a result of forced abundance coming, oddly, from a mix of the pandemic and Brexit:

The apple cashew thing

Ingredients

• As many apples as you want to use up

• A roughly equal weight of raw cashews

• About 1/3rd of that weight in raisins (or other dried mixed fruit)

• Oil

• Salt, allspice, honey, all to taste.

Steps

1. Coat the cashews in just enough oil to lubricate them (don’t use too much! They’ll get super oily if you do), add salt to taste, mix thoroughly, and bake at 180C for 15 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, chop the apples as finely as you can be bothered. Toss them with some allspice.

3. Take the cashews out of the oven, add the raisins and apple to them, mix thoroughly with a suitable amount of honey.

4. Raise the oven to 210C and bake for another half hour or so, stirring occasionally, until the apple is thoroughly cooked.

This recipe resulted from an excess of apples from fruit and veg boxes, and a bunch of cashews and raisins that were past their best before date because I’d bought them in bulk as part of stockpiling for Brexit. It’s also very good, and I’d probably never have figured it out otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t seem to be a thing that anyone other than me and a few people who have tried the recipe after I told them about it make. It’s something invented purely out of a circumstance of forced abundance in which I had to figure out how to use a bunch of ingredients I didn’t normally use that much of.

I think it also highlights some of the ways in which forced abundance is kinda fake.

Matt Bateman

has a great frame he uses called the demotivational interview:

My favorite form of practical reasoning “advice” is what I call Demotivational Interviewing. It looks like:

person 1: Ugh I have to go to the dentist

person 2: Good news, you don’t have to, you can let your teeth rot

[…]

This sounds sardonic how I put it but it isn’t really. Basically: state the reasonable worst case consequence of not doing what you are avoiding or dreading, in a matter of fact enough way that you can actually consider choosing that consequence. Then choose one way or the other.

Good news! You don’t have to use up all these apples, you can just let them rot.

Really, nothing actually forced me to use up these ingredients. Sure, I was making this in the height of the pandemic, but it’s not like we were actually short on food at that point. There was a brief window of panic and I think we were mostly out of it by the time I invented this. I wasn’t trying to figure out basic sustenance, I just had some ingredients that I thought it would be a shame to let go to waste.

I think this is something where gardening for yourself really amps up the emotional investment. Yes, you can let those apples rot, or those berries, or those tomatoes… but you sunk all that work into it. It’s personal in a way that money isn’t. Of course, that money would be very personal if you didn’t have enough of it, but even in the middle of my PhD like I was then my food budget wasn’t particularly tight. I certainly could have afforded to throw these away, but I didn’t want to. It would have seemed like a shame.

If I were more resource constrained, it wouldn’t have been an emotional thing, it would have been a straightforward necessity. So forced abundance, naturally, is relative to your actual level of scarcity.

But even when things aren’t actually scarce and you can absolutely afford the worst case scenario of letting something go to waste, you can choose not to, to treat things as if they matter more than they do.

I had another experience like this recently which was, in comparison, with oranges.

Here’s another recipe I make:

Stewed rhubarb with orange and ginger

Ingredients

• 6 sticks of rhubarb

• 3 oranges

• 1 tbsp frozen chopped ginger¹¹

• 1 cup sugar

• 1 cup water

Preparation

1. Chop up the rhubarb into small pieces.

2. Peel the oranges and chop them up coarsely.

3. Put everything in a big pot on a low heat and let simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally, until everything has mostly broken up.

4. Decant and let cool (I think this is much nicer cold from the fridge than warm, although it’s not bad warm either).

Unlike the apple cashew thing this is a very normal recipe. There are many like it, but this one is mine¹².

This isn’t a forced abundance recipe per se, although it is a little bit in that I like rhubarb and it’s very seasonal, so when it arrives in the shops for the first time I buy a lot of rhubarb, bring it home, and then go “oh shit, what do I do with all this rhubarb?” and stewing it is the easy default. I’ve gradually tinkered my stewed rhubarb recipe over time to arrive at this one and it’s now something I deliberately set out to make, but the starting point was definitely a very high rhubarb to ideas ratio.

Seasonality is a bit like a mini version of forced abundance - it’s not that you have an unreasonably large amount of food to eat, but you do have an unreasonably short amount of time to do it in.

But the relevant recent experience is that I got to the end of making it, looked at the orange peels, and thought to myself: You know, candied orange peel is delicious, and it would be a shame to let those go to waste…¹³

Anyway, that’s how I ended up making candied orange peel. It turned out OK. The recipe I used clearly didn’t have enough sugar, so after boiling it in sugar water for an hour I topped it up and put it on for another boil, and the result was still decent but not great. But then I got to the end of it, and thought “Hmm but now I have an awful lot of orange flavoured sugar water. It would be a shame to let that go to waste…”¹⁴

Of course, what I actually then did with it was forget to turn off the stove and leave it boiling away while Lisa and I both went and watched an episode of Decameron. I came back to find it had boiled down significantly¹⁵. “Oh well”, I thought, “I’ll deal with that in the morning” and I covered it and left it.

…and came back in the morning to discover that what I’d left overnight was less “syrup” and more “melted sugar”, so I had functionally glued a boiled sweet to my pan.

Which is, long story short, how I ended up spending the morning making orange candies. This involved a lot of trial and error¹⁶ of figuring out how to hand shape them, with the candies getting progressively less like boiled sweets and more like fudge as the sugar repeatedly got cooled and then reheated. I then covered them in ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to keep them separate and add a bit more of a zing. The result… well I like them. H likes them too, but she’s at an age where she’d probably like anything with that much sugar in. Dave and Lisa… do not. Even I’ll admit they’re not exactly a winner of a recipe. I had fun making them though. It was an interesting experience that I’d not had before, and a good exercise of creativity. But also next time I think I’ll use the leftover sugar syrup to make a cake or something.

But this is a good example of what I mean by forced abundance being a bit fake. Of course I didn’t need to use up those orange peels. I could have just thrown them away. I have done so dozens of times before. But this time I decided they were important.

A phrase that keeps bouncing around in my head is “life is made of found things”. I associate this idea with the book “Trickster Makes This World” by Lewis Hyde (although the phrase itself is, I think, mine), which talks a lot about how creativity is often a sort of responsiveness to the world, building things out of what we find in it.

Traditionally, every time I try to write about this book, I fail to say what I’m trying to say and abandon the post, so I won’t dwell on that now, but it’s a good book. I recommend it. All I mean to say by bringing it up is that an important source of creativity is taking what you find in the world and asking “What can I do with this?”, without necessarily attaching it to any sort of predefined goal.

Bernard Suits in his book “The Grasshopper” talks about the philosophy of games, and about their relationship to utopia. He thinks that in a utopia we’ll do nothing but play games. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is idiotic or tautological, but currently I think maybe it’s just missing something crucial.

Game-playing in Suits’ sense involves taking on some goal voluntarily, but I think it matters why you take it on. In a game, you take it on solely for the benefit of getting to play the game, and I don’t think that’s enough. It’s hard to thrive without the sense that, at least some of the time, what you’re doing is important.

I think it doesn’t have to be important in some grand global sense though. I think you can just decide that it matters, and it can be as simple as saying: This turned up here. It’s a gift. It would be a shame not to make use of it.