Food for Thought

I have reached a stage in life where I am more likely to think of salad than spaghetti when I want to fix a quick meal. But it is still spaghetti sauce I turn to in talking to students and colleagues about technological creativity. I well remember the first time I reached for the metaphor, for it was in desperation. Trying to get a group of undergraduates to realize that invention was not magic but rather a very human act that all of us can identify with at some level, I found myself talking about raiding the refrigerator, rummaging around among possible ingredients, and devising a spaghetti sauce just slightly different from the ones I had eaten before—adding some capers, perhaps, or roasted peppers, or leftover chicken, whatever promised to make novel dinner fare of an old standard. I really don't know how well my effort that afternoon did the trick, but in subsequent years I have found myself returning to spaghetti sauce when I need to make some point about technique, innovation, acceptance, or any of a host of elements that we historians of technology like to talk about.

The spaghetti sauce metaphor is terribly simple, to be sure: we live in a world of designed artifacts, and technological change begins with alterations of design. I know what my usual sauce is made of and how it's put together: some tomatoes, garlic, and onion, a little oregano, basil, and bay, perhaps a meatball (the subject of an entirely separate design exercise) or two, or simply some chopped beef, the whole browned and stirred and stewed. If I am not satisfied with this, or if I have a different set of ingredients at hand, I alter the design, I test the result, and I may then make changes in my long-term "construction" of spaghetti sauce (or, quite possibly, I chalk the result up to experience and draw conclusions about what doesn't work—failure, we remind our students, is another important aspect of technological experience). It's not a model that needs belaboring in order to convey some sense of the dynamics of invention, innovation, and development.

I imagine that one of the reasons that I liked the metaphor originally was that it was unexpected: any teacher knows the utility of surprise in waking up a drowsy classroom. I liked it, and continue to like it, also because of its simplicity: everyone can grasp the possibility of change, and of success or failure (or mediocrity, for that matter). They also, I trust, can readily imagine the technical elements involved, the open-ended and yet bounded set of possible ingredients and techniques, even if they have not in their lives ever done more than open a jar in order to dress a plate of pasta.

Some of the effectiveness (I hope!) of the metaphor lies in the fact that it obviously is a metaphor; no one imagines that I'm really interested in spaghetti-sauce-as-technology. But why not? Why, in other words, is spaghetti sauce less technology than, say, steam engines or light bulbs or refrigerators? Is it because it is ephemeral, made to be quickly consumed? But light bulbs, textiles, and fuels, to mention just a few familiar objects of technological interest, are made to be used up, although at different rates, to be sure. Does the organic nature of food put it outside the technological realm? But there are many elements of technology that come from or belong to the organic world, from wood and paper to the entire domain of agriculture. The more I think about this question, the less certain I am of finding any answer. The question becomes part of the larger question that many of the readers of this journal have had to at least acknowledge, if not actually try to answer: what is technology? As the matter of spaghetti sauce—or, indeed, food in general—makes clear, the question is often, as a practical...