Why the Digitization of Everything is fraught.
Plagioclase’s mother has boxes of index cards with recipes on them. I have a lab notebook about 1/4 full of recipes that we’ve had since we started cooking for ourselves. I think we thought that since the pages don’t fall out, we could keep them forever, and then index them…
Well, it turns out that I have at least twice as many recipes written out, printed out or cut out and stuffed into the notebook. And as I was looking for my granola recipe (printed out, then written all over to make it better), I thought that maybe I should just transcribe them all into the notebook.
Better yet, I thought, maybe I should just put them all online, or at the very least, put them in some sort of database or something.
But then I realized that I can’t do with a “database or something” what I can do with these little bits of paper — remember how and when I got the recipe in the first place. Writing down “Plagioclase’s mother, 1989″ on a digital representation of a recipe is not the same as holding that 1″ strip of paper and remembering that Plagioclase wrote down that nutball recipe when he called his mom that year we weren’t going to make it home for christmas.
A copy of a thing is not the same thing as the thing. And while I risk losing those scraps of paper out of my notebook, I think I prefer that the recipes stay just the way they are.
Besides, I’m a messy cook. Can you imagine the crap I’d be having to clean off of a “kitchen” computer?!
