no. 76: insufficiently disposable

on things that get wrapped

Hullo to readers old and new! Happy fall, and thanks for waiting a month to hear from me again.

If you’re new here, you may want to read this other essay first, or at least in proximity to this one. They kind of go together, though I can’t quite say how.

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There’s this cup on my counter. It’s been sitting there for months, and I’m never going to use it again, but it’ll be months more before I throw it out, because it’s insufficiently disposable, too sturdy for a single use, yet obviously meant to be forgotten. So it sits there, a toad upon my counter, a monument to a moment of weakness. 

It came from a place called Nan Xiang Express, yet another fast casual chain in the pangs of breech birth. Nan Xiang Express sells xiao long bao (soup dumplings)¹ and a sort of greatest hits list of small dishes and noodles that, if you close one eye and squint, looks like it was inspired by the cooking of Shanghai. It has self service and wipeable surfaces and trashcans in the dining room, a McDonald’s of the dumpling.

The outlet we went to had recently taken over one of Chinatown’s most storied addresses, a place called Dumpling House that used to be packed to the rafters every hour it was open. Dumpling House was what I think of as an equilibrium Chinese restaurant: 30-40 seats, heavily staffed, with probably 4 servers and at least 6 cooks, plus a couple of folks at the host stand (for reasons I don’t quite understand, a lot of independent Chinese restaurants in the northeast wind up being about this size). They served everything that Nan Xiang Express serves, and over a hundred other dishes besides, but they inevitably got famous, at least on the English internet, for their soup dumplings, which were decent but not actually great.² 

We ordered from a touchscreen that tried four cheery upsells in two minutes. Lunch cost about as much as it would have at Dumpling House. As I waited for our food, I looked for traces of the old regime. The kitchen and bathrooms were in approximately the same place, but it felt like the new ownership had done a pretty good job erasing the past. It took me a minute to realize why the room felt so different – the place was full, but the staff weren’t moving. The college students running the counter sat hunched over their phones when they weren’t calling out pickup numbers. Through the kitchen door, I watched two cooks conversing by a wok burner upon which the wok sat inert. There was no yelling expo, no clanging wok, no hissing oil, no clouds of steam like thought bubbles from a dreaming stove. I could only hear the exhaust fan, and I’ve never, ever seen a Chinese kitchen mid-service where that was the case.

Our food came on a plastic tray that held 5 single-use dishes and twice that number of Nan Xiang Express logos. The cup that’s now on my counter held iced tea. Since literally everything on the tray wound up in a bin, the bins in the dining room filled quickly. The servers only ventured into the dining room to haul bulging black bags back to the kitchen. 

The dumplings were the product of one of the many many ingenious dumpling making machines now available in Asia, and the rice cakes had been stir-fried by someone who didn’t know how. The food was obviously engineered, but slightly less so than at McDonald’s – there was more salt and sugar than there should have been, but the dial wasn’t quite at eleven. The places where flavor was missing were more obvious than the places where additives intruded. Something suggested less consistency. I couldn’t decide if I should be outraged or impressed that so obviously soulless an operation could put out such inoffensive food. 

I guess I’m writing about this because it feels like an allegory. One restaurant closed and another opened. They both serve xiao long bao. I don’t know what anybody’s gained from this. The food’s gotten worse, the staff have been deskilled, the interactions are less human, we’re generating shiploads of waste, and at the end of this process diners are getting a worse version of the same menu. We’ve value-added nothing except more branding, and a veneer of convenience, meaning everything is meant to be thrown away. Is more branding what we really wanted?

It feels like we owe xiao long bao something better than this, the way we owe our planet and our history something better. It isn’t just that xiao long bao were once considered a crowning achievement of Chinese cuisine (and maybe they still are). It’s that xiao long bao aren’t just a dish, but a culture. Most dishes are, to some degree. A recipe is a shorthand for a whole set of values, and aesthetics, and material conditions, and Nan Xiang Express couldn’t exist without this intangible foundation. Nan Xiang Express couldn’t have been conceived without places like Dumpling House, or Din Tai Fung, or every hole in the wall in Shanghai and Changzhou and Taipei where someone’s sat for forty years, filling and pleating, filling and pleating, till their fingers were working in their sleep. It couldn’t exist without every Shanghainese journalist who’s had to write a xiao long bao listicle, every look of wonder on every first-timer’s face, every argument in every restaurant in Jiangsu about which style came first. It couldn’t exist without the millions of people who decided, through famine and revolution and war, that something about this dish captured something precious and worth celebrating – even if it was only the opportunity to eat a little bit of pork and wheat. Something essential enough and important enough that after all that and the end of the world, they wanted to make this specific thing again. 

And it feels like Nan Xiang Express is taking all this in and saying “yes, yes, but what this antiquated dish really needs to make it in the global market is a jaunty logo and better packaging.” 

Every time I see that cup, I think about enshittification, which is Cory Doctorow’s description of a phenomena that now seems as inevitable as continental drift:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Except what we’re talking about here isn’t an internet platform but the edible parts of our civilization. There’s no central volition behind this, no board and no Bezos setting strategy, squeezing first with the left hand then with the right. It’s just what happens if the food itself matters less and less.

What happens when you eat happens only between you and your dumpling. Only one person knows how you experience the lifting of the steamer lid, the bite of the skin, the balance of the broth on your tongue. Since we can’t share what it’s like to eat something, no one can tell us what the experience is subjectively worth, and if no one can confirm our assessment of its worth, maybe the food itself is actually worthless.

The thesis of branding is that things are worth less for themselves than for how they make us feel. Intrinsic qualities aren’t as important as the stuff you can put words to, the things you can express online, the aspects of experience that can be shared and liked and reacted to. If the food is just a coat stand for the feelings, why not just short circuit the actual experience, and just tell people how to feel? Printed paper bowls and posters and upsell screens, the traces of branding are a material culture too, and maybe this is just how we do xiao long bao today. 

One day our reference point for xiao long bao will change, because that’s what happens. The only question is how. Make enough xiao long bao machines, and eventually the expectation becomes that the random dumpling joint on the corner, the one with the grumpy uncle at the door, gets theirs from a machine, because so few people make them by hand. Eventually dumplings made by hand don’t taste right, because the taste of nostalgia, the first xiao long bao you tasted, were the ones made by this one machine, from that particular blend of standardized ingredients. 

Around the time we went to Nan Xiang Express someone sent me this thread on the site formerly known as twitter:

It made me think about how long this has been true of the physical world,³ how it’s been true since the dawn of the age of manufacturing, and how we wanted it to be true even before that, how much we wanted the perfection of the handmade nail to be lost beneath its abundance. How we loved xiao long bao so much we wanted them all the time, in unlimited quantity. And when we managed that, all that was left to tell them apart was the packaging. 

There aren’t many reasons to learn to eat, to spend the time and energy asking whether you like this bite more than the other and why. To work at something you’ll never be able to share with anyone else, at least until we figure out how to transmit taste on the internet. And all this may be the best reason I know. 

1. This is one of those wikipedia articles that’s well worth reading.

2. Dumpling Cafe two blocks away was always better, and is still around. But it’s never been as crowded because it’s not right in front of the Chinatown gate.

3. To the folks who also read Scope of Work: I don’t actually think this is strictly true. I appreciate that everything that’s manufactured was also crafted by someone, and is a marvel in itself, but it’s a different kind of marvel, and made for different reasons.