scientific progress goes "boink"
I’m writing from Milan Malpenza, where I’m stopped for an hour en route to Singapore (just long enough for un cafe and a glimpse of the world’s smallest foosball table). If there are any Singaporean food topics you’d like me to cover, now’s a great time to do it - I’ll basically be spending 9 days with my family, eating (and afterwards, probably as many weeks writing about Singaporean food). Photos will go on the tweeting place.
Last week I wrote about a cafe where most of the coffee is made by machines. The piece was inspired partly by a recent 99% Invisible episode about Horn & Hadart automats. As they note in the podcast, the automat is still with us. There’s a startup in San Francisco that wants to automate restaurant service, much as Horn & Hardart did decades ago. Their promotional video shows people ordering food from pristine white machines, smiling widely as they withdraw plates from glowing cubicles, a Food Network show from Minority Report.
Another startup is automating production and has humans do the serving, putting a human face on the mechanical turk. They briefly ran an actual restaurant in the Bay, where you could get a hamburger made by a machine served to you by a happy young startup employee whose performance you could rate on a screen. Apparently they ran a study that showed that people didn’t like interacting with robots. It’s not clear whether this study predated their decision about what they wanted to sell.
A startup in Brooklyn is trying to do the same for coffee, building an actual espresso bar in a vending machine. Their promotional video shows paper cups gliding magically across a sheet of glass, filling with espresso and steamed milk, which later will presumably glide, equally magically, into your hand. There are no humans in this video, but perhaps the vending machine will have a video screen, with a barista’s face.
When I read about these endeavors I think not about the future but the past, the retainers kept in noble houses to do nothing more than wait upon their masters, to increase the masters’ magnificence by their obvious dependence. The human fronts for these machines might as well be retainers for a middle class world, deployed to reassure us that we are are still important enough to purchase others’ time, even as the actual service becomes thinner and more like interacting with a machine.
The founders of these startups frame their projects as a response to the ongoing labor crisis in the restaurant industry, but to me they also speak of a deep ambivalence in how our culture regards this work. The existence of these startups suggests to me that we as a culture don’t think people should be working in restaurants. We mechanize work that humans should not do (moving tons of earth, handling nuclear waste), and when we have to have a human do the work, we denigrate them socially and economically so we don’t have to remember that they’re human (this, by the way, is one of the core theses of David Graeber’s excellent Debt, The First 5000 Years).
The present critical shortage of restaurant labor is pretty strong evidence that most people would rather be doing something else, and this is part of why, as a new book argues, America can’t have nice restaurants any more. I haven’t read all of Burn the Ice, by Kevin Alexander (yet) but this review in the Washington Post includes a pretty full summary.
If, in a capitalist economy, profit is the measure of whether a thing is worth doing, it’s pretty telling that the restaurant industry as a whole has seen its profit margins shrink steadily. Perhaps restaurants aren’t really a worthwhile endeavor, at least not in their current form.
I remember a popup we hosted at our restaurant, years ago. It was run by a personal chef, and staffed by his friends. There were line cooks who’d come to make something interesting on their day off. There was a guy who I think worked as a chemist, and someone who sold insurance. I don’t remember what the food was like, but I remember the atmosphere in the kitchen, the evident happiness of the team at work. Their clear belief that they were doing something worth doing. And maybe this is the best way to run a restaurant - for it not to be a restaurant, for it not to be permanent and have investors to pay off, and margins to razor out.
Maybe the future of eating out really is a bifurcated landscape, with burgers made by robots and delivered in glowing white cubicles on one branch, and popups staffed by excited, engaged people, none of whom are relying on food to make a living, on the other. Yet even Alexander himself would prefer otherwise:
“I hope it will come back around to the simple sit-down restaurant that cares about service. And maybe I’ll check my phone with the phone-check person. And I’ll be invested in the meal and the conversation.”
There is something deeply, ineluctably human about our thirst for hospitality, and there is something just as durable about the joy of offering it. Yet we have somehow turned hospitality into work that is more fit for robots than for human beings, and in the process, we have removed a key reason for doing it - that it is a way to make a living. We ought to ask how to turn it back.
I still, for some obscure reason, miss ACuppaDay.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!