The Good Products: My Rice Cooker
I often talk about products and their discontents. Anti-consumerist analysis must highlight oft-ignored faults in products: that we buy to self-soothe, that we panic buy, that we buy things for reasons that have nothing to do with the product, and that our over-consumption damages the environment without making us feel any the richer.
Yet, it would be disingenuous to argue that consumption is totally wasteful, evil, useless. Many products do us small miracles. The miracle of products remains a mighty source for our love of consumerism. Our life really is made better through products, and this fact provides an apologia for capitalism that many find potent: “How can you say you’re anti-capitalist when capitalism made your iPhone?”
There are many common rebuttals to this. Our phones rarely actually make us happy. The electronic waste from these phones will outlast us all. Foxconn’s factories are suicide mills, and no phone is worth a body. And smartphones are not a luxury for latte liberals. They have become a fact of life, with an entire economic underclass, gig-workers, dependent upon them. Critiquing use of smartphones, in 2021, looks a lot like saying “Well, capitalism bottled your water, yet you still drink water.” We know that. We live within capitalism and therefore it inscribes itself onto all the things we do. We cannot procure water through some socialist method, but we cannot live without it. Your Uber driver feels much the same about iPhones.
But the potency of this meme outlasts such rebuttals because everyone has a product—and you can pick your poison here, be it iPhones, makeup, Funko Pops, InstantPot, Instagram, Audible—that has renovated, redefined, renewed their life. Tying the end of capitalism to the end of products then ties it to the end of our identities, to the end of our personal miracles. Even if we can assure that a more equitable world would not do away with modern advances, the argument over iPhones and capitalism punctures identity, and is therefore a highly emotional appeal.
To not recognize this joie des produits is to not recognize an intimate psychology, and those critical of consumerism ignore it at their own peril. We should celebrate products that matter to us, that define our lives. If we do not, we are intellectually disingenuous.
The Good Products, a column where I will highlight things I’m glad I have purchased, is not the opposite of Bad Buys, my series where I highlight purchases I came to regret. Rather, they are twins, each other’s dual. In mathematics, two objects are each other’s dual when they somehow bind one another. Mathematical models of supply and demand rest on mathematical duality: a supply line plots the producers’ output to price, and the demand line plots the consumers’ consumption to price. The clearing price, the market-equilibrium price, is where the two functions bind one another to a single point. At this price, demand is bound to a certain quantity, and supply is bound to the same quantity. Duals often have this fixed point which forces specific equilibrium values.
The Good Products then is the upper bound of how products can work miracles. They are times when I have found a problem and a product has solved it. Bad Buys, on the other hand, often arise from a nebulous and ill-defined problem. They are products whose only goal is to exist and be acquired, products with little outside utility, purchases driven by nothing more than our belief in products.
Likely, the truth about consumption lies somewhere in the middle, just like the true price of a market occurs between the the supply line and demand line. That’s why I like this metaphor of mathematical duality. Here, the benefits of products constrains what is best about spending, and our desire to mindlessly buy and acquire generates what is least useful in products.
It is a rather pretty metaphor, and I’m often suspicious of pretty metaphors. As it is an idea within mathematics that I always found aesthetically beautiful, it may not provide as much analytic benefit as I allege it does. Duality has such a pretty phonology. When we speak of duals, we often speak of the “shadow vector,” which is an alluring and pretty word. Duality makes for good graphs. My favorite proof in mathematics is a duality proof: that all linear programs are themselves zero-sum games, such that it follows that linear programming, an important branch of optimization theory, is but a subset of game theory, a wider and more frightening form of optimization.
So maybe, for most readers, it is best to think of these two columns as opposite entities, point and counterpoint. But I am looking to extremes in hopes of synthesizing a relationship to consumption which is honest, accurate, fulfilling.
What I like about my rice cooker is that it redefines my relationship to a historically fraught set of products: food.
As a rule, I overeat. This overeating practice is hard to tame, and it has had negative repercussions for my health: namely, I am a pre-hypertensive. I would like to state that I am not anti-food, nor am I anti-fat, and I believe that impulses stemming from a fatphobic society creates an unhealthy relationship with food that is often times more damaging than overeating. Roxane Gay’s Hunger provides a seminal background on this topic. My issue is sodium and cholesterol, not fat, not the aesthetics of my body.
My only recourse against overeating has been to stock food that requires some amount of cooking. If I can snack on it without doing meal prep, then I will do so mindlessly through the day, and consume past my sodium budget. In moderation, a slice of bread is fine, but I cannot, on this topic, pursue moderation. I will always eat more than one slice of bread.
My rice cooker crafts an important compromise in my life and allows me to achieve moderation. Because I can now cook grains with ease, I can buy food that has just enough of an activation cost to prevent snacking. Since it takes an hour for my rice to cook, I prevent myself from scarfing through bowl after bowl of rice, the way that I used to for another staple, bread. Now, I can keep my pantry stocked with only unsnackable goods. My rice cooker can make rice, bulgar, steel-cut oats, pasta, and steamed vegetables, all meals whose reagents do not comport to snacking and whose products are tasty, healthy, and now easy-to-make.
The reason that my rice cooker has been such a boon to me is that it has allowed me not just to solve a problem, but to redefine an entire set of problems based in my overeating. In medicine, we have diseases and we have symptoms. For me, overeating was the disease, and its symptoms were increased blood pressure and spending too much money on delivery. The rice cooker then is not mere palliative: it is treatment for the disease.