Member-only story
A Quantifiable Kitchen
(and a recipe for candied orange peel)
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
Just around the corner from us is asuburban home that has actually appeared on Google Maps as “The Quantified House”. It is inhabited (inevitably: this is Silicon Valley, after all) by techbros, and they use All The Apps There Are to measure everything that is measurable: their exercise regimes, their heartbeats and sleeping patterns, their nutrition, their working hours and the methods they use to stay focused, so on and so forth, all of it. And, of course, they record it all in spreadsheets and reports.
That is not and never will be me, obvs. I cannot be that disciplined & organised, and nor would I want to be. I have from time to time enjoyed and found usefulness in recording my daily word- or page-count, in one way or another; it helps to keep me honest if I have a target to achieve and records to beat. At the moment I’m not setting myself any targets at all, though, so those habits have more or less lapsed. I do still keep an eye on the numbers, just to know where I am in the piece, but it’s a wayward kind of eye that just nods and shrugs and moves on.
I have sometimes enjoyed tracking the number of steps I take in a week and the distance covered, but I’ve never kept a record or tried to up the numbers. It amuses me that I have a summer weight and a winter weight, and I like to watch the scales shift back and forth over time. M’wife and I keep a cheerful eye on the car’s odometer, so that we can share when it rolls by significant or symmetrical figures. I used to keep a diary, but I haven’t for decades and I destroyed the volumes that I did have.
You get the picture: casually entertained by numbers, occasionally curious about patterns, willing to use numerical incentives, but not really devoted to these pursuits. Really not.
However!
There is no saying how long this is going to last, but right now, little by little and week by week, my kitchen is becoming not only more quantifiable, but also more quantified. I spent much of December cleaning, sorting, throwing out and/or reorganising almost everything, and then deploying the new labelmaker; this month, I have started keeping records.