When I was a kid I had a chemistry set. In the 1960’s, you could go into the back of just about any “hobby” store and stand in front of a display with little square bottles of just about any chemical compound you could legally buy. They were all marked with different prices. You took your meager allowance, counted it twice, and determined what to buy: maybe six little bottles of cheap chemicals or one bottle of exotically overpriced chemicals.
I was an innovative chemist. Meaning, of course, that I wasn’t a chemist at all. I just mixed stuff in the set with stuff I bought in the back of the hobby store to see if it would blow up the house, or clean a penny, or make the dog puke. Walking past the foo-foo dollhouse stuff was initiation enough into this special breed of innovative chemist.
Later I turned to brewing beer. It was much the same process. First you throw a bunch of stuff together, but then, after trying to drink it without wrinkling your nose, a little light goes on—the ancients knew what they were doing!—and you read up a little, got some education, and made a decent beer, guided by good sense. It was a whole lot more satisfying then just throwing crap together and then spending days trying to find a use for it.
I got to thinking about this while reading the interesting Slate article, What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies: The home-brew movement serves as a lesson in DIY innovation
The article investigates the with the way students make beer in an Arizona college unfettered by rules of any kind compared to the way they made it in Bavaria when “Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X of Bavaria decreed that the only ingredients to be used in making lager were water, barley, and hops.”
The results were awesome, dude. Arizona wins! They threw gobs of stuff in the wort! It was all good!
Of course, that’s because in America, innovation trumps just about everything, including knowledge and common sense. It may be the only thing we do well. Hate that pizza from Italy with only three toppings? Throw on 35 more and a block of chocolate! Now you’re talkin’!
What the author ignores is the fact that Germany isn’t exactly known as a country of beer slackers, despite the handcuffs they’ve had to wear in the form of the Bavarian purity law. There’s plenty you can do with all the variety of hops and the toasting of malt. Then there’s even more you can do with various yeasts now that we know of yeast (they didn’t at the time the purity laws were written).
My point is that restrictions aren’t necessarily bad. Not unless you filter all results through the lens of “innovation”. (Or, perhaps, what I might call “macro innovation” because we only look at huge jumps, like adding chocolate to your anchovy pizza, rather than looking at the small “micro-innovations” inherent in things like cooking it at a slightly different temperature, or making a “looser” crust.)
Take Italian cuisine. It’s all cucina povera, peasant food. Peasants were limited to the cheapest cuts of meat, often from the internal organs (well, also including the external ones of which we are forbidden to speak—in polite company anyway). These restrictions made those “innovative” mothers look for the absolute best way to prepare the cheapest (and tastiest) cuts of meat. Instead of the “taste of the day that will knock your socks off” they eventually came up with a codified cuisine, a cuisine that wasn’t based upon the idea that the cook could do whatever the hell she pleased but based on a very limited pantry and a group of consumers who were dead set against any major deviation from the regional chow. It became art like poetry became art, because the restricted form they were forced to use was a prison from which only the very clever could ever escape—and those were the people who you counted on for great poetry or food.
Is complete freedom all it’s cracked up to be?