Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.2/1001 PiesNeverWork
Pie recipes never work!
"So, did you make my pie recipe?"
At this seemingly normal and everyday question, Beth looks glum. "No... I'm becoming increasingly convinced that no matter how many times we try, pie recipes are never going to work."
Ariana looks surprised, first of all at the entire thing that has been said, but her attention especially fixing onto one particular word. "'We'?"
"Yes, we. I told our other friends about your recipe, and they all tried it, but every single time something went wrong. Chris tried your recipe and the dough came apart into a gooey mess. Then she told Dana about it, but when Dana tried the pie exploded. Then Ed heard Dana was baking a pie and wanted to try it. He actually had reasonable success with your recipe... at least for a while. But then Greg tried and it shattered into a bunch of burnt pieces in the oven. He was certain he knew how to tell everybody else how to bake a pie, though. And that's not even getting into the argument between Greg and Felix about what Ed started doing wrong."
Ariana smiles wryly. "Well this has been something of a disaster, hasn't it?"
"Hannah gave it a try too. When she tried the crust wildly bubbled, but she seems to be convinced it's an adequate fruit soufflé." "Oh boy." Ariana puts her hand to her forehead, amazed. "How is it possible for everybody to get the simple concept of baking a pie so wrong?" "You tell me. All the ingredients are on the sheet. It's beyond me why nobody around here can put them together."
"So what happened when you tried the recipe? You say you didn't make it, but by that do you mean you failed?"
"Oh, no, I didn't even get that far. I've been thinking about baking a pie for a while, but I have to confess, it's been more of a dream."
After all the strange things that have been said today, this is the moment where Ariana has simply heard enough. She looks at Beth in complete disbelief, throwing out her hands to either side. "Come on, Beth. We're talking about pies here. You know a pie is made of nothing more than ingredients and a baking process. Is there any reason you can't bake a pie? What exactly is stopping you?"
Knowing she lacks any good excuses, Beth now looks vaguely ashamed. "Well... to be honest, it was the day my uncle was here. He's never baked a pie. He only makes cakes. But every time we see each other he always tells me that all pies taste bad and pies will never work." "Ah, so just like Felix." "Felix isn't actually opposed to pies. He just has a lot of opinions about what constitutes a vegan ingredient." "...Ah. It all makes more sense now."
Ariana furrows her brow and studies the floor, beginning to ponder and concentrate on the strange situation they all find themselves in. "There has to be some way we can solve this. Maybe we can all meet up some time soon and take a look at each other's recipes."
Beth looks doubtful. "We could try that. If everyone doesn't just cling to their own notion of what a pie should be and dismiss everyone else." "What reason would anyone have to do that? We'll figure out the basic way to bake one kind of pie, and then we can go back to every other kind of pie to fix the others." "You make it sound so easy." "Well, it shouldn't be difficult. We look back at all our mistakes, and every time we uncover the reason for one of them, we see if we can apply it to all the other pie recipes."
"All right, but who are we going to invite to this thing?" Beth asks. "Are we going to invite Greg?" "Of course." "Ed would never invite Greg." "Right, but we're already to the point where even Ed can't bake a pie. Things can't get any worse than they already are." "All right, if you really think so."
A few days later, the eight friends meet to discuss their different recipes. There are arguments. There are missteps. There are misconceptions. There are moments where somebody blames somebody else for a third person's failure. There are moments when the entire meeting seems to go in circles.
"You have to bake the pie for 400 minutes," Greg insists. "It's _40_ minutes," Ariana corrects. "We fixed this in a very early version of the recipe before it got to Hannah." "But, it's 400 minutes. That's what it says in the first version of the recipe Ed gave me." Ed looks exasperated. "I never said you had to use that version of the recipe. What is it with you and always trying to find the 'original versions' of things?" "I don't like when people change them. You don't fix what's not broken."
"Really?" Felix chimes in. "Like Greg's recipe was totally necessary to fix any of the recipes that came before it." "It was," Ed confidently affirms. "Once I fixed it, we had a perfectly good pie to eat. All we really have to do is fix my recipe again." "Does it really matter whether we use Ed's recipe or Felix's?" Hannah asks. "When I went to the animal shelter, I didn't exactly ask them if they had a black cat or a white cat. I just wanted a cat."
"Well, it does matter somewhat," Ariana clarifies. "A pie recipe isn't like a cat. Some pie recipes successfully create pies and some don't. It would be like if somebody showed up at the animal shelter with two doodles of a black cat and a green cat. You can lay out all the steps to draw a green cat, but there has never been a real one. Meanwhile the kid with the accurate drawing will go home with the black cat. The kid who drew the green cat will go home with a black cat or a white cat but not a green one." Felix side-eyes his rival mischievously. "—Greg." "I don't care any more," Ed admits bluntly. "Greg didn't do anything. You seem to be trying to undermine both of us just to shore up your own solution to the recipe." "Okay," admits Felix. "I do like my version, and I might very well be doing that."
Ariana takes a moment to collect herself, hiding her head in her hands in embarrassment. "Greg. Felix. If we don't come out of here with a working recipe, people like Beth and her uncle are going to keep believing that pies are nothing more than a dream. Half of us are going to give up on baking pies and there simply aren't going to be any pies made."
Chris, after staying silent for a long while, finally offers her opinion. "Well, that may be true, but currently there's an argument going between all three of you. I think the first thing we all need to learn about baking pies is that nobody works well when other people are shouting at them." "Right," Felix argues. "If each of us is trying to bake our own unique flavor of pie, how do we even know that any of the rest of us actually knows how to complete that recipe?" "Exactly," says Dana. "We should just let each one of us start from the first recipe they got and find the solution themself. It will probably turn out to be the same set of basic steps anyway, but that way we all respect each other as people and our right to carry out that correct set of steps uninterrupted."
Ed stops and looks at the three people who have just spoken with incredulous suspicion. "Why is it that when we get to a critical moment these three are all the same?"
Ariana stands up, leans against the table, and puts her hands down. "Chris. Dana. Felix. That's what we've already been doing. It hasn't been working, and that's why we came together in this meeting."
Despite all the fractures and differences, the eight friends remain in the room and the meeting goes on. There are many frustrations. There are many questions of basic meeting procedure. There are many moments at which one bloc of friends is frustrated at what seems obvious to them but which the other bloc can't see. Nevertheless, they press on through all the theoretical wrinkles, and eventually they begin to arrive at a single understanding of the parts of a pie recipe.
"If you really look at it closely Felix isn't actually wrong," Beth observes. "The 'granular' parts of the pie as he calls them, like the flour and the salt, really are the foundation of the pie crust." "But a pie also isn't just made with flour and salt," Chris notes. "The butter, or the vegetable oil, binds the granular parts together. Forget the binder, and the pie explodes." "Whenever you add the filling, different pies are different. But at the same time every pie has crust and every pie has filling. This is what Greg was failing to see," Ariana summarizes, "that the last steps of an apple pie are a separate thing from all the first steps." "Maybe it's not 400 minutes," Greg allows. "But I am not going to put margarine in my pie." "Okay Greg," Ed says in apathy. "At least we're in agreement that the point of pies is to bake an edible pie."
After the meeting, the eight friends return home, and each give another try at baking pies. Not all the attempts are successful. And yet, each time someone's attempt fails, the group becomes better at taking one successful pie and one failed pie and extracting successful ingredients and procedures to create a successful pie out of the failure. Ed's pie becomes better for the lessons of Hannah's. Ariana takes lessons from the failed pies of both Greg and Felix. Felix boasts that he has learned valuable lessons from everyone else's pies to soon enough create the single best pie, although in reality it is more all the other pies he has improved.
In the end, after some amount of time has passed, almost everyone has produced some different flavor of successful pie. None are exactly the same, yet none of them are fundamentally different. There does, however, happen to be one exception, who shows up at Ariana's door holding up an angry-looking newspaper with an expression of bitterness and spite.
"I'm now a member of the anti-pie club," Greg declares, pointing to his angry news article with its ardent cake-supporting headline. "And it's time you became one too. Pie recipes never work."
Ariana gives Greg an uninterested look, and steps back into her house to look around. Soon enough, she emerges with a printed pie recipe stapled into a packet, and gently but dismissively tosses her tested packet of wisdom into Greg's shins. "Greg, follow the instructions!"
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