replaced by a food processor?

My wife and I went to Pennsylvania for the week to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and to meet my daughter Lucy outside the City of New York. We had a wonderful week and if you have been reading this blog, you know we had a great Thanksgiving feast.

Sadly however, I discovered that for at least some of my own kitchen skills, I can be replaced by a food processor. You can quarter onions and zip, you are done. The home where we stayed was missing many kitchen essentials, but it had two food processors. Those "labor saving devices" can make quick work of the chopping required for preparing large meals.

And my question is, "saving for what?" Can it be that the attention that is required to cut and chop with a knife provides the opportunity to invest something of inexplicable quality in the preparation of food? Quality that you may not see or taste, but that is there none the less... the energy of human attention and love invested in food and its preparation? Slowing down to cut attentively with a knife can be one of those moments when one focuses attention deliberately into the food one prepares.

What happens when hurry and haste lead us to replace human activity with mechanical processes, eliminating the need for skill and attention? If the change can't be felt or tasted in the food prepared, surely it is felt in the energies of the kitchen itself. Now, you have to remember we were working hard and fast to feed 14, so perhaps some time saving reliance on technology was justified.

The same things happen in woodworking. There are demands that one make products fast enough to make a living, putting mechanical processes in place of hand-work and pushing aside the opportunity to invest greater love and attention in work.

We all need to be needed and asked to serve, and we feel best about ourselves when we are asked to chop, serving thus in simple ways, being lured into greater engagement and creativity. So, if I have a single small regret about a wonderful week in the Poconos, it would be that we were equipped with too many food processors when I would have most joyously gone merrily chopping without.