Have you ever looked at all the things around you and wondered: how did I manage to collect all of this crap? Who made this crap, and why? The sheer amount of objects we own is preposterous once you look at them individually. Somebody had to come up with all of this crap, design it, get the materials, make the crap, box it, send it out, receive it, store it, sell it by the truckload to a retailer, send it to the retailer, receive it again, store the crap again, put it on a shelf for a year until you come along, and then sell it to you for a couple bucks. Keep in mind that everything that you own or have ever touched has gone through that same process. That’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. You don’t have to hew all of your furniture out of solid oak logs whenever you need a new dinette set. You simply go down to the store and buy one.

It’s the same process with food and other consumable items, which is completely mind-blowing for me. Let’s say you want a carrot. Well, the carrot is planted, fertilized, tended to, harvested, thrown on to the back of a flat-bed truck, brought to sorting facility, packaged, sent out to distributors, and sold to you, passing though the hands of over a dozen people on its way to your home. Then you take one of the carrots out of the package, rinse it off, dry it off, and then drop it onto your dirty kitchen floor — now it’s ruined.