I mentioned in my last post on Putnam's Bowling Alone that I wanted to discuss a phenomenon that I'm calling professionalization. This isn't something that Putnam necessarily addresses directly, but rather I think it's tangentially related to both isolation and entertainment, which I plan to discuss next. This particular concern fits nicely at this point because I think it both follows from and reinforces the trend towards isolation that I discussed previously. By "professionalization", I'm referring in a general sense to what seems to be an increasing trend away from doing things for oneself and instead toward hiring a third party to do things for us or in our stead.

What put me onto this particular train of thought was Putnam's discussion of lawyers and the shift from informal to formal means of conflict resolution and reinforcement of norms. My thought is that we are becoming a society that is less able to disagree respectfully and resolve conflict amicably, primarily because we have outsourced our disagreement and conflict resolution to a professional class of persons who do these things for us. In other words, as we lean more and more heavily on lawyers and other formal means for resolving differences, we as a society gradually lose the ability to do so for ourselves, much like a muscle that atrophies due to lack of use. This prompted me to think of other ways in which professionalization has crept into our lives - and I'm surprised that, the more I think about this, the more confident I am that this is in fact occurring in many ways.

Think, for example, of the decline of the home cook. Gone are the days when a meal was a labor of love, or at least a labor of craft and skill. Go into any supermarket and you'll be confronted, not with aisle upon aisle of fresh ingredients, but with mountains of prepared and packaged foods, waiting merely to be reconstituted into insipid piles of carbohydrates with chemically enhanced flavors. Cooking is more and more a hobby instead of a necessity - we've outsourced our food preparation in the interests of expedience. And, I would wager that this trend is more pronounced among younger folks. According to Food Technology magazine, fewer than one third of all meals in America are still prepared from scratch:

While three-quarters of all adults ate last night’s meal at home, the number of meals prepared at home continues to decline, falling from 64% in 2003 to 58% in 2005 (MSI, 2005). “Scratch” dinners prepared at home dropped another 7% over the past two years and now account for only 32% of all evening meals. One quarter (26%) of last night’s dinners used convenience foods and 17% used restaurant/supermarket take-out, while 23% were eaten at a restaurant.

Think of it this way - for how many people does the process of making cookies begin with opening a box of premixed dry goods? Does tomato sauce begin with a tomato, or a can opener? When was the last time that you took your bread from an oven instead of from a bag? Even our salad comes in convenient packages - we can't even be bothered to cut our own lettuce anymore. But I think we lose something of ourselves when we outsource even our most basic of necessities, something that makes us human. We become disconnected from our very selves, unable to even participate in sustaining ourselves from one day to the next, passive recipients of whatever lowest common denominator has made it through the assembly line and onto our plates. We cede power over our day to day existence to a faceless corporate entity that is most concerned with market share and protecting a brand.

I know there are reasons for this - I know them myself. I am the primary cook in our house, so I bear most of the burden of meal preparation. And there are nights when a pizza just fits the bill. But I try to resist, and I try to do as much from scratch as possible - it's almost a spiritual practice for me, one that I try to maintain as I'm able. But this shift towards professionalization is bigger than just cooking. We could discuss the same trend in any of a dozen different spheres of life. Besides the discussion of lawyers, Putnam also discusses it in the context of social engagement - meaning that, for most people, social action has become more about writing a check than about actually working to implement change. We are chronic outsourcers - we want someone else to do our stuff, and we'll pay good money for them to do so. And people of faith should absolutely recognize this trend - we see it every day as folks outsource spiritual development.

That's a tangent that I'm dying to engage right now - but I want to place a few more pieces in the puzzle before I go there. It's part of a bigger picture that frames where we are, and I want to resist making it the whole scene.

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