Too Many Chefs Spoil the Soup
In the past couple weeks I've had a number of long, distracting, intrusive side thoughts. The majority of these overly involved bemusments have all seemingly started with me pondering the aplication of this saying to a number of different situations. I think most people are able to infer the sayings implication that detrimental conditions may occur when any level of creative control is too highly divided amongst multiple parties. What I find really interesting is changing the size and scope of that which the soup is directly analogous to, aswell as the number and nature of chefs involved.
One could expect, in situation with an exponentially increasing, ever growing quantity of chefs, that the soup would be indefinately ruined. That is unless one were to implement a universally accepted, compromised convention to dictate soup recipe, calibur and quantity of ingredients, and methodology of preperation and serving. This would ensure that all whom posess a culinary inclination could ascend to the level of chef, granted they are willing to work within those parameters set forth in the agreed upon convention.
I felt okay with that notion for about twelve seconds. I began to again feel uneasy when I started to debate about making a distinction between a chef an a cook. I'm not a culinary expert and I'm really just using using this whole soup analogy as a literary device to prove a point, so please don't get offended if you're a chef or a cook. But it seems to me the main differences between them can fit into two different realms. The realm of creative control, and the realm of status. The chef embodying the apex of both realms.
If we've already established that unfettered creative control will yield disasterous consequences. Considering a cook to be the mindless slave of convention,would it not be better to maintain a cook majority? Maybe, maybe not. What would stop the cooks from murdering the chefs and stealing their nifty white hats? This is where I feel the realm of status becomes important. My theory, is that if you call the cooks chefs, if you give them nifty hats, and a six figure salary, then they might just start to believe they really are chefs.
So, I think my notion of a passive, balanced, culinary world, is one in which there is a vast middle class majority that is mostly ignorant towards it's own ignorance, and anyone you ask can tell you "what's in the soup" but no one can tell you "why it's in the soup", mostly because nobody ever thought to ask that question in the first place. Hey they're just chefs right?