Hi all,
Over the past week, I’ve made a couple references to the problem of categorization. I feel pretty strongly about the problematic nature of categorization. In general, I think categorization is dangerous. In some cases, it’s violent. Some of the world’s biggest problems – like racism – are direct results of our lazy acceptance of categorization. Those are ideas I might get into at another time.
The benign manifestation of the problem comes when people lean on categories to help navigate the challenges of daily living. Those who rely too much on categorization become less able to work with the reality in front of them. A person who likes buying things on sale, for example, might worry more about the percentage discount than whether the item is affordable at the new price. And if a person becomes too accustomed to seeing the world in categories, it becomes very difficult to apply the principles of one domain to the very different context of a separate area. In short, categories build walls and barriers between people and ideas that rob us of our ability to make connections and limit the applications of our creativity and ingenuity.
Now, the library book example I used recently is not the best representative of this idea. What is dangerous or violent about how I choose the books I read? The Business Bro’s insight into organizational dynamics was a little more relevant but it wasn’t exactly the blueprint to building the next great corporation, either – as it always seems to go with him, some of the advice was insightful while some of it sounded a lot like “if you do well, you’ll do well”.
But I did think of another example this week that might be a better way to express the way categorization causes problems. This example takes me back a full decade to when I visited Japan for six weeks. At the time, I was about a half-year into what I now expect will be a lifelong commitment to health and nutrition. When I arrived in my homeland, one of the things I was excited for was the chance to try some new cuisine and continue building up my knowledge about healthy eating.
At this point, one area my diet suffered from was a lack of transferred knowledge. I was aware, more or less, of what the good foods were but I wasn’t eating them all the time. Instead, I was eating them as part of pre-defined meals and food groupings. For example, bell peppers were often spotted in my breakfast omelet but rarely considered as a sandwich topping. And the slice of cucumber that topped my lunch sandwich was always skipped over when assembling my dinner.
This all ended after my first morning in Japan. I sat down for breakfast and found half of my plate occupied by uninvited guests – scallions, tomatoes, lettuce, an entire farm’s sampling of vegetables, really. I turned to my rusty Japanese and enquired about the meal.
The resulting conversation permanently changed the way I thought about my diet.
-Salad for breakfast?
-What, you don’t eat vegetables?
-No, this isn’t really breakfast food in America.
-What’s breakfast food?
Yes, indeed… what is breakfast food?
Good food is good food. At that breakfast, I learned the lesson. What helps the body at lunch is probably helpful at breakfast or dinner as well. It doesn’t really make a lick of difference if the local diner stops cooking certain items at 11 AM. If the idea is to eat well, we should aim to eat well, and ignore the irrelevant categories like ‘breakfast food’ that stand as obstacles preventing us from reaching this goal.
Footnotes / endnotes / casual breakfast?
0. A nod to the longtime reader…
Now, the longtime reader might recall the basic lesson from my ‘Casual Friday’ post – why is a good idea for Friday not considered any good on the other days of the week?
(Spoiler alert: because you work for a shitty organization…)
I suppose this post repeats the same concept in the context of the first meal of the day.
