Don’t be so STEM
… and while we’re at it, stop STEMsplaining. You are destroying America!
Act One: January 1, 1990
The last days of the Eighties still lingering in people’s minds and blood, snow falling onto the quiet morning streets of Bamberg, Germany. A cold wind drives the flakes painfully into my face. It’s five in the morning and I am riding my bike down an icy, cobblestoned decline on my way to work.
From the butcher’s hut in the distance I can see fog rising into the street lights, a smell of baked bread and fresh sausages permeates the air, and someone, somewhere on the second floor of the main building, plays “Rock around the Clock” as his wakeup call. I am a butcher’s apprentice, a cooks’ assistant, a hand in the pot and a hand on the plate. I feed people for a living.
Germany’s apprentice system requires me to attend classes regulated by the ministry of education, remain in good standing with industry chambers and guilds, pay dues, and follow a complicated set of dos and don’ts pertaining to my association with cohorts and masters at work (cohorts have finished apprenticeship and their journeyman year). It challenges me every day to prove my worth in the kitchen and butcher shop.
Act Two: March 2012
A kid’s birthday party, balloons, laughter. We, the adults, are sitting around the only table in the yard, drinking beer, and generally using yet another birthday bash as an excuse to see each other as parents do. Six year old Mira handles a set of kids’ scissors, “trimming” the hedge and tending to her little herb and spice garden while her guests are more interested in playing “who can fall off the bouncy castle and break something first.”
“Amazing,” I say, pointing at Mira, “she’ll make a great farmer when she grows up.” Her mother, looking up briefly from her iPhone on which she reads something pertaining to her law firm’s recent litigation, perks up. “Kittens, no,” she barks. “My daughter is smart and strong, she’ll become an engineer or medical doctor or lawyer. Hell, who knows, maybe she’ll become the President.”
Act Three: Present
Massive CAFO, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, raise hundreds of thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish every day. The meat, processed in massive slaughterhouses, makes its way into the freezer aisles and cold storages of our supermarkets. Fields the size of villages provide feed for the animals and the barest of America’s food necessities such as wheat, corn, and soy. Planes, ships, trucks, and trains dump tens of thousands of tons of foreign grown vegetables, foreign slaughtered meats, and foreign caught fish, into warehouses across the nation.
Genes determine fitness and are patented, food is packed, wrapped, cooked, seasoned, and sold to be reheated. Fast food chains stand at the forefront of innovation and sell more potatoes than supermarkets and farmer’s markets combined.
And on top of all this, this massive machinery of food, stand we, the people. Scratching our heads we condemn the works of Big AG and Big Cattle, we petition and rally on Facebook and Twitter. We vow to change the world, one field of wheat, one pasture, one consumer brand at a time.
Schneider, a German electronics company partnered with British Amstrad, end-of-lifed the “Schneider Joyce,” a CP/M based business computer in 1990. It was four years before Commodore’s bankruptcy and more than a decade and a half until smart phones happened upon the world. My father’s Joyce had been my companion many nights. Two programs I’d written, one to manage inventory and one to print invoices, had sold a few times, mostly to members of my fathers’ Landscaper’s Guild and a few local businesses. My family knew I’d wind up studying the newly invented field of Computer Informatics, knew I’d become an engineer. Yet the first day of the new year saw me racing to work, a few minutes late and still pretty drunk and smelling of a night of partying and sweating, at five in the morning.
My family and friends’ reaction was predictably bad. How could I, the “smart one,” the one “destined for better,” apprentice as a blue collar food maker? Was I not “so much better” than that?
Had it existed then, reading over Facebook or blogs my 16 year old self would come to the same conclusion many boys and girls do today — there are two Americas, the smart ones engaging in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), the ones who “fucking love science” by putting misattributed one liners on stock photos of faraway galaxies, the ones who code or practice medicine or the law, and the dumb ones, the lower class, who don’t.
Today’s America is home to less than 2,000 Master Chefs, more than two thirds who apprenticed and mastered in countries other than the United States. The remainder are so-called “Certified Master Chefs,” a title sold by America’s only attempt at a food industry chamber, the “American Culinary Federation.”
Less than 1,000 Master Bakers, less than 400 Master Carpenters, and less than 100 Master Landscapers still work here. A pittance of skilled workers supplying a nation of 300 million.
Yes, the flight into STEM, the idea that it takes less skill and training to feed the masses than to write a 140 character microexpressions website directly supported ConAgra, McDonalds, and Kraft Foods.
It’s thought that those who code, operate, design, are not just better but, by nature of a smartness and value hierarchy, are also qualified to speak of and determine the needs and wants of those who are “just” blue collar (I call this STEMsplaining). This led ultimately to flimsy houses and pre-packaged foods.
Monsterfarms and CAFO ranches exist not only because of a ravenous demand for their goods, they exist because there is no supply of the opposite, the small farm and family ranch. Young men and women leave their family’s businesses to become “better,” to become lawyers and doctors and coders and engineers.
ConAgra and others, much publicized as cases of hostile takeovers are, benefit more from the flight into Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the cubicle farms of the nation than lawsuits. Farms, in one family’s hand for generations, are sold or abandoned to be taken over by Big AG. And who could blame them, their children having been told from day one that farming, ranching, and making food is inferior to sitting in front of a computer and blogging about it while posting Instagrammed photos of one’s dietary life?
Much has been talked about narrative and its programming of future generations. How pink easy bake ovens are bad and early empowerment works. And they are and it does. But our early empowerment today vilifies those who are as skilled, as artistic, as intelligent. Men and women who perform those jobs that make up the backbone of any country and that America so badly needs lest it surrender completely to individually shrink wrapped bananas.
The culprit? Us, the generation of an anti-craft, anti-blue-collar, narrative. The generation of “she’s better than that, she’ll be a lawyer one day.” The generation of CAFO and Monsterfarms, the generation that can spring forth 15+ “Codecademy” web sites but not one skilled labor school. The generation that tells girls and boys that only being the next Zuckerberg validates their brains.
There is insane job growth in STEM, no doubt about this. Not enough to catch the incoming wave, a fact to which stand as silent witness the number of Computer Science masters and Psychology bachelors applying for untrained jobs in my industry, the blue collar kitchen job. Just as the gene splicing lab across the street, however, we do not need more untrained, unskilled, labor. The future of our country stands shakily on the shoulders of highly trained scientists and untrained blue collar workers, there is amazing potential for stability in the much neglected highly skilled manual labor camp.
STEMsplainers would have me and you believe that a career in STEM magically prepares one for all lower jobs, including mine, which is pretty much the gist of the issue at hand. Great physicists will still be rotten cooks, not because cooking is lower on the skill scale but because it is equal and a vastly different path to boot. The decision for blue collar, craft work, must be made as early and with equal weight as the decision to pursue a career in law. Only then can we save the quality of America’s production and manufacturing.
To get there we must stop and actively combat the narrative of better and worse careers and acknowledge the realities of all careers having potential to be fulfilling, while being financially lucrative and equal in standing in society. We must acknowledge the Dunning-Kruger Effect and its fallout, STEMsplaining.
We have handed the work of our artisans and crafters, makers, and doers, to Ikea, ConAgra, Kraft Foods, Monsanto, Walmart, and the trucks and trains and boats from faraway lands. Time to take it back.
