If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.
-Carl Sagan
So you think you made that apple pie from scratch, do ya? Did you grow the apple tree and wait for a plentiful harvest to pluck some apples? Did you scythe grains of wheat to make the dough and gather water at the river? And that sugar cane, did you spend a year on a Caribbean island with ideal soil/ climate conditions living in a ramshackle hut with a tin roof avoiding the local’s best effort to poison you with the zombi potion so you would work the fields for eternity? Did you start a fire with two sticks and wait for the ideal flame to bake all these ingredients you’ve spent years growing, nurturing, reaping? No? Life is a lie, we make nothing from scratch. The question is, where do we draw the line between buying something and making it from scratch?
If you buy a premade apple pie from the supermarket society doesn’t like when you call that made from scratch. When you harvest apples that’s part of the from scratch recipe. When you buy pre-cut apples that are already little triangles that does not count in the from scratch recipe. The point being you can still buy whole apples and consider your pie made from scratch. So paying someone to pick your apples and ship them to a store still counts as from scratch. The use of currency to reduce effort on your part can be part of the recipe.
The same methodology goes for all other ingredients. You can’t buy pre-made pie crust and have it be from scratch but if you buy dough and butter from the store that’s fine and then mix it with water from your faucet you pay for with your taxes then that is definitely from scratch.
Similar concept applies to building a computer. To say you built your own computer you do not actually have to spend any time 100s of feet underground with a pickaxe mining for precious metals or silicon, the Schrodinger metal. You can buy the parts online, let the national or in some cases international delivery services make sure it gets to your door and clip/ screw the pieces in place within the tower.
Back to pies. It is more than acceptable to use an oven to cook the pie utilizing natural gas or electricity to generate the heat in the store-bought appliance. A lot of local infrastructure goes into the process of making a pie.
At this point you may be wondering: Is anything we do truly made from scratch? The answer is yes. Our lies. Our lies are made from scratch. Every time you visit a friend’s house or see someone post their food on media made to be social, they are showing you their lie. Made from scratch? Yeah, with the help of modern-day technology and infrastructure and hardworking farmers around the world. When someone tells you they made a meal from scratch what they’re really saying is they created a ton, like a huge amount, most of the time a monumental amount of dirty dishes and silverware. The level at which something is “made from scratch” is based on how many times you have to run the dishwasher afterwards.
If I had sponsors this would have been a great sponsorship of microwaveable chicken nuggets. No hassle, minimal clean up. Eat processed mystery chicken and avoid the massive amount of clean up you see in from scratch meals! With microwaveable chicken nuggets you can have your pie and eat it too.