Six Ways to Make a Cucumber Delicious

Somewhere in a lab right now, an AI is inventing a snack you will not be able to stop eating. That is literally its job: mapping your cravings to a formula before you even know you have them, and aiming it ... my opinion ... at the worst eaters in the country. Meanwhile the produce section got shoved to the wall again, the meat counter is somewhere out by the loading dock, and the middle of the store grew another aisle of boxes that expire NEXT summer. Your counterpunch? An app that scans the ingredients list and tells you how sorry it is. So one machine engineers the craving, another machine audits the guilt, and not a single algorithm in that loop knows six ways to make a cucumber delicious. None of them can turn a potato into a HOLY FUCK moment. That part was always ours. Which is why it's on us to ask: not how cooking squeezes into a busy life, but how a busy life learns to fit the rhythm of cooking for ourselves.