Serena's Story (an allegory)
Once upon a time there was a young girl named Serena. She liked to joke that she grew up in her Yiayia’s (Grandmother’s) kitchen. Her parents were always busy, but her Yiayia always had time for her. They spent time drawing, dancing, talking, drinking tea, and just hanging out together.
The most magical thing about Yiayia’s kitchen was the food that they made together.
Yiayia loved cooking, and you could tell.
Every day she would bake bread, make salads, roast meat, make traditional foods like mousakka, stiffado, klephtico… and experiment with trying to make exotic foods from scratch like “Pommes frites” or “Sweet and Sour” or “Curry”.
Often Serena and Yiayia would go for adventures to find ingredients.
They were well known in the local markets, buying fresh vegetables and haggling over the best cuts of meat or freshest fish. But the adventures sometimes took them further afield - on the long inter-city bus to the capital in search of “Garum Massala” powder, or bamboo shoots.
As Yiayia grew older, Serena would take on more of the preparation work in the kitchen. Her friends’ parents were terrified of the way she’d so casually pick up a huge chef’s knife, but the way she could dice an onion or cut a potato into fries would delight even the most fastidious sushi itamae.
One day Yiayia was sitting watching her crimp the edges of a pastry.
“You know, koukla mou, you don’t have to become a doctor if you don’t want to. I know your father says it’s the best profession, and your knife skills could make you a great surgeon. But you could always study to become a chef. There’s nothing dishonourable preparing food for a living!”
Serena paused, the pastry half finished, and stared at Yiayia. Not only was Yiayia a genius with food, but also incredibly wise.
So Serena adjusted her high school topics, and, much to her father’s mock dismay (although it was after being served her incredible pie, which helped) she soon was a star student at a culinary school, paying her way by working in the kitchen of the local posh hotel.
She was worried, and chatted with Yiayia about her fears, that working in expensive restaurants could kill her love of cooking - and was a legitimate fear! The head chef was loud, hot tempered, and exacting. If the chips were the wrong width, or the tomatoes not perfectly balanced on the plate, the shouts of wrath could be heard from the bar.
“You don’t have to be like that. And maybe they didn’t have a lovely Yiayia to teach them to laugh when they were young. Not everyone is as fortunate as you in their grandparents!” smiled Yiayia.
And Serena tried to remember that lesson when customers were rude or obnoxious. But even still, sometimes it was overwhelming. One day she asked Yiayia, “How can they be so picky? I know the omelette is perfectly cooked - even the head chef was satisfied - and it’s not cheap to eat at the restaurant, so they must know the eggs are locally sourced, fresh, we’ve prepared them well and know what we’re doing! Why are some of these rich people trying so hard to make us look little?”
“Being rich doesn’t make you nice, nor happy. Sometimes people with money try to fill up their emptiness with what they can buy - and the disappointment can make them mad. Like your little cousin Mia when she tries so hard to stack her blocks and they fall over.”
“But Mia is 2 years old!”
“True, but she’s got a wonderful Yiayia like me, and big cousin like you to help her learn to deal with disappointment. Maybe those rich customers never had that.”
“How can you be so philosophical and gracious, Yiayia…”, sighed Serena.
Still, the frustration of dealing with incredibly rich but spoiled customers nagged at Serena.
One day, while she was visiting Josephine, the local grocer to buy some fresh carrots just brought in from the farm, she stopped outside the store, startled by the smell of savoury cooking meat. It smelled so good, she followed the smell to see where it was coming from. This wasn’t a well to-do part of town, there were no restaurants nearby.
Eventually she tracked it down to St. Barnabas’ kitchen, where volunteers were preparing a soup kitchen for the homeless and destitute of the area.
“This smells amazing!” she told the shift leader. “Oh, it’s nothing special. But we get a massive discount of vegetables from Josephine’s grocery, and they’ve managed to negotiate really great deals for meat & other ingredients from other suppliers for us! None of it is fancy, but cooked and received with love, you know?”
It wasn’t long until Serena was volunteering there too… and because of her training, and skill, and delight in finding ways to make healthy hearty food as cheaply as possible that she was eventually offered a job training other volunteers, printing copies of her recipes to give away, and helping to develop soup kitchens around the country.
Sometimes the ingredients were donations - but most had to be bought, so Serena’s experience of bargaining and searching for local producers was invaluable.
The world grew, and changed, and one day the priest came and sat down at her table after the meal. “Serena, we’ve been offered a large donation of these new ‘MicroMeals’, not just us but across the country. What do you think of them?”
Serena wasn’t a fan - this new craze for instant exotic food you could prepare in seconds was amazing, almost magical! You could have a menu with literally thousands of options without having to keep limited-shelf-life fresh ingredients in stock - and the reconstituted-potato-mash fries were more consistent in diameter than the most skilled chef in the country could cut them - but it just wasn’t … satisfying.
There was no way to know their actual nutritional value, and the whole supply-chain was unknown.
Still, they tried it out, and it was cheaper than buying all the ingredients locally and training all the volunteers how to prepare them. And you could serve a lot more, which was good as the number of people queuing up for meals was increasing every day.
Soon some kitchens were exclusively using MicroMeals, making huge savings by no longer needing ovens, knives, cutting boards, washing up areas - just using the disposable boxes they came in.
Serena kept her kitchen running as it had been before, still with the staff preparing the food and serving it to the homeless. But many others were becoming ‘self-service’ with vending machines providing the boxes.
She was shocked, one day, to see Josephine, the greengrocer standing in line. The business had closed, the farmers had all been bought out by the MicroMeals company.
“Only the very expensive ‘boutique’ restaurants can afford fresh ingredients, these days - for regular people like you and me, the MicroMeals are ‘good enough’, so no-one buys vegetables directly any more.”
And Serena realised it was true. Even she couldn’t afford truly fresh local vegetables any more, she’d been so busy recently, and the MicroMeals so easy, and her work so all-encompassing, that she hadn’t even prepared fresh food at home herself in years, not since Yiayia had passed away.
And she looked around at the volunteers, all of whom she’d taught to use a knife correctly - and yet none of whom knew why.
As the soup kitchens didn’t need chefs any more, and she was too old to get a job in a boutique restaurant, soon she was also in the line for the handout.
All the money to keep it going was going directly to MicroMeals Inc.
No-one grew up in a kitchen again, as it was far too expensive and antiquated a hobby.
And Serena grew old, and never a grandmother herself, nevertheless tried to bring wisdom & laughter to her grandnieces & nephews - but since they never saw her other than as another video chat window, and she was far less exciting than other things they could watch, they forgot about her, she eventually died, and her cremated remains were used as fertilizer at the MicroMeals potato factory.
Reflections in a less poetic form
If you recognise yourself in the story, you’re not alone.
Every software developer, every designer, every writer, every digital artist you meet who cares about their craft is currently - if they’re paying attention - in a state of constant anxiety.
The years we’ve spent trying to get good at what we’re doing are being constantly bombarded with messages from the richest people in the world: “We’ve photocopied everything you’ve ever made to train our robots, and your work is now overvalued and you are now worthless.”
Some people are leaping at this with gusto, shovelling out thousands of AI generated projects faster than they would ever have thought possible before.
And for those of us working in the third sector, who want to produce great work in the service of others - it’s really hard to try and justify our own existence. Why would you pay me to produce something high quality & fulfilling, when you could spend the donation money on cheap artificial version that many people can’t tell the difference between?
Is what I do actually worth it?
In the charity world, it feels so much harder - as we’re not just cutting into our end of year profits on some spreadsheet - but are talking about generous donations made by people who care, trying to do real good and help others.
Supermarkets decided that the increase in shoplifting from self-service checkouts didn’t matter - as they could just pay less staff to work the tills, and so overall save money.
Many in the wider software industry are talking about giving up caring about any of the quality metrics & monitoring we’ve been building as best practice over the last 50 odd years - and just giving in to the vibes. If there are quality problems, security issues, data breaches, theft, they’ve saved so much money from not doing it by hand, they can just pay the insurance and throw another agent at it to fix it later.
We can’t just do that.
As a software developer, and someone leading others in this, we’re trying out different AI tooling, trying to find “wins”, places we can get true value out of them - but it’s a relentless fencing match of issues.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do, or what the best path is.
But we’ll try and find it together.