Scratch

Last night I watched a video on Ted talks about a guy who wanted to make a toaster from scratch... this meant finding the minerals in the earth and melting them into certain metals and making plastic from oil.... stuff like that, the link is on the post before this one. it took him 9 months to make a toaster and it almost worked.

After watching this, I of course looked at everything differently... - my plastic keyboard of my computer, my doorknob, every single item in the grocery store.... really depressing actually, once I understood that if i were asked to reproduce any of these "man made" items from scratch I would have no idea where to start and would likely never succeed in completing it.

This upsets me, because I would like to believe that human beings are intelligent beings, and we can create incredible things. Which is true, unfortunately none of us seem to remember how to create something out of nothing anymore.

I'm going to borrow some words from the video clip, and say that I don't think I could make a sandwich from scratch. I have no idea how to grow wheat, or raise a cow, I think I could make some sort of instrument that could churn butter... o man and if I could make my own cheese, I would be sooo happy...

My point is that after all this "reflecting" I did today, I ended up going to the grocery story, buying milk in plastic cartons , cereal in cardboard boxes, beans in tin cans...

I wonder how many of us can successfully create a tin can.
... Just so we can throw it out after we use whatever it was containing.