The curse of American innovation

By Preet Anand

Because of American innovation and entrepreneurship, we have become a coddled society. For nearly each appliance, there is a specialist we have to call. The net result is that we don't know how to do anything on our own.

Take food procurement, for example. We get all of our meat cleaned and pre-packaged from grocery stores. The amount of farmers in the U.S. is a fraction of a percentage of the entire U.S. population. Just imagine if the average high school football jock was asked to kill and prepare a chicken for sale. He would probably shriek from queasiness just from attempting to wrestle the bird down.

A scary fact: Over 90 percent of the animals we eat are born to die and then be eaten. Talk about an accomplished life. "Yeah my Uncle Joe, he was awesome! Oh, what did he do? He was born, stayed in the house for 15 years and died. His body was then used for science." That would describe the life of a farmed fish, pig or chicken.

I'm not against the killing of animals for food -- it's survival. But most of us couldn't do it ourselves. Our economy is engineered so we don't know how to survive.

Companies are now turning to specialization to decrease competition. But eventually, since we assume that only a specialist can operate in a certain field, we become hesitant to perform tasks that aren't within our immanent domain. We continue to outsource and further specialize under the claims of efficiency, with the main motivator of fear.

Take a look at taxes. Paying taxes is like going to the bathroom: You have to do it, and if you don't, you're either profoundly brilliant or in a really bad situation. Unfortunately, only those studying to be CPAs know anything about taxes. But it's absolutely critical. It's OK to know just a little, then turn it over to those who do it better -- like the CPAs -- but, at the least, we should have some basic knowledge so we don't get screwed.

Take cooking as another example of how we are becoming less capable. Each American generation since the beginning of the 20th century has become worse at cooking. With the availability of fast food and TV dinners, who would want to cook when someone else can do it for you?

But a problem occurs when you want to start eating healthily. You can either entrust your healthy eating to someone else or learn a new skill. Science has proved that we are at maximum learning capacity during our adolescence -- the rest of our life is refinement. So, we better get cooking soon.

I'm sure that college students know how to cook breakfast more than any other meal. Why breakfast? Because we are too lazy to get up early in the morning to buy our food.

Preet Anand is an undeclared freshman.