This is the first of two pieces on inconsistency in food. Doug McMaster asks why the industrial food system was built the way it was, chasing a uniformity nature never promised. In the second piece, Chris Locke picks up where this one leaves off, with what it actually looks like inside a kitchen that has stopped fighting that inconsistency and started working with it.
Inspired by a conversation with Chris Locke.
I found myself thinking about the hidden price of embracing inconsistency.
Nature’s variability is undeniably beautiful, but it also carries a cost. Every variation sends a ripple through a professional kitchen. A peach that ripens differently, flour that ferments at a different speed, or a cut of beef with unfamiliar marbling. It creates uncertainty. One cook hesitates. Another questions whether they’re doing it correctly. Service adjusts. The intended dish shifts slightly. The guest experiences something subtly different from what was imagined. Those ripples accumulate.
Sometimes, from a certain angle, industrial food isn’t simply an attempt to dominate nature. Sometimes it’s an attempt to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe uniformity isn’t the true objective. Predictability is. Industrial systems aren’t necessarily optimising for flavour or nutrition. They’re optimising for confidence. The farmer wants to know they won’t lose their land. The chef wants to know they won’t lose their job. The server wants confidence in every plate they carry. The diner wants to trust that the meal they dreamed about will be the meal that arrives. Predictability offers safety.
Of course, that pursuit of predictability has grown into something deeply destructive. I’m still a proud cynic, raging against that machine. Yet after years spent negotiating with nature’s inconsistency, I’ve come to realise that the machine wasn’t built out of greed alone. It was built out of fear. The real challenge for restaurants that choose to work closely with nature is whether they can absorb that uncertainty without passing it on. If every fluctuation in nature becomes a fluctuation in the guest experience, then trust slowly begins to erode. Guests don’t consciously think, The tomatoes were sweeter last week. They simply leave with the feeling that one meal was better than another.
Perhaps that’s the deeper consequence of industrialisation. After generations of engineered consistency, we’ve begun to mistake consistency for quality. Variability no longer feels alive. It feels like failure. So perhaps the final question isn’t whether industrial food is right or wrong. Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: Can a society raised on engineered consistency ever choose anything other than industrialisation? Have we forgotten what nature feels like? If the answer is yes, then perhaps we’ve been arguing about the wrong thing all along.
The devil may cry.
Douglas McMaster is a chef and the founder of Silo, the zero-waste project that began as a restaurant, first in Brighton, then in Hackney Wick, London. Since its closure as a restaurant, Silo continues through his work as a speaker and zero-waste consultant, and through his book, Silo: The Zero Waste Blueprint.
