“She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. Does food in twenty minutes really deliver in twenty minutes?”

“Usually fifteen, they do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There’s usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic jams too, on scooters.”

Doctorow, C. (2009). Makers (p. 169). New York: Tor.

 

New technology and methods give us more effective and efficient ways of dealing with “problems” or “needs.” But recently I have been contemplating the question, are we making more problems then we are solving? How is it consciously acceptable to pay someone to bring you a hot processed chemical meal in fifteen minutes when nearly a billion people around the world are suffering from malnutrition. We have the technology and process to create fast food empires and industrial supermarket chains, but cant figure out how to grow and package food in a way that is sustainable? Some people have so much food they can throw it away, but we cant figure out how to distribute food so that people around the globe aren’t starving?