Right before COVID hit, food trucks were proliferating at an astonishing rate, maybe even an exponential one. According to one 2017 count, the U.S. had about 5,000 food trucks, generating over a billion dollars revenue. And for good reason: Why go to the food when the food can come to you? Why spend lunchtime waiting for the host to seat you, the waitress to find your table, take the order, return with drinks, return with food, return to refill the drinks, and return to collect the money, why go through all that on a busy workday, when the food truck is right outside, maybe by a local park near benches under shade trees. And the food? Well, competition keeps the quality up and the flavors in. Time and convenience are two commodities many of us cherish in a busy society. Then there are the delivery systems set up both by restaurants and companies like Uber. Delivered food, convenient and abundant and available very nearby or virtually on our office doorstep! Are we ancient pharaohs? Kings and queens? Maybe even the gods on Olympus?
But we’re not the only organisms that like our food delivered. Sessile marine organisms like corals and sponges simply sit and wait. Food comes along, and in coral reefs like busy cities it comes along frequently and abundantly. The ocean runs its own food truck and delivery services. The discovery of heterotrophic bacteria in the deep ocean makes me think that life prefers the home delivery to going out foraging for restaurants ala our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors and contemporary ultra-rural denizens of the Namib or the deep Amazonian rainforest.
Two strategies for getting food, one requiring little or no work and the other requiring if not incessant then multiple excursions into the local environment. Both are risky. The former strategy depends on chance drive-bys by the food trucks of nature and humanity. Waiting for the convenient delivery makes us children in summertime, playing outdoors and waiting for the ice cream truck’s maddeningly repetitive and loud tune that signals its arrival in the neighborhood. We’re at the mercy of a delivery system beyond our control; the ice cream truck shows up or it doesn’t. Hot days aren’t always mitigated by cold ice cream. And as in Nature’s production of food, there are seasonal shortages. Nuts, seeds, and fruits don’t fall to the local ground year-round. Delivery systems like winds and flowing water vary, also. But sessile organisms have flourished for millions of years, so the strategy does have its benefits. Consider brain corals. So-named because they look like human brains with crenulated surfaces, these corals have survived as a group for millions of years, so the sessile strategy works. But consider before heaping praise on these “brains” for their survival strategy that their only contribution is their continuation. Sure, they continue, but they do so stagnantly.
That other strategy, you know, the one that has us out hunter-gatherer style searching desperately through grocery store aisles for just the right ingredients for a homemade gourmet meal or for ordinary bread, milk, and eggs, that strategy works relatively well, as long as the expenditure of energy to acquire the food doesn’t exceed the energy obtained in the food. Can’t run on an empty tank, can we?
Are there analogs of food strategies in our consumption of ideas? Probably. How many of us consume ideas that simply come our way by virtue of a home-delivery system? How many of us go out foraging for new ideas? Like the food strategies, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Take the latter strategy, the hunter-gatherer one. We can go out purposefully searching, but unless we have a plan, some sense that ideas are likely to be found in one place over another, through one source over another, discovery and acquisition rely on chance. One doesn’t find gold where no gold ores exist; one doesn’t find ideas where a bland landscape of accumulating sameness or derivatives simply add to layers, like sedimentary layers, of fragmented ideas, all compositionally the same like billions of quartz crystals cemented to make a sandstone. No, finding new ideas by foraging, though possibly successful through luck, is a matter of planning the search. One doesn’t find fish unless one goes to the water, one doesn’t find fruit trees on the upper slopes of the Andes. Foragers need to know the environments that produce the food they seek, and that goes for the search for ideas, also.
Of course, we can rely on the food-delivery strategy, waiting for the ice cream truck, or the winds or waters to deliver either food or ideas. That sessile system has worked to keep the ordinary ordinary, to keep one generation in place until the environment changes and the delivery system fails like a shift in ocean current that bypasses the sessile eaters. During COVID the food truck business stopped for a while. In Nature, delivery systems can work for millennia, and then, for whatever reasons geologic, meteorologic, or oceanographic, those systems shift or fail, and the home-delivery system collapses. Sessile organisms have no foraging strategies. They are at the mercy of delivery systems. Brain corals are like that.
But I suppose even foragers are somewhat reliant on home delivery. Take news and ideas, for example. Home-delivered newspapers, while still part of an ongoing delivery business, have been replaced by news and ideas through the Web. The ideas flow on a stream of electrons and microwaves toward our sessile brains, and foraging for new ideas has taken us on oxymoronic sessile searches. We sit and browse. Sometimes with purpose, sometimes on random wanderings through a jungle of random ideas and information. Yes, many of us take part in this strange Era of Sessile Searching. We want to forage, and we do forage, but we do so seated in front of a computer, electronic tablet, or smartphone. Mostly, we allow the random delivery system to put ideas before us like plankton floating by coral polyps or detrital ocean “rain” of organic matter falling on seafloor’s newly discovered heterotrophic bacteria. The ice cream truck simply appears in the neighborhood—or it doesn’t.
What’s your strategy? Are you a brain coral or a forager? Is your only contribution like that of the sessile brain corals, that is, merely a continuation largely unchanged over millennia, a continuation reliant on that which is delivered to you? Surely, you want more than just a continuation; surely, you have grown beyond those childhood years of waiting to see whether or not the ice cream truck shows up in your neighborhood.
But we’re not the only organisms that like our food delivered. Sessile marine organisms like corals and sponges simply sit and wait. Food comes along, and in coral reefs like busy cities it comes along frequently and abundantly. The ocean runs its own food truck and delivery services. The discovery of heterotrophic bacteria in the deep ocean makes me think that life prefers the home delivery to going out foraging for restaurants ala our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors and contemporary ultra-rural denizens of the Namib or the deep Amazonian rainforest.
Two strategies for getting food, one requiring little or no work and the other requiring if not incessant then multiple excursions into the local environment. Both are risky. The former strategy depends on chance drive-bys by the food trucks of nature and humanity. Waiting for the convenient delivery makes us children in summertime, playing outdoors and waiting for the ice cream truck’s maddeningly repetitive and loud tune that signals its arrival in the neighborhood. We’re at the mercy of a delivery system beyond our control; the ice cream truck shows up or it doesn’t. Hot days aren’t always mitigated by cold ice cream. And as in Nature’s production of food, there are seasonal shortages. Nuts, seeds, and fruits don’t fall to the local ground year-round. Delivery systems like winds and flowing water vary, also. But sessile organisms have flourished for millions of years, so the strategy does have its benefits. Consider brain corals. So-named because they look like human brains with crenulated surfaces, these corals have survived as a group for millions of years, so the sessile strategy works. But consider before heaping praise on these “brains” for their survival strategy that their only contribution is their continuation. Sure, they continue, but they do so stagnantly.
That other strategy, you know, the one that has us out hunter-gatherer style searching desperately through grocery store aisles for just the right ingredients for a homemade gourmet meal or for ordinary bread, milk, and eggs, that strategy works relatively well, as long as the expenditure of energy to acquire the food doesn’t exceed the energy obtained in the food. Can’t run on an empty tank, can we?
Are there analogs of food strategies in our consumption of ideas? Probably. How many of us consume ideas that simply come our way by virtue of a home-delivery system? How many of us go out foraging for new ideas? Like the food strategies, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Take the latter strategy, the hunter-gatherer one. We can go out purposefully searching, but unless we have a plan, some sense that ideas are likely to be found in one place over another, through one source over another, discovery and acquisition rely on chance. One doesn’t find gold where no gold ores exist; one doesn’t find ideas where a bland landscape of accumulating sameness or derivatives simply add to layers, like sedimentary layers, of fragmented ideas, all compositionally the same like billions of quartz crystals cemented to make a sandstone. No, finding new ideas by foraging, though possibly successful through luck, is a matter of planning the search. One doesn’t find fish unless one goes to the water, one doesn’t find fruit trees on the upper slopes of the Andes. Foragers need to know the environments that produce the food they seek, and that goes for the search for ideas, also.
Of course, we can rely on the food-delivery strategy, waiting for the ice cream truck, or the winds or waters to deliver either food or ideas. That sessile system has worked to keep the ordinary ordinary, to keep one generation in place until the environment changes and the delivery system fails like a shift in ocean current that bypasses the sessile eaters. During COVID the food truck business stopped for a while. In Nature, delivery systems can work for millennia, and then, for whatever reasons geologic, meteorologic, or oceanographic, those systems shift or fail, and the home-delivery system collapses. Sessile organisms have no foraging strategies. They are at the mercy of delivery systems. Brain corals are like that.
But I suppose even foragers are somewhat reliant on home delivery. Take news and ideas, for example. Home-delivered newspapers, while still part of an ongoing delivery business, have been replaced by news and ideas through the Web. The ideas flow on a stream of electrons and microwaves toward our sessile brains, and foraging for new ideas has taken us on oxymoronic sessile searches. We sit and browse. Sometimes with purpose, sometimes on random wanderings through a jungle of random ideas and information. Yes, many of us take part in this strange Era of Sessile Searching. We want to forage, and we do forage, but we do so seated in front of a computer, electronic tablet, or smartphone. Mostly, we allow the random delivery system to put ideas before us like plankton floating by coral polyps or detrital ocean “rain” of organic matter falling on seafloor’s newly discovered heterotrophic bacteria. The ice cream truck simply appears in the neighborhood—or it doesn’t.
What’s your strategy? Are you a brain coral or a forager? Is your only contribution like that of the sessile brain corals, that is, merely a continuation largely unchanged over millennia, a continuation reliant on that which is delivered to you? Surely, you want more than just a continuation; surely, you have grown beyond those childhood years of waiting to see whether or not the ice cream truck shows up in your neighborhood.
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