Thoughts About A Chef

She wouldn't call herself that, but...

Over perhaps the past year, Mrs. Bailey and I have discovered our perfect chef. An amazing cook, in an unassuming dive.

The prime rib is the tell.

Now we’d been going there, a lot, for quite a few months, but one particular Thursday we wandered in for the prime rib special. It was superb, as always.

The very next day, Friday, we were up in the big city, at a fancy and well known restaurant that we have long enjoyed. We got the prime rib. It was good. But it was also really clear that the prime rib in our little dive place was better.

Photo by Mike Hsieh on Unsplash

So, we love our little dive place. But it brings up all sorts of complications.

Two Thursdays a month, our Chef makes prime rib. Which is great. But it also means that we have to hope and pray that the place is slow on those particular Thursdays, and we have to then return on Friday. Because if the Chef doesn’t sell out all the Thursday prime rib, she makes us prime rib sandwiches on Friday. You see the trouble here, I’m sure.

And of course, it isn’t just the prime rib, one doesn’t want to miss out on any of the Chef’s wonderful creations!

So, I’ve been thinking about utopia lately. (Utopia is of course impossible, so one must guard against all of us who attempt to create utopia, for history shows that such experiments always end in murder on a mass scale.)

But one can’t sweat the small stuff while dreaming of the perfect society.

I’m thinking that maybe we sell the house, then set up a tent in the back parking lot of our little dive. That way we could just wander in and take all our meals there with ease.

But it wouldn’t quite be perfect, and of course utopia by definition must be perfect.

The trouble is, our Chef doesn’t work 365 days a year. There are these things called ‘days off’ and ‘vacations’ and other such craziness. So for my utopia to actually become such, I’d have to figure out how to force our Chef to work every day of the year. The first step in that of course would be to create a planned economy, that way the Chef could simply be required to do her part. Forced to do her part.

Force. Ultimately that means guns and a willingness to use them. Prisons and a willingness to lock any who disobey into them. Now we’re talking government.

So I’d need to start a little government in my tent, so that I could force our Chef to work to suit our preferred schedule. I wouldn’t call it force of course, regulation sounds so much softer. If I had to menace the Chef with a gun, I’d be sure to do so politely, to seem reasonable while engaged in barbarism. If the Chef disagreed with my decisions she could argue against them in official channels, where my bureaucracy would simply be unfeeling and unmoving.

But I’d be government, so the Chef wouldn’t be given a choice. Compliance would simply be required. The Chef’s rights would have to give way to the needs of the collective.

I’d still have that little problem of potentially too many customers eating all the prime rib on Thursday though. I suppose I could solve that through public health regulations. Just declare beef generally bad for one’s health, and thereby ration the amount of beef each person can eat in any given month. That would ensure me my prime rib sandwiches on Friday, because of course those who make the rules are never actually required to live by the rules they create.

Perfect.

The Chef’s life might suck, and everyone else might be limited to a few ounces of beef per month, but me, I’d have my own little prime rib utopia.

And isn’t that exactly what happens every time some politician or bureaucrat decides to take away just another sliver of our individual freedom?