My loved ones say that I cook well, and I enjoy cooking. However, my enjoyment turns out to be a rather manufactured experience!

If I go to a typical grocery store to buy onions, I see onions that have been cleaned and sorted. Few of them have bruises, to say nothing of mold or weevils. (I'm not actually sure if weevils eat onions.) The crappy-looking onions are not presented to me; they are diverted into other uses in the pipeline. If an onion is not pretty, I don't ever get to see it as an onion; it ends up dried and powdered as a component of chili powder or bouillon cubes. Weird-looking or off-size eggs end up in mayonnaise, not egg cartons; gnarly oranges in juice. Mangoes show up without any of their toxic sap.

It is as if the entire food-acquiring experience has been optimized for my aesthetic pleasure, in order to be rewarding and reinforcing to me as a participant. This makes economic sense for the grocers and farmers: if I didn't enjoy food and cooking, I would be over in the "let's quaff nutrient slurry" camp with RomeoStevens, who spends a lot less money on food than I do.