No one can make a cheeseburger

Last year I linked to Matt Ridley's wonderful TED lecture in which he argues that no one person knows how to build a computer mouse from scratch. Extracting petroleum from the ground, turning it into plastic, building a circuit board, refining the metal for it, etc.... these are highly specialized tasks. Ridley estimated that it takes perhaps a million people to actually build a mouse. He took this as a positive sign; we are all profoundly interconnected, allowing us to create things that none of us could create on our own.

Via Brad DeLong, Waldo Jaquith makes a similar argument about the cheeseburger, which he attempted to create from scratch:

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in the fall. Mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it. 

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not…

This is something to celebrate. Perhaps with a cheeseburger.