Two nights ago, I ordered dinner from a locally owned burger place and had one of those increasingly unusual experiences in which almost everything was simply… good.
The food was excellent. The service was friendly. The order was correct. Nothing was missing. Nobody acted as though I was inconveniencing them by purchasing food from their restaurant. There were enough little positive details that I am going to write separately about the experience, because I have begun to think that we may have reached the point where good service deserves to be called out at least as loudly as bad service once was.
But there was one very small thing in the order that stayed with me.
The condiments.
They came in their own neat little bag. Inside were napkins, forks, a knife, a spoon, ketchup, salt, pepper, vinegar and even a small container of ranch dressing, presumably because we had ordered mozzarella sticks. There was enough cutlery for the two people eating the meal. I hadn’t asked for any of it. Someone at the restaurant had simply looked at the order, thought briefly about the people who would be eating it, and packed what we were likely to need.
It felt strangely luxurious.
Which tells you something about how much has changed.
For most of my life, this was completely ordinary. Buy fast food and a small ecosystem of useful things came with it. Napkins. Ketchup. Salt. Pepper. Straws. Forks and knives when appropriate. Sometimes little packets of vinegar, taco sauce, soy sauce or whatever else belonged to the food you had ordered.
Then, gradually, the service envelope began to shrink.
Over roughly the past decade, restaurants increasingly stopped automatically including many of these items. Some chains reduced them voluntarily. Delivery services began making disposable cutlery something customers had to request. Cities and states eventually passed laws requiring restaurants not to automatically provide certain single-use utensils and condiments at all.
There are perfectly understandable reasons for this.
Multiply one unwanted fork or a handful of unused napkins by millions or billions of restaurant meals and suddenly you are no longer talking about a fork. You are talking about tonnes of material that must be manufactured, transported, collected and disposed of. Restaurants also save money when they give away fewer things. Municipalities have less garbage to handle. Some of the newer rules were explicitly designed to reduce unnecessary waste.
So this isn’t a simple story about greedy corporations stealing our ketchup.
But something was lost.
And I don’t mean three cents’ worth of ketchup.
I mean all the strange little second lives these objects used to have after the meal was over.
There was a time when fast-food napkins seemed to reproduce inside cars. You would open the glove compartment and find fifteen of them stuffed beside the owner’s manual. They were in purses, kitchen drawers, desk drawers and lunch bags.
And those napkins did not necessarily go to waste.
They cleaned spilled coffee. They wiped children’s faces. They became emergency tissues when somebody sneezed in the back seat. You spit gum into them. You wrapped something messy in them. If the household paper towel supply unexpectedly ran out, there was probably a little reserve of restaurant napkins somewhere.
Parents especially know the value of any absorbent piece of paper that happens to be within arm’s reach at exactly the right moment.
The salt and pepper packets had their own afterlife.
I distinctly remember having a paper bag filled with little salt and pepper packets when I was younger. They would accumulate until they became a kind of tiny household reserve. They were perfect for picnics, packed lunches, camping, hotel rooms or any meal eaten somewhere that did not have a fully stocked kitchen.
Ketchup may have been even more useful.
A couple of packets left over from lunch could migrate home and turn up later beside a plate of fries or a hamburger. For a broke student, two forgotten ketchup packets could be the difference between plain Kraft Dinner and what felt, at the time, like a considerably more sophisticated culinary experience.
Then there was the cutlery.
Once you have had children, you develop an entirely different appreciation for dishes you do not have to wash.
Those little wrapped forks, knives and spoons accumulated in drawers too. They went on road trips. They went camping. They ended up in lunches. They rescued you when you brought food somewhere and discovered that nobody had remembered utensils. If enough of them accumulated, you could practically set the family table with fast-food cutlery while the real dishes sat dirty in the sink.
Some of the stranger packets were even better.
Soy sauce. Taco sauce. Vinegar. Hot sauce. Mustard. Mayonnaise. Ranch dressing.
They became a tiny distributed pantry.
None of these things was particularly valuable by itself. That is probably part of why their disappearance has attracted so little attention. A ketchup packet isn’t worth enough to complain about. Neither is a napkin. Neither is a plastic fork.
But their usefulness was much larger than their price.
A napkin sitting in a glove compartment for three weeks has almost no value—right up until somebody spills an entire coffee.
A fork sitting in a drawer for six months appears completely unnecessary—until someone brings home takeout and discovers that every clean fork in the house is in the dishwasher.
A salt packet is basically worthless—until you are sitting at a picnic table with an unsalted meal and no salt shaker within five kilometres.
These little things had what economists might call option value. You did not know precisely when you would need them. Their usefulness came from the possibility that someday you might.
They also created redundancy, which modern efficiency tends to treat with suspicion.
Why do you need twenty plastic forks in a drawer?
Because someday you might need fork number seventeen.
Human households are full of this kind of redundancy. Spare batteries. Extra toilet paper. Bandages. Pens. Extension cords. Candles. Chargers. Canned food. We do not use these things every day. Their value comes partly from the fact that they are already there when circumstances become slightly inconvenient.
Fast-food restaurants used to accidentally contribute to that little household resilience network.
Nobody designed it.
McDonald’s was not secretly operating a continent-wide emergency napkin distribution program.
But millions of restaurant transactions caused millions of small useful objects to drift outward into cars, homes, offices, cottages, backpacks and purses, where they waited until someone needed them.
Then there is another kind of loss that interests me even more.
The little condiment bag I received the other night represented something I have come to think of as computational kindness.
The term appears in Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and describes the surprisingly valuable act of doing a little bit of the thinking so that someone else doesn’t have to.
The person packing our restaurant order did that.
They could see that enough food had been ordered for two people, so they packed enough cutlery for two people. They knew mozzarella sticks were in the order, so ranch dressing went into the bag. Ketchup, salt, pepper and napkins were already there.
I didn’t have to remember any of it.
That matters more than it sounds.
When restaurants move to an entirely request-based model, the material cost may disappear from the business, but another small cost gets transferred to the customer.
Remember ketchup.
Decide whether you need utensils.
Remember napkins.
Ask for a fork.
Check whether the sauce is in the bag.
If you forget, decide whether it is worth going back.
None of those tasks is difficult.
That is precisely why they disappear from consideration.
But modern life is filled with tiny things that are individually easy and collectively exhausting.
The restaurant the other night removed those decisions from me.
Someone else had already thought about what I was likely to need.
And when I opened that neatly packed little bag, I didn’t think, “Excellent. I have acquired seven cents’ worth of disposable consumer goods.”
I thought, “Wow. They thought of everything.”
That is hospitality.
It is a subtly different philosophy of what it means to sell someone a meal.
One philosophy says: We prepared the food you purchased.
The other says: We tried to make it easy for you to enjoy the food you purchased.
Neither ketchup packets nor plastic forks are among the great losses of modern civilization. Some reduction in disposable waste is probably sensible, and there are undoubtedly plenty of packets and utensils that really did go directly from restaurant bag to garbage can unused.
But I wonder if, in measuring all that waste, we accidentally counted some useful little things as worthless simply because they weren’t used immediately.
Those old condiment drawers were messy.
But they were also pantries.
Those glove-compartment napkins looked like clutter.
But they were also supplies.
Those extra forks looked redundant.
But redundancy is sometimes exactly what makes life easier.
Perhaps that is why the little package from the local burger place pleased me so much. It reminded me of an older version of the fast-food transaction, when a meal often arrived surrounded by a small halo of useful things you hadn’t specifically purchased and didn’t have to remember to request.
The objects themselves were tiny.
What they provided wasn’t always tiny at all.
And sometimes kindness is nothing more complicated than looking at what someone is going to need next and putting it in the bag before they have to ask.
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