As the holiday season—propelled in part by sweets—rushes in upon us I cannot imagine a sillier, lonelier enterprise than baking one cookie at a time. At the same time, doing just that may represent the sorry excesses of our American individualism and divisions.
I started baking chocolate chip cookies several years ago in a quest for the secret to my mother’s recipe for them. Her chocolate chips were like no others. She baked an untold number of them for decades prior to her death at nearly 96 in 2015.
Mom could have never imagined baking to satisfy her appetite alone. She baked for family and friends. Her cookie jar was never empty, and was usually filled with chocolate chips. In her later years—much of her family scattered—she drove around our community on Saturday afternoons to give away cookies, breads, and rolls that had been isolated raw ingredients earlier that day.
I believe my cookies come pretty close to tasting like hers, though I am not sure exactly why. It’s taken some experimentation, and therefore some investment of time to approximate her secret. My experience has convinced me that making a single-serving chocolate chip cookie is an extravagant enterprise destined to lead to lonely consumption.
The article with that picture reported that it takes half-an-hour to bake one cookie. In around three hours I can mix, shape, bake, stow and clean up after the creation of 48 chocolate chip cookies. Do the math: my way is eight times more efficient than the one-at-a-time way. My mother, who no doubt made her cookies much faster than I can, would not have survived had she been so inefficient.
Advocates of small-batch baking (as they call it) may argue that not everyone can carve out a three-hour block of time to bake. I counter with, you make time to do what you want, don’t you? If you baked four dozen cookies in a single evening and preserved them (freezing works), you could eat one a day for a month and half without investing another minute or making another mess.
But of course, you’d have to eat each cookie all by yourself. You would not dare invite a neighbor in to watch you eat your cookie, would you?
This, then, is my real concern: loneliness; isolation; individualism. As in, I’ll do it myself for myself. Other people just get out of my way and my life.
That sounds extreme. But it is exactly the opposite of how my mother lived her life. Though she could be an independent sort, her overriding concern was always the comfort and good of others, particularly of her family.
Being so focused on yourself that you bake a cookie that simple good manners dictate you must eat by yourself sounds like much of what endangers our nation and world today.
In 2020, the BBC conducted what it called “The Loneliness Experiment.” It surveyed over 46,000 people of all ages living in 237 countries regarding their experiences of loneliness. Among its findings was this: “people in individualistic (vs. collectivist) countries reported more loneliness.”
In the name of individual and private freedom, many of us resist masking requests and vaccination requirements, laws that extend liberty to people not like us, to using public policy to share some wealth with poor Americans, and more. We think we can take care of ourselves without caring about people we do not happen to know. As long as I am okay—but even if I am not—I will not do what anyone else tells me to do, even to preserve the common good or to protect my neighbor. Because I am my own person, responsible only for my own self.
“America First”—when it means “America only” or “America in isolation”—is the macro-political equivalent of baking one cookie at a time and eating it alone. It seems so right…until we can’t get our hands on the things we need to bake just one last cookie because someone else controls our access to them.
How to overcome loneliness in our uber-individualistic and isolationist land? Here’s a start: bake a real batch of chocolate chip cookies…2, 4, 6 dozen. Then, share them. Give them away, or enjoy them and a cup of tea or glass of milk with someone else. The baking and the sharing will both do wonders for you. They will do wonders for others as well, and could be your greatest contribution to the flourishing of us all.
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