If an object can serve multiple functions, it’s more useful than an object that serves just one. A knife, for instance, doesn’t just “cut.” It chops, dices, slices, minces, tenderizes, scores, peels, shreds, juliennes, pierces, perforates, splays, chiffonades, batonnets, debones, cubes, filets, brunoises, pries, smashes, slashes, slits, and slays.
The folks over at Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and the like, however, would rather you buy a garlic press, an egg slicer, a cheese slicer, and several dozen other specialized objects that do just one thing (but do it better or faster than most amateur chefs could hope to do).
It’s not just kitchenwares have proliferated. The cosmetics counter is full of creams and distillations for every zone on the face. No longer content to use mere “face wash,” women purchase a variety of product. Some for the nose, some for the eyes, some for the brows, some for the cheeks, the lips, the ears. Then there are the preparations (the peels, the exfoliations), and the tinctures that are put on by day-part (morning wash, night-mask, daytime moisturizer) and by climate. Some of this is legitimate. Most of it, however, could be replaced with a wash cloth, a fine bar of soap, and disciplined hygiene.
The object dieter seeks to replace single-purpose objects with multi-purpose objects. A few good, sharp knives work very well for most cooking tasks. I’ve given up on shaving cream (an entire product category built around removing one of soap’s many functions!) and have instead been lathering with a bar of unscented glycerine soap. My shaves are just as close.
The object dieter also makes sacrifices. There are some dishes that I won’t be able to make, thanks to my refusal to invest in specialized machinery. I’ll just have to purchase these foods from a local establishments; sausage links, dimsum, fresh squeezed vegetable juices, and Hello Kitty-shaped ice cubes are just a few of the things I’ll never make at home.
This isn’t simply minimalism. Minimalism can be used to describe an object that does just one function. This ridiculous “citrus squeezer,” from Williams Sonoma for instance, is designed so that it won’t be able to squeeze oranges. By some definitions of minimalism, that’s a success. I think that’s dumb and unsustainable.
True minimalism requires that one try to minimalize the total number of objects in one’s possession. In doing so, the following negative side-effects of object ownership are avoided or minimalized:
- manufacturing costs: as Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” rightly notes, the costs of consumption are legion. I won’t repeat Annie’s arguments. I’ll just refer to them.
- consumption itself: buying things costs money. That’s money that can purchase things that really matter: your kids’ education, early retirement, good healthcare, time with loved ones. The authors of Your Money or Your Life ask their readers to do an explicit conversion of dollars to time spent working for those dollars. Again, read the book; I won’t repeat those arguments either.
- storage costs: kitchen cabinets don’t come cheap. If more cooks were to eschew gimmicky kitchen implements, they’d need fewer storage bins in the kitchen, and could avoid some of the cost of owning a fabulous chef’s toolshed. Similarly, a smaller wardrobe (fewer shoes, fewer belts, fewer ties) allows for a smaller closet. The overall effect of conscious consumption is a reduction in the largest storage cost of all: your mortgage. What percent of the average home is dedicated to storing stuff that’s used once a year? If all the superfluous crap were removed from the average home, people would have the same cubic volume for living while paying for a much, much smaller space. The effects continue! Thanks to the jumbo manses that we purchase to store all of our goods, we all own cars so that we can commute from our low-density neighborhoods to wherever work is. If everyone’s homes were reduced in size, density would naturally go up, car ownership down, and all of the deleterious effects of car ownership would also be diminished.
- maintenance costs: it’s not just cars that cost significant money to maintain. Everything we own rots, breaks down, or loses function over time. Couches need to be reupholstered, lightbulbs changed, dishes replaced, paint touched up, carpet shampooed, animals dewormed and groomed, and so on. Every square foot of floor I pay a mortgage for must be swept, mopped, and kept in good condition. In fact, my condo charges me a monthly maintenance fee of about $.45 per square foot. There’s not an object (digital or physical) that doesn’t impose its maintenance costs on us, and these costs add up. Corporations have learned to think of their investments in technology on a “TCO,” or total cost of ownership basis. They no longer assess the cost to acquire a desktop computer for a worker, they now also assess the full lifetime cost of supporting that desktop, upgrading it, keeping it virus free, and keeping power flowing to it. More environmentally friendly corporations are even starting to consider the disposal and recycling costs. Individual consumers would do well to think of every purchase in this way. It might steer us towards lower-maintenance objects and away from fussy, expensive-to-maintain objects. Dry-clean-only clothing is a great example of a product category that needs to vanish. Hell, even stuff that requires ironing is too high-maintenance (if not for my wife’s clothing, I wouldn’t need to own an iron).
- disposal costs: Annie Leonard says that some 90% of what we acquire in a given year ends up in a landfill. Buying bottled water creates disposal costs that would have never existed had the thirsty person opted for tap. Buying dainty containers of food vs. bulk containers of food increases the ratio of packaging-to-calories and imposes additional disposal costs on all of us. Again, if fewer objects were obtained in the first place, there’d be fewer down-the-line disposal costs as well.
This wasn’t intended to be a complete description of the object diet. I simply wanted to get one of the core tenets down: go multi-function. Specialization may create some convenience, but specialized objects drain money directly and – especially – indirectly.
Examples of single-function vs. multifunction opportunities:
- clothing that can be layered (and unlayered) for use in summer and winter
- room dividers that also serve as storage
- using folded dish towels as trivets
- using (screw-top) wine bottles as water containers
- using face soap instead of shaving cream
- carpooling (converts two or three cars that had been serving one person each to a single car that now serves multiple individuals)
- the spork (in fast food situations, this is a tremendous invention)
- composting organic garbage for use in a garden (gives new use to refuse)
- sleeper sofas
- toaster oven-microwave combo units
- washer-dryer combo units
I’ll build the rest of the list from comments, if there are any.