How do you make brownies? Rather, how long is your brownie recipe? Mine is on the back of the brownie box. For others, it's an index card or a single page. I hopped over to foodnetwork.com and searched for brownie recipes and even this rather elaborate one (by everyone's favorite TV chef, Guy Fieri) for Mexican Rhubarb Chocolate Chunk Brownies (sounds strangely good) which is only a page when printed out.
The Pentagon, though, has a brownie recipe to kill all brownie recipes. I saw this news story today about the Pentagon's recipe for brownies "suitable for consumption by US soldiers". And, in typical bureaucratic form, the recipe can't be just any normal recipe; it's got to be 26 pages long. That's right; 26 page--for brownies (and Betty Crocker can fit it on the back of a box).
So I read the story and one of the government representatives quoted (the guy is from the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate--I'm not kidding) said (and this is a direct quote):
"One thing we like to say is, 'What would happen if you cooked a meal, stored it in a stifling hot warehouse, dropped it out of an airplane, dragged it through the mud, left it out with bugs and vermin, and ate it three years later?'"
So their monster of a recipe outlines in 26 easy to read pages how to make a warehouse-resistant, airdrop-resilient, mud-proof, vermin-resistent brownie (can you imagine what the recipe for chicken tortilla soup must be like?). I thought about the obvious inefficiencies here (how many people spent how many years developing this recipe?), and I realized that there's a fundamental principle at work here. The principles of Self-Management stand in stark contrast to the mind-numbing bureacratic inefficiency we see here. Why wouldn't an organization simply determine that they would ensure the people they hired to bake the brownies were responsible, disciplined and knowledgeable, and then trust them to make warehouse-airdrop-mud-vermin proof brownies?
Makes no sense to me.
