Technology and innovation

INFORMATIONAL: Passage A is from the essay "The Errand" by Rosalind Keate. Passage B is from the essay "Seen from the Kitchen" by Daniel Okafor-Hale. Both passages consider how the home refrigerator changed the way families shopped for food. (Original practice texts; the authors, works, people and towns are fictional.) Line numbers run continuously through both passages and appear in the left margin every 5 lines.

Passage A When my father was a boy in the river town of Hollin, food was bought the way weather is experienced: a little at a time, every day. Milk came to the door each morning because it would not keep until evening. Meat was bought for 5 that night's supper and no other. Most afternoons, he was sent down Bell Street with a basket and a list, and he came back not only with bread and onions but with news: whose baby had arrived, which shop had raised its prices, why the butcher's son had left for the city. 10 The home refrigerator ended that errand. Once a family could keep milk for a week and meat for several days, there was little reason to shop daily, and within a generation the weekly trip had replaced the daily one. The change is usually described as a gain in convenience, and it was one. 15 But convenience measures only what a person no longer has to do. It says nothing about what that task had been carrying along with it. The daily errand carried a neighborhood. The shopkeepers on Bell Street knew which families were short of money that 20 month and which elderly customers had not come in for two days. A child who went shopping every afternoon learned the names of forty adults and was known by all of them. None of this was the purpose of buying onions, and so no one thought to protect it when the reason for buying onions every day 25 disappeared. I do not argue that families should have refused the refrigerator. My father, who spent his boyhood hauling a loaded basket up a hill, would have laughed at the suggestion. I argue only that when we count what an 30 invention gave us, we should also count what it quietly took away, especially the things that no one ever set out to build.

Passage B Writers who mourn the daily shopping trip tend to describe it from the sidewalk: the greetings, the gossip, 35 the shopkeeper who knew your name. Seen from the kitchen, the errand looks different. Someone had to make that trip every day, in every kind of weather, and in most households that someone was a woman or a child who might otherwise have been doing something else. 40 The home refrigerator did reduce the number of trips. It did not, however, abolish the ties that the trips had supported; it moved them. In the town where I grew up, the hours once spent walking to the butcher went, in part, to things that had been hard to fit into a day organized around 45 food that spoiled: evening classes, church suppers, a softball league that my mother helped start. These were also places where neighbors learned about one another, and people went to them because they chose to, not because they were sent. 50 It is also worth remembering what the old system cost. Milk that turned sour by evening was poured out. Meat that could not be kept cold was sometimes eaten anyway. A family with no money on Tuesday went without on Tuesday, because it could not buy extra on Monday and store it. 55 None of this means that nothing was lost. Some small shops closed, and a few older people who had depended on the daily visit to be noticed became more isolated. Those losses were real, and a town that cares about its members should look for ways to replace what the old errand provided. But a 60 loss of this kind is a reason to repair, not a reason to wish the invention away, and a history that remembers the pleasant talk at the counter while forgetting the child carrying the basket has not counted everything.