Bad Ketchup

“You’ve been eating bad ketchup all your life”

This quote comes from a Malcolm Gladwell article that later ended up in the book What the Dog Saw.

What I love about this quote is that it is so specific, and yet it hides something incredibly broad.

I have no idea whether there’s better ketchup out there. I’m no tomato sauce expert. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s good ketchup and what’s bad ketchup. Yet we’ve all experienced “worse-than-usual” ketchup at some point. If you asked me to define “What is bad ketchup?” I might struggle, but as the old phrase goes, “I know it when I see it”.

Here’s where our worldview comes crashing down: the existence of bad ketchup tells us nothing about whether our current ketchup is “good”. Perhaps it is merely “less bad”. Up until I read that quote, the quality of our existing ketchup was unimpeachable. Now my eyes have been opened to a potential in which better ketchup exists and I can never go back. Ketchup no longer seems like a solved problem.

These kinds of technological advances are easy to spot in hindsight. Antibiotics are a classic example. Can you imagine what life was like before antibiotics? People had no idea that germs were little critters running around inside your body. Even the smartest scientists around believed diseases came from poisonous “night air”. Our best treatments for diseases were leeches. That’s some bad ketchup right there.

Looking toward the future, what is out there now that might one day seem like bad ketchup? Cars seem ready for improvement. The more I talk to people about driving, the more it seems like most people would really prefer not to drive. The way car adverts and movies present cars is as these amazing tools of autonomy. They certainly can offer that, but most of the time they are far less exciting. Most car journeys are mundane - a way of getting you to the supermarket, or to do the school run. In a lot of car journeys it’s not even you the driver that is trying to get somewhere. You’re ferrying other people where they need to get to because that’s the way it’s done. In 100 years our current modes of transportation will seem so quaint and so primitive.

With self-driving cars, we can see the prototypes and believe that a better way is coming. For so many other things, we have absolutely no idea what is out there. Is there some plastic-like material that is readily biodegradable or infinitely reusable? Is there a better source of renewable energy out there? Maybe “good ketchup” isn’t the final destination. Will someone someday invent an entirely new category of condiment that surpasses the best of the best ketchup? Boy, I sure hope so.

Here’s a new tool for your belt. Next time you find yourself staring at a product that’s been iterated upon so much as to be near-perfect, think again. Is this the best possible version, or have you been eating bad ketchup all your life?