My mother and my paternal grandmother had an ongoing theoretical rivalry over pie.

I’m not referring to the “…mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space  …the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius.”

No, I’m talking about pie, the kind you eat: cherry, mince, apple, lemon meringue, lemon chiffon, shoofly, and so forth.

My grandmother was of the opinion that anything purporting to be a piecrust that was not made with lard was a counterfeit and an abomination. My mother, on the other hand, was much impressed with Crisco—a 50s invention—and insisted that science can indeed improve just about anything, including piecrust, and there’s no sin in stepping boldly into the 20th century—that’s what all good cooks do.

If my grandmother even thought about Crisco, she confessed it as a venial sin.

This rivalry was not exactly hateful but it wasn’t exactly frivolous either.

Everyone in the family benefited from this culinary passive aggressive competition. Whenever the family gathered for any reason, both of my mother and my grandmother set immediately to baking with a kind of domestic vengence—my mother presenting her best Crisco concoctions with fancy cut work and lattice and an egg wash, my grandmother holding the classic line with lard and fork tine decorations and sprinkled sugar. Each woman would duly compliment the other while watching for any sign of favoritism from within the ranks: number of second slices eaten, remarks made, uneaten portions.

All of these pies were heavenly, every last one. Needless to say, the family kept the contest going until both women passed on to that big kitchen in the sky. Declaring a winner was in no one’s best interest.

What does any of this have to do with work?

Of course pie is always relevant no matter what the topic, but because it feels especially relevant in this context, I’ve been trying to get my mind around that question for weeks now. The thing is, I know this family story has something to do with work, but everytime I start to write an essay about it, I get to thinking about pie and my mind wanders, and before you know it I’m in the kitchen again, not writing.

I heard an NPR program some months back (I’ll post the link here later if I can find it) about the end of cooking. It seems that analysts (you know, the ones who analyze stuff, those analysts) predict that within just one more generation, if not sooner, NO ONE will cook anything anymore. Everyone will buy prepared food at the supermarket or at drive thru restaurants instead. Cooking will become an historical oddity, like churning butter or starching sheets.

Remember when people churned their own butter? Remember when women actually cooked meals? Remember pie?

Wow, that was a thousand years ago!

The trend away from doing work with any intrinsic value isn’t confined to the domestic arts, either.

Matthew B. Crawford, a philosopher and a motorcycle mechanic, wrote an excellent book last year called Shop Class as Soulcraft, in which he argues that working with your hands is in many ways more intellectually challenging and more satisfying than any corporate job requiring an advanced degree—kind of the same way a homemade pie is almost always infinitely more satisfying than anything mass-produced by Sara Lee, no matter whether lard or Crisco is involved in its creation.

Crawford describes how he ended up repairing motorcycles for a living after getting an advanced degree from a good college and lucking into what he assumed would be a richly rewarding job. The job—writing abstracts for scholarly papers for a corporate service—turned out to be a factory-type grind that made the assembly line look like nirvana.

Shortly after being escorted to his cubicle, Crawford realized that it was not going to be possible to write anything coherent or necessarily even related to any of the articles he was given to summarize, and that in fact most of the summaries had nothing whatsoever to do with the article content.

The corporation in charge of pumping out these summaries had pared the writing of them down to a series of mechanical operations and checkpoints (as in, always include these four things in each summary) and then demanded faster and faster production rates, so that by the time he was at this dream job for barely a month, he didn’t even know what he was writing anymore—or care.

Soon the high point of his day became a half hour lunch with two coworkers, one of whom turned out to be an active heroin addict.

The corporation didn’t care if the summaries made sense or if they actually summarized the articles they were matched up to, they just cared about pumping out tons of them and hitting certain ‘value added’ phrases and sentiments reliably so that their customers were satisfied and their profit margins went up and up. Crawford realized fairly quickly that not only did this job require almost no thought whatsoever, it was also making him and his coworkers pretty sick. Physically and mentally sick. Soul sick.

At the same time, Crawford discovered that fixing his motorcycle (something he did for lack of funds to farm it out) required focus, attention, and a willingness to keep trying new things until the correct solution to a problem was found. He found that motorcycle repair required both knowledge and thought, and also no small amount of practical experience and intuition. He also discovered that a good motorcycle mechanic will ALWAYS have work, and he developed a deep respect for men who had been doing this for many years.

This is the reverse of how we tend to think about work and how we are taught to think about work, at least here in the United States: We tend to see people who use their minds and wear suits (or office casual wear) to work as being intellectually superior to people who work with their hands fixing or making things. Yet so many jobs that supposedly involve the mind actually kill all thought and creativity, while jobs that require working with one’s hands demand real skill and real attention.

A good mechanic, if you can find one, is worth a whole year of homemade pies. Maybe more.

My grandmother and my mother could each whip out a piecrust in about five minutes from flour to oven. It was a marvellous thing to behold. If you’ve ever tried to actually mix and roll out a piecrust, you know that the task doesn’t come together effortlessly, but for these women it did. Rolling out pie crust was something they’d done thousands of times—so many times that they made it look effortless. The knowledge gained in such work is subtle and impossible to communicate. The resulting product is more than the sum of its parts, embodying and sharing out the personality and flair of the cook in a very tangible way.

Somehow in the move from the mercantile to the financial, from the practical to the abstract, from the excellent to the convenient, we are losing much more than access to good pie. Work for the sake of work is no longer seen as valuable, and people are now judged by what they have, not by what they can do. The result is that many of us can’t do much of anything.

We’ve become slick, hurried, and helpless.

I know it’s not chic to say so, but I think that when these domestic arts are gone for good (if they aren’t already) it will not be a happy day, it will be a sad one. Who wants to read stories in school about the days when women made pie at home? Who wants to just imagine how that must have been?

Crisco makes a crispy, flakey piecrust with a nutty aftertaste. Lard makes a shortbread-like crust that is especially delicious with rich fillings like mince or chocolate. Both are ecstatically delicious.

Our grandkids won’t know that.