A Clear Broth, or How the Sausage Gets Made

Cantonese soup is judged on how deep it tastes, but you can tell at a glance whether it was made right: the broth is clear. And the way you do that is through a process called 'flying' water, or fēishuǐ, 飛水. Pork bone goes into a pot of cold water, you bring it up slowly until it boils, the grey scum rises, and the whole lot, water and all, goes down the sink.

It looks wasteful the first time you watch it, to boil a thing and throw away the water, but skip this step and the soup comes out cloudy and tastes 腥, seng, that raw, bloody note your grandmother would have tasted and said "hmm, not so good." The blanch isn't the cooking. The blanch is what makes the cooking clean.

So I think since we're almost through the year, it makes sense to showcase how these articles get made. I wouldn't say it's AI-written. AI-assisted, more like.

Let me explain:

Most of these pieces start off as fragments, half-remembered moments of lucidity. Because so many of these moments are unplanned, you need some type of format or mental state to allow the subconscious to bubble through. Capturing these bubbles often happens to me on a walk, or a run, but hardly in front of a laptop or a blank page. Inspiration doesn't come on command like a command prompt in a Terminal window (I mean, I wish.) What I do have on my run, though, is my phone and Apple Notes. I use the app to write down the mess of my mental state in the midst of whatever I'm doing. And then I finally get the discipline to sit down and sift through the words to see if there is a piece in there.

Next step is the verbalization. I imagine if I was a high school band student sight reading for the first time. It's clunky, verbose, you-don't-really-know-what-it-sounds-like-until-it-comes-out, and Wispr Flow is where my unedited self goes, in the shape of an attempted essay.

To the unassuming bystander, this first pass can look like yapping to oneself at a cafe or on the phone. The resulting transcript comes out as a mess - run-on sentences, three tangents, and no ending.

It is this glorious mess that I hand over to Claude for my 'shitty first draft.' The phrase is Anne Lamott's, from Bird by Bird, and her point was that nearly all good writing begins with a terrible first attempt. You have to let yourself write the bad version, knowing no one will read it, to get to the version someone will. AI doesn't write the essay, but it does boil it down, enough for a shape to emerge. It brings me a version of a beginning and an ending, and a draft I wouldn't feel comfortable publishing with my name as an author. Which is to say: this is the blanch water.

The grey cloudy stuff, full of coagulated proteins and scum that isn't the good stuff, at least not yet. The filtered essence is still in there. This first boil is just pulling the silt out of it so I can see what I actually meant.

That was the quick part. Now the slow part: I still handwrite a draft in my notebook first. This step is meant to counteract the last one. I have noticed that when I'm asked to do a speech, I tend to speak faster than normal, almost too fast, so much so that I don't even know what I'm saying as I am saying it. No, no, that's not good. That's what the pen is for. The handwriting slows it down.

The slowness is on purpose. You can't skim with a pen, you can't write 'too fast'. If a sentence isn't mine, I find out four words in, because my hand just wouldn't let me finish it. This is the second draft. Now I can say that I wrote it - both literally and figuratively. This I type back up, add some images, clean up the grammar, and that, dear reader, is the final draft.

I've landed on the fact that the quick way and the slow way is, in fact, the best way. More importantly, it's my way.

Good things take time and I don't feel this dumbing down of my cognitive abilities that the AI doomers seem to predict. I still do things the hard way. If anything, it is as if I'm co-producing with the machine. Like anything else, AI to me, is a tool to perform a task.

There is no benefit for a machine to make a food-centric newsletter like this one. This is a human endeavor for human consumption.

You'll never see the first pot. You'll just taste that the broth is clear.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L