A Rotary Cheese Grater
is like a typewriter
THE REVIEWS ARE IN:
“Got a real hoot from reading it.” - my grandparents
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If you missed “The Bass Pro Shop,” it’s here. If you’re already sold on these reviews alone:
According to an article I found on “Seven Different Types of Cheese Grater,” my particular grater is called a rotary grater. It doesn’t look like the website’s example of a rotary grater, but then again their example of an automatic cheese grater looks to me like a pasta machine, so it’s probably best to defer to the experts of the HOME Stratosphere. My cheese grater is an odd-shaped item, kind of like a plastic clamp with a cylinder on one side, with a worn label on that cylinder that says “Pecorino Romano Cheese” in my mom’s art-teacher handwriting.
The cheese grater serves only one purpose: to grate cheese with panache and enthusiasm like a waiter at Macaroni Grill. You turn the crank and little shreds of cheese fall like snow on your pasta dish.
It’s not even for all cheeses: it’s specifically for Parmesan, but if you’re serving a large crowd of hungry college students like my mom probably was when she fashioned this label, the cheaper Pecorino Romano works almost as well. I also own a “rasp” cheese grater and a “box” cheese grater. You can grate carrots or Colby Jack or apples or even onions (though my mascara last night would attest otherwise) with one of those graters, but not with the rotary grater. You pull the rotary grater out of your drawer when dinner guests are coming over for spaghetti and meatballs or fettuccini Alfredo, or when you’ve decided to treat yourself like a dinner guest for one of those dishes.
Many things have only one use: a piano, headphones, a lamp, a pair of shoes. Of course, you can plant succulents in the shoes or hit someone over the head with the lamp, but they are not properly multitasking items. Many other things are very interesting that have multiple uses, like mason jars or flour sack towels or water bottles that double conveniently as vases when you pick up 25-cent zinnias from a farm stand.
But there is a certain class of things that holds a particular fascination for me: things that take out and isolate one particular capacity of a multitasking object. Typewriters, film cameras, record players, and rotary cheese graters all fall under this heading, but they need not carry an aura of steampunky nostalgia: a Nintendo Switch or a rice cooker or a pocket flashlight also fits the bill.
Things like these are cousins to Cal Newport’s “deep work.” You are not doing “deep work” when you are gaming on a Switch or grating cheese with panache. But you are, in a style that Newport would probably approve of, choosing to opt out of a system in which multitasking is the default. You have intentionally chosen to isolate one particular activity and have committed to the cheese-grating, gaming, or photographing bit. For at least a moment, you have chosen one task in a world of fragmented focus.
In encouraging this focus, items like these artificially limit your options. On a typewriter, you have one typeface, no ability to backspace, and a print capacity of exactly one copy of one page at a time; a laptop is far more versatile. But a laptop also comes with Twitter and video games and Zoom calls and emails from your boss and old friends from high school asking you to join their multi-level marketing scheme on Facebook Messenger.
Given the fatigue that goes along with modern life, it’s no wonder that many modern people, millennials especially, have become fascinated with limited-use items: film cameras are making a comeback, as are record players and even cassettes. More than simply a vague nostalgia for the past, I think these trends indicate a deep desire for a certain way of paying attention.
It is this quality of attention that interests me. When you use an intentional single-use item, you are taking time out of your day and devoting your efforts to a very specific activity. If you are playing a record, you are playing that record.
The friction involved in using a record player means that you are forced to attend to what you are doing, but not in the frustrated way that you are when you are trying fruitlessly to pair a set of Bluetooth headphones with your iPhone—the latter process is a frustrated process, friction where friction was never intended, while the playing of a record is like a ritual. It naturally has multiple steps: removing the record from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, starting the turntable, placing the needle. After a little while you will need to flip the record. All these steps demand a certain presence in the present that is rarely demanded of us in a world where we no longer forage for food or run away from bears (mostly). I think we crave having this kind of attention demanded of us.
The quality of the attention that a single-use item affords is certainly a mindful attention. But though mindfulness is all very well in its place, I do not enjoy using my rotary cheese grater only as an activity similar to the raisin exercise. Part of the enjoyment of a single-use item is actually using the item: the little pile of snow-like Parmesan on the pasta, the Polaroid photograph.
The other element is the sense that you are present at an event. A record player or the rotary grater makes what you are doing an Event. I am Taking a Photograph. I am Grating the Cheese. And the reintroduced friction reminds you that these are, in fact, noble pursuits, worthy of attention.
A traditional Japanese tea ceremony involves a liturgy-like process in which a coordinated set of steps are performed in silence. The process involves a set of very specific tools: a silk cloth, a tea whisk, a tea jar. (The princess of “tidying up,” Marie Kondo, sells beautiful versions of these implements on her website, indicating the practice is culturally important enough to warrant a place even in a totally decluttered life.) Each implement has a purpose, and using that thing for its intended purpose invites you into the present moment. The tea ceremony has its roots in religious practice. Sen no Rikyu, its originator, is said to have explained his ceremony with the phrase ichi go ichi e: “one time—one meeting.”
When I was in college, some friends and I met up every Friday night to sing songs and read poetry aloud. This practice had its own kind of ceremony. We always began with “Here’s a Health to the Company” (a song with roots in a different culture and a different kind of drinking). The song is a rollicking drinking song but it was the surprising poignancy of one lyric of the chorus that I think ushered it into this tradition of communal life: “for we may or might never all meet here again.” And eventually, we did not meet there again.
This is how I understand “ichi go ichi e”: If you do not take this time to look the people who are with you in the eye, the opportunity may never return. Single-use items force us into being really there at the Event, no matter how seemingly trivial it is. My inherited cheese grater indicates my mom’s willingness to create a permanent label for a gaggle of college students who were having dinner with her only once. Focusing with intensity on the people who were there right then, in the moment, she made the cheese grater its own memory-laden artifact of a seized present.
The tea ceremony dictates that beside a few other remarks on predetermined topics, the conversation should focus on the tea and on the seasonal changes now taking place. These are the two sides of the coin of presence—buying the moment’s awareness through another awareness, that the moment is passing away.
Maybe this is why so many single-use items have such an air of nostalgia to them. People used to have film cameras and typewriters, at a time when we imagine they were more present to the time where they lived; now we gather those ephemera, grasping in them for a time that has passed away, called by them into our own time, and reminded by them that our time will pass.
Come back next Friday: to find out why a Victorian house is like my local DMV.
Now Playing: “Four Green Fields” on guitar, not well enough to play it publicly. Songs about August.
Of Note: Welcome to my four new subscribers since last week’s edition! You know who you are and I’m thankful you’re here!