Let’s say we want to make a loaf of bread from scratch. Assume it’s a simple loaf: just flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe some spices. These days, you can actually buy premade dough from some grocery stores, form it into a loaf, and bake it off. If someone buys a bagged mix of flour, yeast, salt, and spices, adds water, kneads, rises, forms, proofs, and bakes the bread, is that making it from scratch? If someone buys those ingredients separately and makes the loaf, is that making it from scratch? Maybe you just buy flour, water, and salt, use the flour and water to make a sourdough starter for your yeast, and make the bread from there. Does that count as making it from scratch? How about buying whole grain, milling it into flour, using that to make a sourdough starter, and proceeding with the bread from there? We could go further still. We could use rain barrels to collect water, use it to grow wheat in our garden, mill the grain, filter the water, make the starter, filter salt out of the soil, make the dough, make a brick oven, and bake the bread. But who made the rain barrels, the bowl we mixed the bread in, the utensils we used, the bricks used to build the oven? Deeper and deeper we go, with no end in sight, but most people would be willing to call a bread baked from one of the first few methods “from scratch.”
My research for this post certainly is not from scratch – I turned to the Merriam-Webster dictionary for a little etymology of the phrase. The “scratch” most likely refers to the starting mark used for various sporting events in the nineteenth century, especially footraces. Thus, “from scratch” meant from the starting point, without a head start or other advantage. It came to be used figuratively to refer to the starting point of a project. When it comes to starting most projects from scratch, though, it’s a bit more complicated than setting down the starting line for a race. It becomes a question of just how fundamental you intend to go.
In an earlier draft of this post, I started with the example of writing fiction stories as one of the most “from scratch” activities, because we start with a blank page and the ideas in our heads, and need nothing else. Except there are tools that we use, and I don’t just mean the writing tools discussed in Elements of Eloquence or Writing Excuses. We must have the page in the first place, whether it’s physical or virtual. We must have ink and pen, or keyboard. Beyond the physical, we must have language, words, the alphabet, shared context and understanding. The very nature of storytelling prevents it from being conducted truly “from scratch,” for to do so from the most basic principles would make the story meaningless to anyone else. It’s not something I worry about in the context of storytelling, but for most other types of projects I undertake, I have a distinct tendency to get carried away trying to move the starting point back as far towards the fundamentals of the undertaking as possible.
That’s not necessarily a negative. It certainly has benefits in terms of increasing my understanding of a process and expanding the horizons of my knowledge and abilities. It’s symbiotic with my figure-it-out approach to problems, which can probably be traced back to taking apart old clocks, radios, and other broken gadgets when I was a kid to figure out how they worked or just to see what was inside them (I say this like it’s not something I still do). There’s something satisfying about taking something most people would throw away as “broken,” doing a bit of investigation, and finding that it can be made operable again simply by replacing a two-dollar component. Of course, the downside is that I can’t help seeing opportunity now in every broken piece of machinery or electronics, and have not nearly enough time to make all of them into projects.
However, attempting to start from scratch can easily be taken too far, and where to draw the line is a difficult question. I’ve been recently building new kitchen cabinets, and some people would probably say I’m making them “from scratch.” After all, I have rough sawn lumber I’m milling, jointing, framing, installing, and finishing myself. But I didn’t press the plywood, peel the veneers, mix the glue, dry the timbers, mill the logs, harvest the trees, grow the trees, forge the nails, machine the screws…you get the idea. Nor do I think I should have started from a more fundamental place for this project, since I do not have the tools, the time, or the talent to affect all those earlier steps in the process. Of course, others would argue I needn’t have bothered doing as much “from scratch” as I did. The same holds true with other projects I pursue, like 3D printer modifications.
In analysis of charitable giving, it’s often said that unless you happen to be a professional craftsman or otherwise an expert in the exact field of work involved, you will do more good devoting your charitable hours to generating more income in your primary occupation and donating the money to charity that you would going out and picking up trash or swinging a hammer for your chosen cause. Putting aside the questionable ways in which many large charities use their financial donations, this bit of optimization makes sense at an economic level, but it rather misses the point. Philosophically, charity is a matter of community between individuals, not the channeling of financial resources through corporate “non-profits.” Doing things yourself, and starting “from scratch,” is related. It might not be the most efficient from temporal, financial, or even resource perspectives, but it generates less tangible benefits in terms of understanding, customization, ownership, and capability. The benefits of being able to look at a situation, a problem, and view it as something you can do something about cannot be understated.
The idea of doing things “from scratch” is conversant with ideas of “DIY” and the repairability movement. There is no universal formula for how fundamental you should go with a given project, for balancing what you do yourself versus what you buy pre-fabricated or hire someone else to do, for what you take the effort and time required to repair versus what you simply replace. Instead, it’s a matter of making case-by-case decisions to suit your particular circumstances, tools, and abilities. This is not a call to do everything “from scratch” to the deepest level, but it is a reminder – a reminder to see the problems we encounter as problems we can solve, for there has probably never been a better time, never been more tools, references, and resources available, to enable us to find and implement solutions.
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