by Dwight Furrow

We have slid almost imperceptibly and, to be honest, gratefully, into a world that offers to think, plan, and decide on our behalf. Calendars propose our meetings; feeds anticipate our moods; large language models can summarize our desires before we’ve fully articulated them. Agency is the human capacity to initiate, to be the author of one’s actions rather than their stenographer. The age of AI is forcing us to answer a peculiar question: what forms of life still require us to begin something, rather than merely to confirm it? The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is that we preserve agency by carving out zones of what the philosopher Albert Borgmann called focal practices—activities whose meaning lies in their doing, that integrate thought and action, that resist the drift toward frictionless consumption. Cooking and eating, when pursued as focal practices, are exemplary test cases. They can be (and increasingly are) colonized by devices and algorithms. Yet they also contain native antibodies to that colonization—rhythms, resistances, irreducible sensuous details—that make them stubbornly human. The task is to protect and cultivate those antibodies.

“Agency” is often misdescribed as the mere ability to choose among options. That definition flatters the marketplace and leaves us docile, turning us into consumers of choices rather than authors of ends. The more precise mark of agency is the power to set ends and learn through doing—to craft a trajectory, absorb the world’s feedback, adjust, and continue. This is what the crafts teach: not only that we can do things, but that the things we do can teach us back.

By contrast, the contemporary “device paradigm” (to borrow once again a concept from Borgmann) seeks to deliver goods while obscuring the world of engagement that once produced them. Central heating without a hearth; playlists without musicianship; complete dinners in boxes with QR codes. AI intensifies that device paradigm: it can now plan an entire week of meals, generate a shopping list, adapt to your nutrition targets, propose substitutes for your missing fennel, and teach you knife skills—without you ever acquiring a hand’s memory for the knife or a nose’s discernment for fennel. You can “cook” by executing the plan’s plan, outsourcing the learning that makes cooking more than caloric logistics.

In such a world the question is no longer whether we have choices (we have too many), but whether we still become anything through our choices. Agency as becoming—acquiring a form, a style, a capacity—requires contact with the real. Contact with time that doesn’t reduce to convenience, with materials that don’t fully yield to standardization, with techniques that must be embodied to exist at all.

A focal practice gathers a world. It organizes attention, skill, and care around an activity whose meaning is not exhausted by its output. Cooking as a focal practice is not merely “food production.” It is an orchestration of selection, transformation, timing, and judgment that enlists the senses and solicits virtues such as patience, responsiveness, perseverance, and hospitality. Focal practices invert the calculus of instrumental reason. The value of the activity is not justified by external payoffs but by intrinsic goods—the felt rightness of a technique well executed; the aroma that announces a Maillard threshold; the social warmth that a pot of beans and conversation can create on a cold night. These goods are non-fungible. You cannot replace the slow-learning of how to make a béarnaise sauce with a sachet; you cannot swap the apprenticeship of sourdough with a “bread-flavor profile” printed by a nozzle.

In focal practices, means and ends tangle. The doing is part of the savoring; the labor is part of the leisure. That tangle is where genuine agency lives.

The temptations offered by modern technology are attractive. AI meal plans can optimize nutrition, budget, and time; automate pantry inventories and turn grocery shopping into algorithm management. “Smart” execution will give us ovens that “see” doneness and robotic stirrers with “set and forget” the moral ideal. In the not-to-distant future flavor models will be trained on our past ratings recommending recipes calibrated to our “hedonic signature.” Delivery platforms already compress the time between craving and doorstep making dining frictionless.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t asked for any of this. But that seems not to matter. It will be offered anyway, and the attractiveness will come to seem obvious. None of these technologies are evil. Many are marvels of human ingenuity. The danger is subtler. They flatten the learning curve that once shaped the cook’s becoming. They replace cultivation with curation. They make our kitchens behave like our feeds—familiar, efficient, and a little narcotic—until we are more like a manager of inputs than the author of a meal. Agency erodes not when we use tools, but when tools absorb the shaping encounters—the mistake in searing a steak that teaches us about heat, the failed emulsion that teaches patience, the over-salted soup that teaches rescue and restraint. When the path from desire to satisfaction is engineered to be shockingly smooth, we are entertained but not formed.

What I’m advocating is not Luddism but sovereignty within bounded domains where the human remains the protagonist because the practice demands it. That sovereignty is secured by introducing or preserving humane friction—forms of resistance that teach, bind, and orient without descending into masochism. Consider a handful of concrete strategies:

• Keep an old knife, a well-balanced, conventional pan, a wooden spoon that discolors with time. These are not nostalgia props; they are feedback instruments that return the world to you through sound, heat, and texture. A pan that tells you by smell and hiss that the oil is ready disciplines your attention in ways a digital “ding” never will.
• Shop with your senses. When possible, buy produce and protein you’ve touched, smelled, and asked about. The conversation with a cheesemonger or farmer is part of the meal; it is where the dish begins to author itself through your curiosity.
• Practice one manual technique to excellence. Knife work, dough handling, searing, stock-making, fermentation—pick a lane and stay on it long enough that your body acquires knowledge your apps cannot store. Practice enough so the expertise settles into your wrists.
• Cook with the seasons. For stretches of the year, refuse strawberries in December or tomatoes that crunch in January; this is not virtue signaling but a way of letting the calendar shape desire. Scarcity disciplines taste and keeps wonder available.
• Cook for a table, not a feed. Hospitality—this specific “we” tonight—converts cooking from private self-optimization to shared meaning. Treat conversation as the fifth burner. Community is the most human friction there is.
• Keep a tasting notebook, an analog notebook, stained and dog-eared, where you name aromas, record textures, sketch the temporal arc of a sauce. Writing slows experience into learning converting appetite into memory and memory into judgment.
• Allow the “long” methods to survive. A few times a month, embrace low-and-slow braises, broths that need hours, ferments that need weeks. Low and slow is a pedagogy. Time has flavors, and they educate.

Notice that every one of these practices can coexist with technology. You can look up a recipe and still insist on seasonal constraint; you can use an induction cooktop and still train your ear to the sizzle in the pan. The point is not to purge devices but to decide where they stop—to hold back zones where the activity remains instructive.

Why does this matter? Because the reigning ideology—call it instrumental reason on autopilot—wants to rate all activities by throughput metrics: calories per minute, protein per dollar, impressions per post. It misunderstands pleasure as a spike on a chart rather than an ecology of satisfactions that bind a life together. Food, when treated as a focal practice, defends a thicker pleasure—one woven with memory, place, and conversation. It resists being pried apart into nutrient vectors and content opportunities.

AI will happily help us maximize “positive affect” while minimizing “time spent.” It can achieve a narrow kind of hedonic efficiency. But the deep pleasures of the table are anti-efficient by design: the suspense of resting a steak; the lull while dough ferments and you talk; the second glass where the wine opens and with it the story of the day. Such pleasures are not incidental side effects but the point of the activity, and they are where agency is felt most vividly as authorship: I did this; we made this; it took as long as it needed; and now it means more than it costs.

A focal practice counters the homogenizing pressures of global food systems that prize standardization over particularity. A strawberry bred to travel 1,500 miles without bruising will travel well—and tell you almost nothing about where it was nurtured into being. “Smart” supply chains do not aim to erase distinctiveness; they simply cannot afford it. By committing to focal practices, we protect small economies of meaning: backyard herbs that teach you your microclimate; the taco truck that carries a family repertoire, the stubborn defense of place against interchangeability. AI, which thrives on scale, will pressure taste toward the median palate (softened, sweetened, amplified) because the median is where predictive power is strongest. To resist is to let edges live: bitterness, funk, smoke, the unapologetic anchovy. Particularity is not a boutique affectation; it is a civil right of flavor.

All this said, we would be foolish to refuse technology that genuinely extends our reach. The question is which helps the practice and which hollow it out. A humane division of labor might look like this. Use AI to discover unfamiliar regional techniques or to translate a grandmother’s recipe from a half-remembered dialect. But you set the menu, adjust the seasoning, and make the doneness call. Judgement is the human domain. Let sensors guard against actual hazards (undercooked chicken, unsafe canning practices), while you retain control over the thousand micro-decisions that constitute cooking’s taste-education. Emphasize discovery over personalization. Personalization calcifies your palate because it limits your exposure to what you’ve already encountered. Ask models for contrasts, not confirmations. And archive but keep memory alive. Sure, digitize your recipes for efficient search— but keep the annotated paper, the stains, the marginalia. They are not clutter; they are a biography of taste.

This division of labor honors a principle: let machines do what can be scaled; let humans do what creates style. Style is the form agency takes when it has dwelt with materials long enough to speak through them. Agency survives where wonder is still possible, and wonder requires resistance. A tomato that tastes of the field because it had time to become itself; a stock that clarifies slowly, teaching patience; a loaf that fails, and then doesn’t; a table that grows quiet when guests begin to eat—these are the “little things” out of which a life gains richness. They are neither content nor metrics. They are stubbornly, gloriously ends in themselves.

AI can be a brilliant servant in life—an archivist, a scout, a translator, a safety rail. But it must not become the cook, and it must not become the eater. To preserve agency, we must keep some practices focal and some frictions humane; we must insist that certain domains remain resistant enough to keep teaching us how to be human. The kitchen, with its heat and knives and stories, remains the best classroom I know.