Recently, flowers arrived at our apartment in a cardboard box labelled “wonky.”
Not dead.
Not damaged.
Not diseased.
Just commercially irregular.
Slightly asymmetrical blooms. Stems not considered florist-perfect. Flowers rejected by the retail system for failing to meet presentation standards despite remaining entirely alive, beautiful and capable of making somebody unexpectedly happy on a Tuesday afternoon.
One of the chrysanthemums was an extraordinary shade of blue.
The arrangement felt more human than many expensive bouquets I have seen.
At almost the same time, I learned that at large public events in this city, perfectly edible hot food can travel directly from oven to bin at the end of service. Not food circulated to patrons and returned untouched. Food that simply existed in excess of forecast demand. Entire trays discarded immediately because the system governing the event has no operational pathway allowing that food to become nourishment once its commercial purpose expires.
Staff are not permitted to eat it.
Junior kitchen staff are reportedly forbidden even from offering it quietly to front-of-house workers once service concludes. Attempts to do so are publicly corrected. The rules are clear. The food has exited the system. Its status has changed from inventory to waste despite remaining entirely edible throughout the transformation.
This is not unusual.
Which may be the strangest part.
The instinctive reaction is moral outrage, but I think the reality is more complicated — and therefore more unsettling.
The systems involved are not irrational.
Florists require consistency. Retail systems depend upon predictable presentation. Event catering operates under food safety rules, liability frameworks, staffing constraints, contractual obligations and institutional risk management. Large organisations cannot run entirely on improvised sentiment and leftover optimism.
Systems matter.
Structure matters.
Civilisation depends upon repeated process.
I believe this quite strongly.
But systems also drift.
Over time, proxies begin replacing purpose. Flowers stop being evaluated for beauty and begin being evaluated for standardisation. Food stops being evaluated for nourishment and begins being evaluated for procedural compliance. Eventually, perfectly functional and meaningful things become categorised as failure because they no longer satisfy the administrative conditions surrounding their existence.
The rejected flowers were still beautiful.
The discarded food was still food.
And perhaps most interestingly, the systems themselves begin to protect against examination. The institutional language surrounding them becomes careful, contractual and self-sealing. Confidentiality clauses appear. Discussion narrows. Visibility reduces. In writing this, I find myself choosing my words with unusual care — navigating explicit agreements, implied expectations and the quiet social understanding that the system functions more smoothly when nobody looks at it too directly.
Not necessarily because anyone is malicious, but because mature systems develop immune responses not unlike the way living organisms do.
Protection becomes part of the process.
Which leaves us in the peculiar position of living inside systems that are simultaneously:
- rational,
- necessary,
- efficient,
- and occasionally completely diabolical.
Not because they hate humans.
But because they slowly forget what humans were for.
Anyway.
The blue chrysanthemum was lovely.