Cheeseburgers and pencils

This made the rounds a little while ago. This is one guys attempt to create a cheeseburger from scratch. When I say from scratch, I mean from everything from raising the cows and growing the tomatoes.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not

in the comments someone mentioned an essay called I, Pencil. Both of these articles are a great read.