It’s always weird that when eating this “industrialized food” we eat – meaning food formed in a factory, extruded from machines, cooked on conveyor belts – you still can come across some minor defect, such as a burnt cracker or misformed fold of packaging.
It’s rare, but it happens. It happens despite the likely ridiculous amounts of both machine and human-enabled quality control systems that help to ensure every cracker of the 100,000 or-so per-day produced here in this factory meet specifications.
Assuming that the error was human comes naturally. Perhaps, for one brief moment, someone looked away from their post, distracted by a thought. I wonder what that thought was. That’s interesting to me.
If it wasn’t human error, though, then that’s even more interesting.
“Meaning, in other words, is generated by the clinamen, an unpredictable element that invests the text with the unconscious or hidden ghosts of a historical subject…As in Klee’s conception of genius as the error in the system, it is the clinamen, or better, the swerve away from symmetry to asymmetry, that converts combinatorical exercises into artistic prose and fable into myth.” (http://books.google.com/books?id=wVlA7neJB9wC)