I was sitting in the bandstand above the St Nicholas Centre - the very same bandstand that never resonates to anything more musical than the squawking of pigeons - eating my lunch when I got thinking. The thing I found myself thinking about the most was my lunch, probably because it was staring me right in the face. When I had finished ruminating and masticating my sandwich, I turned my attention to dessert, a baked snack that purported to be a ‘Delicious Handmade Chocolate Brownie’. I took a bite of it and discovered, much to my delight, that it was indeed delicious. But handmade? I couldn’t really say. It was around this time that my culinary thinking mechanism went into overdrive, and I found myself pondering the following conundrum: Why are handmade goods automatically assumed to be superior to their machine made equivalent? Weren’t machines given these jobs in the first place because they are better than humans? More efficient, more reliable and less likely to leave blood, hairs and semen in the food. Why would I want some minimum wage stranger’s chicken-choking hands interfering with my brownie mix? Give me a sterile electric whisk every time. Some things just shouldn’t be made by hand. Like chocolate brownies. And condoms too. I don’t want some Philippino sweatshop worker getting two cents an hour to finger a condom that’s destined for my dick. Not unless I’m personally paying her the two cents an hour, in which case she can finger my sheath until I render it unsanitary. I'm not so keen on homemade goods, but ho made does it for me every time.