In pursuit of perfection

In October, a Redditor who goes by Chivelord began a quest: cutting chives every day until Reddit deemed them ‘perfect’. Each day he would post a photo of the day’s cut. The comments would pour in: “uneven”, a “train” (when the chives aren’t cut fully through and are still attached), “towers” (cut too long). Chivelord persevered, cutting again and again until, on day 70, no negative comments came in. Had Chivelord achieved perfection?

According to the Instagram account “RateMyChives”, the answer was an unambiguous “no.” RateMyChives has been rating chef’s herb-cutting ability for some time and has attracted a following of more than 85,000. He weighed in, saying that “if that’s perfection, I’m clearly grading on a different scale — because for me it barely scrapes a 6.2/10. But hey, confidence counts for something.” That’s one tough judge.

Reading about this challenge, I could only imagine how satisfying it must have been to receive all of those Reddit comments on the “perfect” day, only to be brought low by an anonymous account who provided such a dismissive, condescending comment. It brought to mind several questions: Can cooking perfection really be achieved? Who gets to be the ultimate judge? Why do we even strive for perfection when there will always be someone to come in and dash our dreams? Why does RateMyChives have 85,000 Instagram followers?

I think that some of us will always strive to achieve perfection – it seems to be in our DNA. But chasing that ideal so often ends in frustration and disappointment. I hope Chivelord brushes off the negative comment and basks in the praise from Redditors and in the satisfaction of sticking to a quest that most people would abandon after a few days. I would be happy to have his perfect/imperfect chives on my potatoes any day.