
The Pentagon’s recipe for brownies is 26 pages long - cwan
http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/17/how-to-make-brownies-pentagon
======
Kadin
It's not a "recipe" for brownies. It's a specification for a very specific
food item (actually, two items: a brownie and a oatmeal cookie) which form
part of an MRE, which has to be shelf-stable for a very long time.

One might similarly point and laugh at NASA specifications for hand tools used
on the Apollo program. Yeah, a screwdriver is a screwdriver, but there's a
world of difference between the $3 one you can pick up at Sears and one that's
designed to be usable under extremely harsh and unusual conditions _in space._
Similarly, there's a world of difference between the pan of Duncan Hines
brownies you might make when you want a chocolate fix, and a supply contract
for millions of brownies that are going to go into MREs.

The thing is interesting because it provides a window into government
procurement, which is something most people really don't understand, but it's
not meant to be, and really isn't, humorous.

(That said, however, the spelling error in the title is pretty bad.)

~~~
senki
A certain level of boilerplate and redundancy _is_ humorous. I'm wondering if
all of their food specifications contains that "All ingredients shall be
clean, sound, wholesome, and free from foreign material, evidence of rodent or
insect infestation, extraneous material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-
colors." (quote from the linked pdf), or just this one. Maybe they should
define some general rules, after that a brownie recipe is really only one
page.

~~~
mturmon
The reason that's there is historical instances of profiteers selling
substandard food to the military.

~~~
senki
Obviously the quality should be fine, that should be the default, no need to
repeat it in each and every recipe.

~~~
Dove
Clearly you've not spent any time in the world of defense contracting. The
default is to put absolutely every last thing in the contract.

If your contract doesn't say, "You can't put sawdust in the brownies," there
will be a contractor who says, "What? You didn't say I couldn't."

You might laugh. You might suppose there's some common understanding of
quality that everyone can deal with. Especially when it comes to brownies. To
some degree, I'd agree: it's a defensive attempt to avoid problems encountered
in the past, and maybe an overreaction.

The thing is, though, with weapons systems, the equivalent of putting sawdust
in brownies happens all the time. The contractor doesn't live in Alaska, or on
a carrier deck, where the thing will be deployed, and if the contract doesn't
_specifically_ mention cold or fungus or salt corrosion, it'll get overlooked.
Worse, the contractor _really_ has no experience in a combat zone, and has no
idea what sort of abuse their equipment will undergo. The contract has to say.

The defensiveness comes partly from the fact that these systems get a single
iteration. There's some back and forth during testing and verification, and
there are always contracts for upgrades and improvements. But by and large,
you really need things to work right the first time. Hence the heavy reliance
on contracts and standards.

They're like an API telling the civilian contractor what's required in a
battlefield environment. He really doesn't know things that soldiers consider
obvious.

~~~
senki
I meant that they should write down these trivial things _once_ in a standard,
and later just refer to it in every recipe in two words. This spec already
contains references to several federal and military standards, but clearly not
enough. Thats why it's such a bloated piece of sh... paper.

~~~
Dove
Ah. Well, in this case, they kind of did that:

 _3.2 Ingredients. All ingredients shall be clean, sound, wholesome, and free
from foreign material, evidence of rodent or insect infestation, extraneous
material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-colors.

3.2.1 Sugar. Sugar shall be white, refined, granulated, cane or beet sugar.
Powdered sugar of equivalent quality may be substituted for part of the
granulated sugar in the brownie formula to control spread.

3.2.2 Oatmeal. Oatmeal shall be the commercial product known as quick cooking
oatmeal. It shall have natural rolled oat flavor and odor and shall be clean
and free from burned particles, rancid, musty, sour, or other undesirable
flavors and odors.

. . . _

They factored out the "all ingredients" part of the standard.

You know, I'm sorry to admit, but I've written these things before. There's a
real tradeoff to make there. On the one hand, there's a virtuous impulse to do
as much factoring as you can so you don't have to write things twice--or
heaven forbid, update them multiple times when they change. On the other hand,
you then find yourself calling for MIL-STD-340985 sugar and MIL-STD-320598
flour and MIL-STD-24098 molasses with deviations allowed to items 4, 5, and 9
of paragraph 6 when using process B of MIL-STD-32409 Baking Instructions. And
there's sort of a desire by users of the document not to need to have twenty
books open at once just to figure out if they can use this flour or not.

Writing this sort of thing well is a lot harder than you would think.

Edit: Upon reflection, there's a real parallel between that and walking the
fine line between copypasta code and spaghetti abstraction.

------
eplanit
A 26-page Brownie recipe is perfectly fine with me (I have to take advantage
of the chance to echo 'Heck of job, Brownie!'). Compare/contrast with the
inefficiencies in communications you see in businesses and organizations
everywhere. I've never seen a simple project that, when done in Corporate
America, doesn't require 6 months, reams of documents, and hours of meetings.

In other words...in large institutions, nothing is very efficient.

~~~
eli
True to some degree, but it's also about having a level of detail needed for
something that many people will rely on.

Give a simple brownie recipe to enough people and one them will burn down the
house because you never specifically said to turn off the oven when done
baking.

~~~
btilly
But give a 26 page brownie recipe to enough people and one of them will burn
down the house because they missed the instruction saying when to turn off the
oven.

There is a common organizational failure mode where new instructions are added
whenever anyone messes up, ignoring the fact that the complexity of the
instructions is leading to lots of mistakes.

~~~
gte910h
Incorrect. The endeavor itself (making long shelf life brownies/cookies) has a
set of requirements which is pretty exacting. The complexity of the
instructions will likely be turned into long checklists and procedures for the
actual producing plant. And if the plant screws up said brownies, they'll
likely be on the hook to replace the whole lot of MREs

You're confusing quality/policy issues in corporations with inter-entity
contracts between an easy to cheat organization (the military) with a group of
people who have a history of cheating (the military contractors).

~~~
derefr
> The complexity of the instructions will likely be turned into long
> checklists and procedures for the actual producing plant.

It'd be nice if our system of interpreted case law were turned into some form
of checklists and procedures; then we wouldn't need lawyers.

That is to say, the one "contract" that affects every man, woman and
child—federal law—has been screwed up in exactly this way, by providing _so
much of it_ that no one has any idea what it says without years of study.
There is a difference between clarity and verbosity.

~~~
btilly
Actually the years of study aren't to figure out what it actually says. They
are to figure out the many ways you can use it to convince a judge that it
says what you want it to say, which can then be used to get whatever result
you're being paid to achieve.

------
dazzawazza
This is just like programming. Someone asks you to add a small feature and you
say "sure, that's only a few hours work". Two days later you're finished.

------
chr15
This is a military specification for brownies to be packaged in MREs, not a
recipe. Probably not much different from software specifications.

It's not uncommon to find documents like this is government. Everything must
be explicit so that there is little room for assumptions (I guess that's why
it's called a specification). If you have a question about something, you
refer to the spec. It also ensures that each brownie produced meets a certain
quality standard, and that contractors producing the brownie know exactly how
to produce them.

------
pixelbath
Except that the actual recipe itself (combining and cooking ingredients) only
takes up half a page. The rest is not just boilerplate (no pun intended), it's
a specification regarding ingredient and package quality.

------
RyanMcGreal
Don't scoff at this until you've tasted military-grade walnuts.

