This book I'm supposed to be reviewing is really attached to framing stuff as what "we" take for granted or "our" way of life and I am having flashbacks to teaching industrial designers with @sparks bc we used to drive the students insane by insisting they be specific w/r/t the "we" language
I've absolutely been prey to lazy "we" language in previous work and I get the appeal but it also feels wildly arrogant in a book about histories of commodities that draws heavily on prior pop science and history writing. Saying that "we" don't really think much about salt and then citing a bestselling book about salt by a James Beard Award winner is sloppy!
You can also see the skeleton of the book proposal very transparently in the text bc each section has a sentence along the lines of "If (x activity) is what makes us human, (y commodity) is key to doing (x)." I am probably extra annoyed by this bc I just think "what makes us human" is not an interesting question but it's annoying!
@ingrid I 100% share this frustration