There's a small moment, in an otherwise decent bowl of soup, when your spoon catches a sprig of rosemary. Not a sprig anymore — a small green skeleton, pine-needle stiff, with the herbal flavor mostly cooked out of it. You navigate it to the edge of your bowl. You eat around it. The soup was working; for a second the soup wasn't.
The fix, in classical French cooking, is older than most of us: tie your herbs into a bundle.
A bouquet garni is usually a few stems of thyme, a bay leaf, a sprig of parsley, sometimes rosemary, tied with kitchen twine. You drop it into the pot at the start. It does its work — releasing its oils into the broth, perfuming the soup, doing everything a loose herb would do — and then, before serving, you lift it out and throw it away. What's left in the bowl is flavor without debris.
A small act of separation
The bouquet garni is a tiny piece of design. It separates the work from the experience. The herbs need to be in the pot to do their job. The eater doesn't need them in their bowl. The technique acknowledges that those are two different things, and gives each what it actually requires.
Most home cooks I know skip this. The recipe says "add a few sprigs of rosemary," so they add a few sprigs of rosemary. The labor of fishing them back out gets pushed forward — into the meal itself, onto the eater. The cook is done; the eater pays the bill.
It's not a tragedy. But it is a small failure of care. The work could have been done with a piece of string, ten minutes earlier, and never asked the eater to think about herbs at all.
Labor, pushed forward
Once you have the frame, you start seeing it everywhere.
The form that doesn't validate as you type — submit, error, fix, submit, error, fix. The work of catching mistakes early was someone's to do, once. Now it's yours, every time, on every form.
The "Re: Re: Fwd: Re:" email chain in your inbox. Two minutes of someone editing the subject line at the right moment would have saved an hour of searching across forty messages, for everyone copied.
The software update prompt that interrupts your work at 10am because nobody asked when you'd rather it ran. The cookie banner you dismiss on every page of every site, because the implementation was easier than the design.
The IKEA instructions that quietly assume you've already done step three.
In each case, someone arrived at the point where one more small piece of work — a piece of string, ten more seconds of thought, one clearer decision — would have absorbed the cost upstream. They didn't take it. The work didn't disappear; it just moved. Now it's spread out across everyone downstream, in small inconvenient pieces, all the time.
The bouquet garni doesn't ask the eater to think about herbs. That's the whole point.
To me, that's the ethic: do the small, unglamorous work close to the source, where it is cheapest and clearest, so the person at the end can simply get on with what they came to do. Good design often feels like nothing happened. Someone tied the string before the bowl reached the table.