because my previous post made me think of some of these things

[fidelioscabinet]

There will probably be more than one of these posts, since there are a variety of different topics which all end up tied in together. The original post of twitter which started all this off was hawkwing_lb's: I'm beginning to think that writers of epic fantasy and SF should be required to learn about the anthropology of material culture.This started quite a

Comments

[liadan_m]

Not only writers, also anyone else who looks at history. I had an economics prof who said there weren't markets in medieval Europe. And children were a burden to their parents until 15. And so on.

[fidelioscabinet]

Dear ghu. The right to hold a regular market was a regular bargaining point between towns & rulers. And I suppose the Champaign Fairs were a mass hallucination of some sort.

[liadan_m]

since he was a macro modern econ guy, I assume he meant market=widespead trading of classes of goods.Still wrong (Wool! Salt! Silk! Alum!), but different emphasis.

[fidelioscabinet]

Really! The Champagne fairs were the result of international markets looking for a place to sit down, so to speak. They developed because there was already a need.

[rose_lemberg]

Thank you for writing this!

Pumpkins are often reserved for use in pies in the US, but they, along with the squash, parsnips, turnips, and eggplants do appear in US grocery stores, so someone is eating them even if not everyone does

That would be me! I eat cabbage, beets, parsnips, turnips (TURNIPS), radishes, summer and winter squash, and an occasional rutabaga. Eggplants are not a staple because Mati is allergic. Buckwheat is a staple in this house, along with millet. I have consistently failed at cooking amaranth.

[fidelioscabinet]

Rutabagas! A woman after my father's own heart! He loved them, but didn't get them very often.

[rose_lemberg]

Today I had a conversation with my son's therapist about the borsht I made for Passover. It was a splendid borsht! "I do not like beets," says the therapist. "They taste like dirt."

It is something I hear often, that root vegetables taste like dirt. It baffles me.

[neddy_s]

They forgot to wash them first? :)

[sajia]

Despite all the hardship, it still sounds very beautiful.

[fidelioscabinet]

All farming life is hard & often monotonous. But it is not separated from the earth, which is a great good.

[sajia]

Although I can't imagine making soup without stock/broth, and considering how easy it is to make a stock with water and aromatics, that's probably an indication of how bad things were.

[fidelioscabinet]

I'm with you on the broth! There's an old French saying that if the peasant is having chicken soup, either the peasant or the chicken was sick.

[neddy_s]

One thing that strikes me about what you wrote is the involvement of men in 'domestic' tasks--not just the farming, but the actual preparation, preservation and storage of food. It particularly struck me because I was just explaining to someone that she, Stephen King, James Howard Kunstler, and many other (male?) authors are wrong--technology in general, and 20th century domestic 'labour-saving' technology in particular, tends to reinforce rather than challenge existing societal inequalities, gender or otherwise; have a look at this if you need some convincing:

http://labyrinthine.wikia.com/wiki/More_Work_for_Mother

Off to Leeds in the snow to talk about 18th century cheese routes at the Social History Society!

[fidelioscabinet]

My grandfather helped with things that required substantial strength--like the kraut. Butchering was another joint venture--except for poultry! Dairy work was mostly women's work, as was canning. His parents were, for the late 19th C farm family, on the feminist side. His mother told a friend, comparing my great-grandfather to her first husband: Since I married John Fogleman, I've never cut stove wood.
Cheese routes? Is this like the hegglers? Or, indeed, the higglers?

[neddy_s]

One of the things Cowan talks about is that the 'labour' saved in 'labour saving' machines was that of men, who did a lot of the heavy stuff like chopping wood, carrying water, stirring laundry, etc. So the (possibly) unintended consequence of 'labour saving' machines was that domestic chores became much more distinctly women's work.

I use the cheese routes and the Berwick higglers, as well as a few other interesting examples like a guy who regularly shipped tobacco from Liverpool to Hull overland and over water, to point out that goods carriage was very often multimodal as well as involving many pairs of hands; it's misleading for scholars to identify 'a' preferred mode, or claim that modes 'competed' with each other, when one single standard freight route often involved road, river, canal, coastal vessel, or some or all of the above.

[fidelioscabinet]

That sounds like a very interesting book over all. Some labor-saving machinery doesn't have that effect, but it come along later on--once washing machines and dryers as well appear in numbers, laundry is no longer going to have to be an all-day affair--which means anyone can do it, although you see that rarely until more women have entered the paid work force.