because my previous post made me think of some of these things
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 few people off into different directions, all of them interesting. A lot of my thoughts are a little too wordy to be condensed into 140-word tweets, even if I tweeted from now until next Friday, so I'm putting them up into a series of posts here. Needless to say, if you have your own thoughts and reminiscences please comment.
I was born in a small town in the northern part of the Missouri Ozarks in 1958. Neither of my parents were from nuclear families, and both of them were the first generation off the farm. This wasn't unusual for people born in 1912 (my father) and 1916 (my mother); there had been a steady stream of people leaving the farm to move to towns and cities through the history of the US, but the Great Depression (which started off in the 1920s with an agricultural depression, invisible to everyone except the farmers--there's an old song by Bob Miller called Seven Cent Cotton:
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Flour up high and cotton down low,
How in the world can we raise the dough?
Clothes worn out, shoes run down,
Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown,
Back nearly broken and fingers all sore,
Cotton gone down to rise no more.
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Mules in the barn, no crops laid by,
Corn crib empty and the cow's gone dry.
Well water low, nearly out of sight,
Can't take a bath on Saturday night.
No use talking, any man is beat
With seven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
Seven cent cotton and eight dollar pants,
Who in the world has got a chance?
We can't buy clothes and we can't buy meat,
Too much cotton and not enough to eat.
Can't help each other, what shall we do ?
I can't explain it so it's up to you.
Seven cent cotton and two dollar hose,
Guess we'll have to do without any clothes.
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Poor getting poorer all around here,
Kids coming regular every year.
Fatten our hogs, take 'em to town,
All we get is six cents a pound.
Very next day we have to buy it back,
Forty cents a pound in a paper sack.
and was revised for the 1932 election as Five Cent Cotton, but I digress) and World War II greatly acccelerated this trend. After the war came Levittown and the rise of the suburb. It wasn't all because of the cult of the automobile; economics had a great deal to do with this demographic shift. But my parent grew up in situations where they lived in a world full of relatives: in the house, across the road, or no more than a few miles away. My father and his brothers learned to get behind the mule and plow; my mother and my aunts all learned to tend and cook on a woodstove and to trim the oil lamp so it didn't smoke and smudge up the chimney (these were a pain to wash). It was a world where you ate what grew in the garden and the orchard; store bought food was for odd luxuries like pineapple (which was canned) and oranges (which were a treat at Christmastime).
I'll start off with food, which is something that appears in all our lives. Here's a winter peasant soup recipe; you'll notice it uses water instead of broth, and I suspect the sausage might be an optional feature; certainly the amount used for six servings of soup is on the meager side. Everything could come straight from the farm.
Obtaining, preparing, and storing and preserving food was immensely time-consuming, and few people were spared the effort involved. If you garden you have some inkling of what it's like, but it's a pale shadow of what life as a subsistence farmer was like.
One of the great reforms of the French Revolution was a new calendar*. Unlike the heroic effort to standardize France's weights and measures, unchanged since the Middle Ages, and varying from province to province**, the calendar didn't stick. By way of replacing the saint's days, each day of the year was associated with a common item. Here's the list for the month of Vendémiaire--late September into October, starting on the fall equinox:
Raisin (Grape)
Safran (Saffron)
Châtaigne (Chestnut)
Colchique (Crocus)
Cheval (Horse)
Balsamine (Impatiens)
Carotte (Carrot)
Amaranthe (Amaranth)
Panais (Parsnip)
Cuve (Vat)
Pomme de terre (Potato)
Immortelle (Strawflower)
Potiron (Butter Squash)
Réséda (Mignonette)
Âne (Donkey)
Belle de nuit (The four o'clock flower)
Citrouille (Pumpkin)
Sarrasin (Buckwheat)
Tournesol (Sunflower)
Pressoir (Wine-Press)
Chanvre (Hemp)
Pêche (Peach)
Navet (Turnip)
Amaryllis (Amaryllis)
Bœuf (Ox)
Aubergine (Eggplant)
Piment (Chili Pepper)
Tomate (Tomato)
Orge (Barley)
Tonneau (Barrel)
Some of these are directly associated with the grape harvest and vine production, which was one of the big agricultural features of the season--Grape, Vat, Wine-press, and Barrel. There are also shout-outs to the essential draft animals: Horse, Donkey, and Ox: and a tribute to the last flowers of the year: the fall crocus (which was the source of saffron), the sunflower (which produced food for man and livestock), mignonette, which had medical uses and produced a yellow dye in some species, as well as being useful for adding a pleasant smell to linen closets and wardrobes; four o'clocks, which also were of medicinal value. Impatiens, strawflowers, and amaryllis might be less directly useful domestically, but they get a day anyway, as does hemp, which was essential if not very decorative.***
Then there are the foods: besides Grape, Vendémiaire includes Saffron, Chestnut, Carrot, Amaranth, Parnsip, Potato, Butter Squash, Pumpkin, Buckwheat, Peach, Turnip, Eggplant, Chili Pepper, Tomato, and Barley. Some of these are foods that are at the end of the season, like Eggplant, Tomato, and Peach, while others are being harvested for storage or are coming into their season.
Let's consider that list for a moment, though. How many of these are commonly eaten in the US nowadays (I am being US-centric for a reason, here, and not out of obliviousness; extrapolate as you like)? We are more likely to think of grapes as a table fruit--wine is a pleasure, and not an essential beverage. Carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and peaches are in wide use. 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. Chestnuts flash briefly through the stores in late fall, in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We think of them as an odd luxury which will go into turkey stuffing, and not as an important source of carbohydrates for humans and swine alike. Amaranth produces a useful pseudograin similar to quinoa, as well as greens; neither is common outside of specialty stores. Barley appears as a soup additive and the foundation of beer; buckwheat is another pseudograin which was used as a cover crop because of its nitrogen-fixing capacity. We may see it in soba noodles and buckwheat blini and pancakes, although these are not common items of consumption in the US.
If you continue on through the calendar, you'll run across plenty of similar cases: foods and other plants which are ubiquitous today (the potato), common, somewhat common, and then fairly rare. Part of this is because not all of these crops scale up to the industrial production and distribution level very well. Part of this is because we can have foods we love at any time of the year. Strawberries in winter were highly improbable not all that long ago, and even in my childhood they were expensive if they were there at all. They're a regular feature at the mid-range stores I shop in, and don't cost all that much. Asparagus is not a spring treat anymore; you can have it frozen any time, and fresh if you don't mind paying to have it shipped up from Ecuador.
Another factor was the difficulty of food storage and preservation; much of Dorothy Hartley's Food in England covers the way food was preserved prior to canning (especially home canning outfits) or mechanical refrigeration. Some foods, like potatoes, did store well without much additional effort; others could be left in the ground except in very cold climates, and some could be dried. Pickles and relishes were made in great variety--kimchi is a regional variation, and not an unusual development. Meats were salted and smoked; cheeses were given coatings of wax or other materials, or aged in large enough pieces that the dry rind wasn't a problem--there's a reason Parmesan comes in such large wheels. But many didn't. If you wanted leafy greens in early winter, you ate kale and similar heavy-leafed greens. It didn't matter whether you liked them or not; it was what was there. Hydroponic lettuce was not an option.
The effort to prepare food for storage was immense. My mother's family would buy a hundredweight of cabbage and make kraut in the late fall (they had it in the garden but not in such quantity). Her father would grate it while her mother loaded up the crocks with layers of cabbage and salt, packing it in firmly so as to make sure it didn't spoil. My father's family and others made sorghum syrup, just as people much farther north made maple syrup in the spring. Apples and pears were sorted into keepers and others; the latter were made into cider, which turned inevitably from sweet to hard to vinegar, each useful in its own way, and cooked down into apple butter and pear honey. Plenty of other fruit made its way from the woods and orchards into jams and jellies and preserves and some were dried; nuts were collected wherever useful ones appeared. Some gathered mushrooms, and nearly everyone made use of wild foods like honey, blackberries, nuts, and dandelions, poke salad, and other spring greens. People who were in a position to can produce considered themselves ahead of the game, as hard and hot as that work was. In many ways, despite some modern conveniences like canning and the iron cookstove, the farmer in 1924 was not living a life outrageously different from farmers in 1824 or 1724 or 1624. Americans had the advantage from the very first of being able to hunt; even setting snares for the rabbits which were destroying the garden could be considered poaching in Europe if you weren't a landowner.
Not only were they dependent on what was seasonal, they were also desperate to ensure some redundancy. One of the reasons the potato famine in Ireland was so devastating was that there were no redundancies left in the system in sufficient number for the population supported in Ireland at that time: there were potatoes for the ordinary farmers to eat, and grain which was exported to England. In accounts of other famines in Europe, people are described as getting by on greens, edible roots, and so on when they couldn't get grain. When those ran out, they starved. The potato, in an splendid example of both irony and unintended consequences, became a fallback in the 18th century in Europe because it was seen as less vulnerable to damp weather or unseasonable storms than grain crops, especially wheat.
Finally, there's the role of the store. Fairly early on, there were merchants who traveled through the nearby countryside to buy food to sell in urban areas--the higgler, who bought and sold eggs is one example. But to buy things in a store you needed to have either money or goods to trade. For years "butter and egg money" was a resource of rural housewives--sometimes actual money, sometimes store credit earned by bringing the merchant butter, eggs, and produce to sell. (There's a vignette in the movie Sergeant York where York's mother goes to the local store with a basket of eggs to trade.) If there were local shortages, your chances of buying anything were poor, and were worse if you were passing through, since gouging strangers didn't have the same repercussions gouging your neighbors did. But the store was a fallback, not a location of last resort. Farmers tended to distrust the storekeeper, and many avoided stores as much as possible. Many bartered among themselves for good and services as well.
My maternal grandmother's father worked a farm of about 160 acres. From that he and his wife produced enough food to feed his family, both produce and livestock, as well as grain to feed the draft animals, as well as a surplus for sale to buy what they couldn't grow or harvest themselves--essentials like salt, equipment and furnishings they couldn't make, clothing and fabric, and shoes, as well as luxuries like sugar, tea, and coffee. (Stop right there: sugar, tea, and coffee were luxuries. Think about that for a minute.) My paternal grandfather was one of the first farmers in his county in Mississippi to begin to turn away from cotton as a cash crop, moving into cattle, corn, and an experiment with soybeans; his neighbors doubted his judgment, even though the cotton economy in the 1920s was becoming more and more of a gamble. Both of these men, as small farmers went, were at the upper end of the scale, with a lot of ability to confront risk--their sons and daughters, for example, went to school, instead of hiring out to work as farm hands and that American sort-of-servant, the hired girl. But they still worked constantly for a return that might or might not be enough to live on for the next year.
*Someone is tweeting the Revolutionary calendar: @JacobinCalendar.
**We do not appreciate the metric system nearly enough. I suspect one reason the US is so slow to get with the program is that we started out with a unified system, and so have no idea how much the regional systems complicated life in much of Europe. If you want to weep, take a look at French measurement systems prior to 1789. Even Colbert couldn't make a dent in them.
***It's worth a long look at the Revolutionary Calendar day names to get an idea of foods and other items that were a regular part of life at that time and place. Some will be familiar; others much less so. It wasn't until I looked up mignonette that I realized Reseda was the genus for that ancient dye, weld. Lovely as mignotte smells, its value was not just an aesthetic one.
This started quite a few people off into different directions, all of them interesting. A lot of my thoughts are a little too wordy to be condensed into 140-word tweets, even if I tweeted from now until next Friday, so I'm putting them up into a series of posts here. Needless to say, if you have your own thoughts and reminiscences please comment.
I was born in a small town in the northern part of the Missouri Ozarks in 1958. Neither of my parents were from nuclear families, and both of them were the first generation off the farm. This wasn't unusual for people born in 1912 (my father) and 1916 (my mother); there had been a steady stream of people leaving the farm to move to towns and cities through the history of the US, but the Great Depression (which started off in the 1920s with an agricultural depression, invisible to everyone except the farmers--there's an old song by Bob Miller called Seven Cent Cotton:
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Flour up high and cotton down low,
How in the world can we raise the dough?
Clothes worn out, shoes run down,
Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown,
Back nearly broken and fingers all sore,
Cotton gone down to rise no more.
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Mules in the barn, no crops laid by,
Corn crib empty and the cow's gone dry.
Well water low, nearly out of sight,
Can't take a bath on Saturday night.
No use talking, any man is beat
With seven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
Seven cent cotton and eight dollar pants,
Who in the world has got a chance?
We can't buy clothes and we can't buy meat,
Too much cotton and not enough to eat.
Can't help each other, what shall we do ?
I can't explain it so it's up to you.
Seven cent cotton and two dollar hose,
Guess we'll have to do without any clothes.
Seven cent cotton and forty cent meat
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Poor getting poorer all around here,
Kids coming regular every year.
Fatten our hogs, take 'em to town,
All we get is six cents a pound.
Very next day we have to buy it back,
Forty cents a pound in a paper sack.
and was revised for the 1932 election as Five Cent Cotton, but I digress) and World War II greatly acccelerated this trend. After the war came Levittown and the rise of the suburb. It wasn't all because of the cult of the automobile; economics had a great deal to do with this demographic shift. But my parent grew up in situations where they lived in a world full of relatives: in the house, across the road, or no more than a few miles away. My father and his brothers learned to get behind the mule and plow; my mother and my aunts all learned to tend and cook on a woodstove and to trim the oil lamp so it didn't smoke and smudge up the chimney (these were a pain to wash). It was a world where you ate what grew in the garden and the orchard; store bought food was for odd luxuries like pineapple (which was canned) and oranges (which were a treat at Christmastime).
I'll start off with food, which is something that appears in all our lives. Here's a winter peasant soup recipe; you'll notice it uses water instead of broth, and I suspect the sausage might be an optional feature; certainly the amount used for six servings of soup is on the meager side. Everything could come straight from the farm.
Obtaining, preparing, and storing and preserving food was immensely time-consuming, and few people were spared the effort involved. If you garden you have some inkling of what it's like, but it's a pale shadow of what life as a subsistence farmer was like.
One of the great reforms of the French Revolution was a new calendar*. Unlike the heroic effort to standardize France's weights and measures, unchanged since the Middle Ages, and varying from province to province**, the calendar didn't stick. By way of replacing the saint's days, each day of the year was associated with a common item. Here's the list for the month of Vendémiaire--late September into October, starting on the fall equinox:
Raisin (Grape)
Safran (Saffron)
Châtaigne (Chestnut)
Colchique (Crocus)
Cheval (Horse)
Balsamine (Impatiens)
Carotte (Carrot)
Amaranthe (Amaranth)
Panais (Parsnip)
Cuve (Vat)
Pomme de terre (Potato)
Immortelle (Strawflower)
Potiron (Butter Squash)
Réséda (Mignonette)
Âne (Donkey)
Belle de nuit (The four o'clock flower)
Citrouille (Pumpkin)
Sarrasin (Buckwheat)
Tournesol (Sunflower)
Pressoir (Wine-Press)
Chanvre (Hemp)
Pêche (Peach)
Navet (Turnip)
Amaryllis (Amaryllis)
Bœuf (Ox)
Aubergine (Eggplant)
Piment (Chili Pepper)
Tomate (Tomato)
Orge (Barley)
Tonneau (Barrel)
Some of these are directly associated with the grape harvest and vine production, which was one of the big agricultural features of the season--Grape, Vat, Wine-press, and Barrel. There are also shout-outs to the essential draft animals: Horse, Donkey, and Ox: and a tribute to the last flowers of the year: the fall crocus (which was the source of saffron), the sunflower (which produced food for man and livestock), mignonette, which had medical uses and produced a yellow dye in some species, as well as being useful for adding a pleasant smell to linen closets and wardrobes; four o'clocks, which also were of medicinal value. Impatiens, strawflowers, and amaryllis might be less directly useful domestically, but they get a day anyway, as does hemp, which was essential if not very decorative.***
Then there are the foods: besides Grape, Vendémiaire includes Saffron, Chestnut, Carrot, Amaranth, Parnsip, Potato, Butter Squash, Pumpkin, Buckwheat, Peach, Turnip, Eggplant, Chili Pepper, Tomato, and Barley. Some of these are foods that are at the end of the season, like Eggplant, Tomato, and Peach, while others are being harvested for storage or are coming into their season.
Let's consider that list for a moment, though. How many of these are commonly eaten in the US nowadays (I am being US-centric for a reason, here, and not out of obliviousness; extrapolate as you like)? We are more likely to think of grapes as a table fruit--wine is a pleasure, and not an essential beverage. Carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and peaches are in wide use. 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. Chestnuts flash briefly through the stores in late fall, in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We think of them as an odd luxury which will go into turkey stuffing, and not as an important source of carbohydrates for humans and swine alike. Amaranth produces a useful pseudograin similar to quinoa, as well as greens; neither is common outside of specialty stores. Barley appears as a soup additive and the foundation of beer; buckwheat is another pseudograin which was used as a cover crop because of its nitrogen-fixing capacity. We may see it in soba noodles and buckwheat blini and pancakes, although these are not common items of consumption in the US.
If you continue on through the calendar, you'll run across plenty of similar cases: foods and other plants which are ubiquitous today (the potato), common, somewhat common, and then fairly rare. Part of this is because not all of these crops scale up to the industrial production and distribution level very well. Part of this is because we can have foods we love at any time of the year. Strawberries in winter were highly improbable not all that long ago, and even in my childhood they were expensive if they were there at all. They're a regular feature at the mid-range stores I shop in, and don't cost all that much. Asparagus is not a spring treat anymore; you can have it frozen any time, and fresh if you don't mind paying to have it shipped up from Ecuador.
Another factor was the difficulty of food storage and preservation; much of Dorothy Hartley's Food in England covers the way food was preserved prior to canning (especially home canning outfits) or mechanical refrigeration. Some foods, like potatoes, did store well without much additional effort; others could be left in the ground except in very cold climates, and some could be dried. Pickles and relishes were made in great variety--kimchi is a regional variation, and not an unusual development. Meats were salted and smoked; cheeses were given coatings of wax or other materials, or aged in large enough pieces that the dry rind wasn't a problem--there's a reason Parmesan comes in such large wheels. But many didn't. If you wanted leafy greens in early winter, you ate kale and similar heavy-leafed greens. It didn't matter whether you liked them or not; it was what was there. Hydroponic lettuce was not an option.
The effort to prepare food for storage was immense. My mother's family would buy a hundredweight of cabbage and make kraut in the late fall (they had it in the garden but not in such quantity). Her father would grate it while her mother loaded up the crocks with layers of cabbage and salt, packing it in firmly so as to make sure it didn't spoil. My father's family and others made sorghum syrup, just as people much farther north made maple syrup in the spring. Apples and pears were sorted into keepers and others; the latter were made into cider, which turned inevitably from sweet to hard to vinegar, each useful in its own way, and cooked down into apple butter and pear honey. Plenty of other fruit made its way from the woods and orchards into jams and jellies and preserves and some were dried; nuts were collected wherever useful ones appeared. Some gathered mushrooms, and nearly everyone made use of wild foods like honey, blackberries, nuts, and dandelions, poke salad, and other spring greens. People who were in a position to can produce considered themselves ahead of the game, as hard and hot as that work was. In many ways, despite some modern conveniences like canning and the iron cookstove, the farmer in 1924 was not living a life outrageously different from farmers in 1824 or 1724 or 1624. Americans had the advantage from the very first of being able to hunt; even setting snares for the rabbits which were destroying the garden could be considered poaching in Europe if you weren't a landowner.
Not only were they dependent on what was seasonal, they were also desperate to ensure some redundancy. One of the reasons the potato famine in Ireland was so devastating was that there were no redundancies left in the system in sufficient number for the population supported in Ireland at that time: there were potatoes for the ordinary farmers to eat, and grain which was exported to England. In accounts of other famines in Europe, people are described as getting by on greens, edible roots, and so on when they couldn't get grain. When those ran out, they starved. The potato, in an splendid example of both irony and unintended consequences, became a fallback in the 18th century in Europe because it was seen as less vulnerable to damp weather or unseasonable storms than grain crops, especially wheat.
Finally, there's the role of the store. Fairly early on, there were merchants who traveled through the nearby countryside to buy food to sell in urban areas--the higgler, who bought and sold eggs is one example. But to buy things in a store you needed to have either money or goods to trade. For years "butter and egg money" was a resource of rural housewives--sometimes actual money, sometimes store credit earned by bringing the merchant butter, eggs, and produce to sell. (There's a vignette in the movie Sergeant York where York's mother goes to the local store with a basket of eggs to trade.) If there were local shortages, your chances of buying anything were poor, and were worse if you were passing through, since gouging strangers didn't have the same repercussions gouging your neighbors did. But the store was a fallback, not a location of last resort. Farmers tended to distrust the storekeeper, and many avoided stores as much as possible. Many bartered among themselves for good and services as well.
My maternal grandmother's father worked a farm of about 160 acres. From that he and his wife produced enough food to feed his family, both produce and livestock, as well as grain to feed the draft animals, as well as a surplus for sale to buy what they couldn't grow or harvest themselves--essentials like salt, equipment and furnishings they couldn't make, clothing and fabric, and shoes, as well as luxuries like sugar, tea, and coffee. (Stop right there: sugar, tea, and coffee were luxuries. Think about that for a minute.) My paternal grandfather was one of the first farmers in his county in Mississippi to begin to turn away from cotton as a cash crop, moving into cattle, corn, and an experiment with soybeans; his neighbors doubted his judgment, even though the cotton economy in the 1920s was becoming more and more of a gamble. Both of these men, as small farmers went, were at the upper end of the scale, with a lot of ability to confront risk--their sons and daughters, for example, went to school, instead of hiring out to work as farm hands and that American sort-of-servant, the hired girl. But they still worked constantly for a return that might or might not be enough to live on for the next year.
*Someone is tweeting the Revolutionary calendar: @JacobinCalendar.
**We do not appreciate the metric system nearly enough. I suspect one reason the US is so slow to get with the program is that we started out with a unified system, and so have no idea how much the regional systems complicated life in much of Europe. If you want to weep, take a look at French measurement systems prior to 1789. Even Colbert couldn't make a dent in them.
***It's worth a long look at the Revolutionary Calendar day names to get an idea of foods and other items that were a regular part of life at that time and place. Some will be familiar; others much less so. It wasn't until I looked up mignonette that I realized Reseda was the genus for that ancient dye, weld. Lovely as mignotte smells, its value was not just an aesthetic one.