S Curves and Kitchen Technology
I have a long-standing fascination with culture and I never quite know how to define it. The Internet tells me:
cul·turethe arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively:"20th century popular culture"Similar:the artsliteraturemusicpaintingphilosophythe humanitiesintellectual achievement(s)the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group:"Caribbean culture""people from many different cultures"Similar:civilizationsocietyway of life
So then I wondered how we define civilization and got this:
civ·i·li·za·tionthe stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced:"they equated the railroad with progress and civilization"Similar:advancementprogressenlightenmentedificationculturecultivationrefinementthe process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organization.the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area:"the great books of Western civilization""the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt"Similar:culturecustomsmoresway of lifeattainmentsachievementssocietynationpeoplecommunitythe comfort and convenience of modern life, regarded as available only in towns and cities:"in the UK nowhere is very far from civilization"
So what I have begun thinking recently is that culture is various artifacts and the processes involved in making use of them.
Everyone eats, but people eat differently depending on the climate and lifestyle and other factors. And I have a blog inspired by the fact that we have a global food culture largely based on the assumption that "mom" is doing the cooking and that's frequently not true.
Most recipes, food culture and consumption traditions are rooted in the practice of having a full-time wife and mom at home making meals from scratch for a large family on a regular basis. Everything I am seeing online and hearing from people generally suggests this model no longer works for most people because that isn't the kind of living arrangement they have. -- Vernacular Cuisine
Culture can and frequently does involve assumptions about who is doing what. It involves specified roles and then when things change, this causes problems.
Most cultures the world over are based on the nuclear family: Mom, dad and their offspring. There are some variations, such as matrilineal versus patrilineal, but most are patrilineal and patriarchal and mom is frequently not someone with "rights" on par with dad.
And I put rights in quotation marks there because I am not talking about the law. I'm talking about culture, so I'm talking about widespread assumptions and mental models and social expectations.
I'm far more interested in defacto "rights" than de jure rights written into the law. The written law often says "ALL legal adults blah blah blah" and then everyone knows if you are a woman or have the wrong skin color or whatever, it doesn't really work that way in practical terms.
We have a "women's lib" movement that goes back at least hundreds of years because across the globe, this patriarchal, nuclear family basis for most societies shafts women who don't marry or whose husband has died. Wartorn areas don't have enough husbands to go around, so then either locals stick with expecting monogamy, which means a lot of women are just left out in the cold no matter what they do, or they say a man can have multiple wives and then this tends to deepen the problem that rights tend to be something men have in a way women don't.
I mean I'm someone who thinks in theory there's not anything wrong with having multiple wives or whatever, but I never hear that this is a solution that lets all women have a husband. It's never framed like "That poor guy, having to service four women and keep them all happy. What a living hell that must be!"
It's assumed he has power, they serve him and if he doesn't want to sleep with you that night, no big because women are assumed in most cultures to not really have sexual needs.
Anyway, this is a post about kitchens and most residential kitchens are mostly work spaces for women. So where women's rights comes into play here is that:
1. The cultural expectation that women are chained to the stove is rooted in the assumption that there's no birth control or microwave meals or fast food places and if she's married, she's going to pop out another child every year or two and it will take all her time to cook enough to feed everyone. So this is her job.
2. We now have birth control and microwave meals and fast food joints and it no longer actually takes all her time, plus we have high divorce rates etc. So women can and do pursue paid jobs, often by necessity, and yet ALL our recipes etc assume we still have mom chained to the stove.
Anyway, I have a lot on my mind and I'm talking to a hypothetical non-existent audience that doesn't know all this while talking to myself and trying to sort out exactly what I think here, because I have a very long-standing fascination with culture and couldn't quite put my finger on what in heck culture is.
And I watched this video recently and wrote more than one blog post because of it, including Third World, USA and Old Fashioned Cold Shelf or California Cooler and Cellars.
That video introduced me to the idea of a cold shelf. I had never heard of that before.
The video romanticizes older solutions and vilifies corporate America and the US government like every building code ever written is an evil conspiracy to make someone rich.
Part of what it says about cellars is:
In 1974, the International Residential Code began requiring permits and ventilation standards that made owner built cellars "effectively illegal" in 31 states."We traded resilience for convenience and called it progress."
So he's acting like we "outlawed" cellars because we want permits and ventilation. I am not going to try to check his claim that the evil refrigerator industry was quietly lobbying for that for several years and it was a plot to make them money.
It's possible someone realized there was a problem, invented a solution and also lobbied for legal changes out of concern for broader society. But certainly pursuit of money without thinking too much about how this may negatively impact other people is a big thing in the world.
Technology or other cultural artifacts are frequently a victim of their own success. You solve some problem causing widespread starvation, everyone lives, now you have more people to feed and have to solve some new problem to make sure you don't have widespread starvation.
So generally speaking success leads to larger numbers of people and denser concentrations of people and that leads both to problems you don't have with a smaller population and more opportunities to observe phenomena and notice patterns.
Maybe the refrigerator industry became a thing because there was enough wealth to pursue something better and enough people for someone to notice a pattern and conclude "X, Y and Z problems are caused by...."
The video cites multiple changes in the 1970s. Why was the 1970s a hotbed of such changes?
Without researching it, I would guess it's because World War II was in the 1940s and that strongly shaped everything that followed in ways they don't teach you about in school.
World War II saw most able-bodied males between, say, 18 and 30 something join the military and women were encouraged to get paid jobs to fill the labor shortage back home caused by shipping military men overseas. Women were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens to help feed themselves and others locally so farm raised products could feed the soldiers overseas and many things were rationed or simply not made.
Women drew a seam on the back of their leg because you couldn't buy silk pantyhose. Car factories were converted to jeep factories at one point and for a year or two, they largely stopped making new cars in the US.
So with two incomes, low birth rates and no means to spend all that money even if you wanted to, my recollection is that savings rates in the US were upwards of forty percent throughout the war and upwards of fifty percent in the last year or two.
So the war ends, the soldiers come home and the women are actively encouraged to quit their jobs and go have children and some were happy to do so. What preceded World War II was The Great Depression, so for young Americans the end of the war was the first time in their lives that they had money and the US was generally prosperous and the next decade or two was basically a non-stop block party.
Not only did they have two or more years income in the bank, soldiers had housing benefits. This helped give birth to the modern suburbs that didn't exist before that and the result was the Baby Boom.
So starting in the late forties, you have children being born into a large "middle class" of people with working class sensibilities and upper class material comfort -- including access to college education, another military benefit -- and these people don't think they are rich and don't understand what it took to establish the general prosperity of the entire US and the world at large.
And twenty-five to thirty years later, millions of spoiled brats who think they have humble origins are graduating college and getting jobs and most likely they are going "Why is this ignorant, germy, broken SHIT still allowed to go on in the US????? It's fine to have a cellar, but you need ventilation!"
They think food security and good hygiene are basics everyone is entitled to and they pass a bunch of laws, still imagining they are working class stiffs and no one special and even a dumb loser like ME can see this is STUPID.
No, I'm not cracking on them. My dad was a World War II veteran and I grew up in a house in the 'burbs being told my parents were working class stiffs and it's been a long, strange journey to figure out my mom was of noble descent and had very upper class expectations and my parents were well off in a way that most people aren't anymore.
No one told the children of World War II veterans "Oh, sure. This is common as dirt, but it grows out of everyone literally having a gun to their heads to be celibate, part of a two income, childless couple and growing their own vegetables and you, too, can probably have this if you get married, both work, make sure you don't have children and don't party or vacation or indulge yourselves and put half your money in the back for four or more years."
And now we decry the suburbs six ways to Sunday as pure evil and decry Baby Boomers as over entitled assholes (and most probably are because no one told them what the things they take for granted really cost their parents).
So, the title of this piece is S Curves and Kitchen Technology and it's really about the cold shelf being displaced by refrigerators. The video says cold shelves were common and then refrigerators replaced them.
I wasn't there and I don't know what really happened, but new markets tend to follow an S curve and the people who start the process tend to be people who are well off and educated which means they have money to spare and are savvy enough to recognize a better solution when they see one.
A better solution for their needs. In my teens, my mom spent crazy amounts of money on getting an electrician to install a microwave above the built-in oven where there was no socket to plug it into.
My mom was a traditional homemaker for many years and had begun working a paid job over my dad's objections. She saw a microwave as a huge improvement over being chained to the stove and a means to free her up so she could continue to fulfill her obligations as the woman of the house and also further her own ambitions.
So people with money and education see it as a solution to their needs, adopt it and then the middle class and lower classes think that if rich people want it, it must be a good thing and prices come down and blah blah blah and then everyone has some cheap knock off even if it actually makes their life worse.
And -- ta da! -- NOW modern Americans have a cold supply chain for microwave meals and other items requiring refrigeration or requiring freezing temperatures every step of the way and we are prisoners of a food culture that assumes you have a refrigerator and freezer at home.
While the cost of electricity from your local legal electrical monopoly skyrockets and people cannot imagine simply using less and still living comfortably.
The culture has changed and the problem isn't that other solutions don't exist, it's that the logistics for making those changes seem to be some insurmountable obstacle.
It's "easy" to rent a place with a refrigerator with a built-in freezer and hard to establish legal housing without it.
It's "easy" to run to the grocery store and buy a bunch of cold stuff and hard to research alternatives, like shelf stable clarified butter and shelf stable dried vegetables, and learn an entire new way of shopping, cooking and living to simply feed yourself.
Most likely, the future of this world -- if it has one at all given how hard we are desperately trying to kill it for our short-term convenience -- will belong to the children and grandchildren of marginalized people who couldn't afford the upper class suburban lifestyle and in desperation moved off grid and rediscovered lost technology like the cellar and the cold shelf and decided that the inconvenience of changing their habits and lifestyle was doable when the standard expectation simply wasn't within their reach at all.