Just today, I learned about a medieval town that hired inspectors to test the quality of the saffron being sold in their marketplace. Saffron was expensive then, and it’s still expensive now. Apparently, the spice dealers had started spiking their saffron with various other ingredients to increase profits, but some paid for this deception with their lives. I thought to myself, “Wow, I wonder if medieval systems were more effective than we often think. Imagine if the CEOs of large food corporations could be executed for tainting our foods with deceptive or dangerous ingredients!” Mind you, I wonder if those inspectors had too much or too little power, how tainting could be argued in the court of law, and whether maybe the modern world isn’t still better off, seeing how pepper no longer costs 2 days of wages.
But it got me thinking how little I know about the grander scope of history, and how much fun it would be to learn about things like this; not the boring affairs of kings and war, but the lives of ordinary people, and if maybe there might be some wisdom that can be gleaned. I’ve grown somewhat cynical about the world, how big tech companies do everything in their power to spy on us, how food companies are slowly poisoning us, etc., and it’s all very depressing, but nothing is truly new under the sun, and many of these problems have actually been around forever. While ice cream companies use various -glycerides to make things soft and cheap to produce, saw dust has occasionally been used to taint flour, probably long before “capitalism” was even a thing.
A lot of this boils down to social trust, and whether law is powerful enough to enforce integrity within the scope of that trust. But moreover, it reminds me of caveat emptor, and how we’ve come to rely so heavily on the labor of others that we are forced into trust relationships in almost every area of our lives, such that the breakdown of this trust really does lead to a sense of doom and gloom. One obvious way to handle this is to reclaim some of that stability by doing things ourselves or refusing to outsource every area of responsibility in our lives.
My grandma told me about how they used to preserve meat in salt, how you would get a large amount from a butcher, salt it, and store it in the cellar, taking pieces from it over time as needed. I’m still confused how that worked, but I’m fascinated by it. They also used to harvest apples and wrap them in newspaper to be enjoyed all winter. I know apples last a long time, but do they last that long? Apparently, they can, if you store them under the right conditions. My generation knows nothing about any of this, as refrigerators and their requisite electrical power have been the only method of preservation we have ever truly known. It makes me wonder how much more I don’t know about the world, and how much of the sickness we see these days could be the cumulative effect of all of the small adulterations in our food supply, which continue to get worse.
Some days, I still wonder if I should buy a kitchen-sized grain mill for grinding my own flour. A cheap one is maybe $60-80, while one that can easily outlive me costs around $300. The challenge, though, is finding wheat berries, and I only know of one grocery store that sells them (Natural Grocers). Beyond that, you either have to order them online or make friends with local farmers who would be willing to sell some to you. Grinding your own is less of a cost-saving endeavor as it is an investment in freshness and a fight against adulterations in your food supply. On the flip side, though, this means less business for other companies. I buy the organic version of Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat flour, which is only available in a few specialty stores nearby, both of which do not hold them in large quantities, and that’s about as close as you can get to the real deal without investing in machinery. I love that somebody sells this, so I kind of hate to stop giving them my business. A 5 pound bag is cheaper than a Qdoba burrito, so it’s hard to complain about the price, too, even if it is double the cost of its non-organic counterpart. I think a grain mill becomes more cost-effective if you use it for multiple types of grain, and you actually eat a decent amount of those various flours. Bonus points if you buy a hand-crank mill, as that’s one less reason to pay for a gym membership!
[It always gets me how we hate doing physical labor, but then we drive off to the gym to “get a workout”. I kind of despise myself for still having a gym membership I hardly ever use. I really should cancel it; I prefer walking around instead, especially now when all the flowering plants are fragrant]
I think of cloud services, too, when my home lab is deliberately hardware-based, and is sitting right next to me on this desk. I just prefer things this way.
And there’s definitely a time and a place for outsourcing labor – I truly mean this – but our expectations have inflated with our wealth over the course of history. The problem with the “rustic appeal” – so to speak – is that many people think they need a farm mansion with storehouses of gadgets to feed their half dozen children, while their doctor husbands rake in serious dough selling blood pressure medication, and they have the audacity to jump on instagram or whatever to pretend they are average folk, just like you, just trying to get by! Homesteading has a very limited appeal to me, but it’s rarely economical; I just wish life was more resilient, and that we could trust our food supply more, but instead, these giant companies keep doing everything in their power to deceive us.
Perhaps burnings were socially useful afterall (“It’s not about the money, it’s about the message!”), but surely we can do better than that, right?