Junk Food Is the Hard Way Out

Photo courtesy Flickr

Before Col. Chicken, women, let’s face it, it was women, kept an emergency pantry. They stocked canned soup, crackers, canned vegetables (still a staple at the time), grated dry cheese (better in a chunk, we know now), and various other things like canned smoked oysters, Spam (the food product), and instant rice.

Any mid-century cookbook will have a section on how to use pantry foods to turn out a meal in minutes. The pantry was necessary because not all families had two cars. During my school years, I ate lunch in a restaurant once that I can recall. When we were away from home at mid-day, we often ate from a super-deluxe vacuum flask picnic kit filled with sandwiches on store bread, home-made cookies, and, a treat for me, coffee. There were little fruit and veggie sides, too.

There was no kitchen in my school, so all lunches were carried in.

If you factor in the cost of a fast-food meal, of transportation, of earning the money to buy it, and the health and cognitive consequences, it is way foolish to indulge in one for anything but sport. You’d do yourself a favor to buy grapes, little pre-fab hunks of cheese, and some crackers. Or keep some cans of juice around.

The pantry will serve you well stocked with no salt corn chips, low or no sodium canned soup and vegetables, whole wheat pasta, olive oil, hard cheese for grating, canned and dried fruits, nuts, chocolate, honey, and whatever else tickles your fancy that stores well. Choose things that keep without electricity to back up your emergency kit.

More after the jump.

Junk Food Is the Hard Way Out

Before Col. Chicken, women, let’s face it, it was women, kept an emergency pantry. They stocked canned soup, crackers, canned vegetables (still a staple at the time), grated dry cheese (better in a chunk, we know now), and various other things like canned smoked oysters, Spam (the food product), and instant rice.

Any mid-century cookbook will have a section on how to use pantry foods to turn out a meal in minutes. The pantry was necessary because not all families had two cars. During my school years, I ate lunch in a restaurant once that I can recall. When we were away from home at mid-day, we often ate from a super-deluxe vacuum flask picnic kit filled with sandwiches on store bread, home-made cookies, and, a treat for me, coffee. There were little fruit and veggie sides, too.

There was no kitchen in my school, so all lunches were carried in.

If you factor in the cost of a fast-food meal, of transportation, of earning the money to buy it, and the health and cognitive consequences, it is way foolish to indulge in one for anything but sport. You’d do yourself a favor to buy grapes, little pre-fab hunks of cheese, and some crackers. Or keep some cans of juice around.

The pantry will serve you well stocked with no salt corn chips, low or no sodium canned soup and vegetables, whole wheat pasta, olive oil, hard cheese for grating, canned and dried fruits, nuts, chocolate, honey, and whatever else tickles your fancy that stores well. Choose things that keep without electricity to back up your emergency kit.

BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB More after the jump.

Busted Down to Slavey

Photo courtesy Flickr

Until the Twenties, an American middle-class housekeeper was likely to have a live-in servant. Until the Fifties, she was likely to have someone coming in to help out. Between the Fifties and the Seventies a woman whose mother had assumed someone else would do the heavy lifting found herself saddled with all the chores, the child-training she had been bred to, and a culture that disparaged both intelligence and physical strength. It’s a miracle anyone survived. I suppose the local combination of Frederick and Nelson’s delivery trucks and Betty MacDonald’s black humor about family life kept sanity at least in sight.

The history of the twentieth-century kitchen is one of industry lightening the management burdens of the mistress. It was assumed that she would not cook or clean. Electric appliances and conveniences like canned food, shelled nuts, crackers, and bread did not save personal effort; they substituted for other people’s labor, just as the automobile eliminated the bother and risk of a horse.

The fitted kitchen, as we know and assume it, developed from the pass pantry that sat between kitchen and dining room, isolating the noise and smell of food production from the family at the table. I have been living with such a pantry for thirty years now and have been free to deconstruct the twentieth century kitchens I cut my teeth in.

Knowing a little about the history of American housework, thanks to Susan Strasser’s Never Done, I can meander around this gas light era kitchen thinking about how the mistress likely never entered the room. The neighbor’s oral tradition bears this out. Years ago, I visited Aunt Bea at her beach place and shared memories of living without electricity, an ordinary arrangement for rustic Puget Sound vacation property. I remarked that not having power seemed to be no trouble; things got done with not much more effort than in town. Aunt Bea, she of the four children, snorted, “That’s because we stayed home!” It is true: running around interrupts the placid pace of low-tech life support.

Working out of the house lets me take advantage of the energy savings of simple systems. Recently I bought a low-tech washing machine, one with a tub for washing and a little centrifuge for spinning. Although it is more bother to use than an automatic, it uses less than half as much water, can be programmed to the minute for a wash cycle, and gets clothes dry enough to wear (in a pinch) in the spinner. I tended it grudgingly until I realized that it isn’t a dumb washing machine; it’s a very smart washtub. I do paperwork during the cycles. So, down-teching the laundry saves time, money, water, electricity, and detergent and keeps me more on top of the household accounts.

Reading this over, I realize “busted down to slavey” is only too apt a term for the previous paragraph, but it’s a different kind of slavey from the Fifties. First of all, the law no longer stops at the front door of the house. Protective legislation, contraceptive medicine, and electronic communications can prevent the worst advantage being taken of a house-bound woman. Second, high tech has revolutionized materials and controls so that very simple procedures have a big payoff. For example, although I have to handle wet wash to get it spun, most of the items I fish out of the tub are feather light synthetics. Detergents and the simple passage of time in the tub do most of the work of getting clothes clean. Third, the mail-order revolution of the Seventies allowed me to find the machine on-line, order it from a big box store, and collect it at my local shipper’s concierge stop. It’s fun to haul a washing machine home on a hand truck without breathing hard.

The service procedures that were so burdensome in the Fifties, dusting and vacuuming for example, are now elegant thanks to lightweight machines and clean-room technologies like high-tech dust cloths and HEPA air filters. The army, at least, has redefined the role of maintenance. Looking after the facilities has been integrated into operations rather than marginalized in a service ghetto.

The Y has taught me how to work hard and protect my frame, so doing heavy labor now enhances my body rather than brutalizing it. The twentieth-century house is designed for consumers. Previously, houses were places of production. We bought this building for the number of cubic feet of work space it afforded us. Managing life support, I have found, is a trivial side line to the other things we do, even though, or because, our systems are as simple as we can manage. It’s good when home is not an end in itself.



More after the jump.

The Window-More Anatomy

Photo courtesy Flickr

Years ago, a photographer friend talked about the “visual information” in an image. Considering visual information is a useful way to decide how to manage one’s surroundings. Visual focal points are like freeway signs, directing attention to one part of a space or another, and unless they’re used consciously, they can distract and annoy. A focal point is like bait on a hook.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve visited two essentially identical interiors set in very different locations. One had a bird’s eye view of the Stanford campus, the other looked out on the neighbors in a brand new subdivision. Each place had a main room furnished only with essentials: a flat panel video monitor, one or more guitars, a couch, some chairs, and a food prep area. The walls were light and plain. One householder teaches computer science, the other runs a small business.

I suppose one might call these places expressions of the digital interior, for in each room the focal point was, realistically, the running visual feed on the whole world that a good telecommunications connection affords. That’s a window to end all windows, and it’s hard to imagine a period in which such differences in education have generated such similar homes. More after the jump.

Triage

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In medicine, triage is a way of deciding whom to help when resources are short. Put a bandage on the easy problems, ignore the hopeless, and construct a future for the rest.

Triage makes it easy to decide what deserves house room.

Traditionally, Japan sees the house as theater. In the West, we see it as a museum. The two views fuse in storage areas. A fireproof storage bunker, the kura, backs up the Japanese paper house. We have basements and garages.

Let the size of your residence limit the size of your inventory. I have lived in twenty-three places ranging from eighty square feet to twenty-four hundred. Each was equally elegant set with active inventory and equally depressing clogged with clutter. Think constipation. Define a storage area, use it, and keep the rest of your space open and lively.

The outdoor community can fit all it needs to support the strenuous life into one backpack. Use carefully chosen outdoor gear and high tech as the core of your inventory, and you will double the number of square feet at your disposal without having to move.
More after the jump.

Anatomy of the Household

Photo courtesy Flickr

When the crunch hits-when does it ever not hit?-think of your abode as if it were a prosthesis. Animals carry housing and tools all the time: fur, teeth, and body fat. The building is our exoskeleton. Appliances are muscle. Communications systems are the nerves.

Domestic arrangements pay off when they’re a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. It’s pleasant to have a comfortable place to live, but in munutes, heavy demands on time and energy can turn a support system into a handicap.

Think of the anatomy of the house, and it becomes easy to decide what’s earning its keep, what’s a stumbling block, and what is missing. Edit often: messy problems indicate editing deficiency. The process is like keeping one’s percentage of body fat reasonably low.

Editing need not mean sacrifice. Keep things where you use them first, and set the rest out of the way. Push stuff closer and closer to the back door, and one day the decision to let something go will make itself. More after the jump.