Some interesting thoughts in "Peeking Through the Keyhole: The Evolution of North American Homes" by Friedman and Krawitz

I'm reading an interesting little book about how homes have evolved and changed over the decades to reflect changing demographics, values, societal norms, and consumerism. There are a couple of points the authors make that have jumped out at me so far, and that state the concepts better than I could. For example:

Our labour-saving devices in the home  didn't free women from housework, but allowed them to maintain their homes and work outside the home. "...women were able to take up work outside the home because machines allowed them to perform their housework and maintain a paying job. Appliances and gadgets allow us to achieve more in a given amount of time, but because we have heaped on ourselves a greater burden of work both inside and outside the home, we don't see any direct pay-off from this increased productivity in terms of extra free time."

So work ends up being just as time-consuming and tiring as ever; we're just churning out more. I've always wondered where all the time saved by these time-saving devices went! We actually spend more time now doing laundry than women did in the 1920s -- we have more clothing now, for one thing -- we just don't have red and raw hands now from washing it. I see the same thing in the office: it used to be we had to type out copies of a document for every recipient, perhaps with the use of carbon paper, so we were picky about who got a copy. Now we have copiers, scanners, email, and the cloud, and everyone gets copied on everything. So we're inundated with stuff we don't really need and didn't used to get.

The authors also talk about how our eating habits have changed, with an increase in prepared foods and "convenience" products. We have microwaves so we can make the food more quickly -- but we also eat more and more quick-prepared foods because we have microwaves (a vicious circle that really doesn't take nutrition or taste into account). They talk about how meals now consist of simple tasks like shopping, freezing, and microwaving. But then they wrote this: "Of course, people still buy basic food ingredients and make meals the old-fashioned way. (By "old-fashioned," we mean chop and dice, steam and broil, fry and bake, not hunt and gather, pluck and winnow, churn and knead.)"

Well! What an interesting way to look at it. Someone somewhere is still gathering and gardening and fishing and threshing, just on a grand scale and outside of our vision. It doesn't even cross our minds to do that part anymore. We call it providing food for our families when we just chop the salad and fry the burgers. Or -- increasingly -- just dump the pre-bagged salad into a bowl and pop a box from freezer to microwave. What a sad thing. One of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life was to grow kamut in the backyard, harvest it, thresh it, grind it, and bake a loaf of bread with it. We may have made life more "convenient" now, but we've lost a great sense of connection and independence and pride in the process.

When we took our teen-aged son to Italy with us, I put him in charge of the camera to record our trip. He came home with pictures primarily of the food his dad cooked while we were there. That will be the chief memory he takes away from the two weeks we spent in Italy -- homemade food. The silly thing is, he gets homemade food daily all the time. But I guess it tasted better in Italy (and perhaps gave him a sense of being grounded and secure while in an unfamiliar environment).

Now I must go curl up and read some more of this fascinating book. But first I'll post a photo of the kamut I grew and the bread I made, because I am stupidly proud of it.