Arless Montreal Studio Photo, unknown woman. Tighsolas collection. If you click on this photo you will get a larger photo, that reveals the woman to be quite good looking. Remember, they wore no make-up. This hairdo, in fashion, I guess, does not do her justice. And I’m guessing she had some money as that dress is very complicated. I wonder what colour the dress is. Red?? Sea green?
This has nothing to do with Tighsolas, well, I am sure I can figure a way to fit it in.
Well, here. It’s easy to fit it in. In my last ‘episode’ a neighbour’s cows got into the Tighsolas garden. This was a big event, because like their neighbours, in 1910, the Nicholsons counted on their garden to provide veggies for the rest of the year, although they could also buy vegetables in season.
It was an extensive garden. Tighsolas had a lot of land. And, for the most part, Margaret tended it.
As it happens, I have the COMPLETE household accounts of the Nicholsons, from 1883 to 1921, just before Norman died.
I know what the Nicholsons ate, or at least, the components of what they ate. Margaret left behind no recipes so I only have a general idea of the dishes she cooked. Haddie? Oatmeal? They ate mostly beef and pork. Chicken was very expensive and available only half the year.
I also some invoices from the local merchants.
In many ways, the traditional meat and potatoes ‘anglo’ diet of today, the staples, are what the Nicholsons chowed down on. Curry was about the only exotic dish anglo Canadians ate in 1910, a by- product of British Imperialism.
There is, however, a world of difference with respect to the path the food takes to our plates. The food supply is now totally industrialized, less healthy for us and much less tasty too.
Here`s where my rant comes in. Today, I went to the grocery store, and as usual the cashier asked me if I had my own bag. They charge 5 cents per plastic bag, a widespread practice today. This always enrages me – because it is so patronizing.
I don’t believe for a minute that plastic grocery bags are worse for the environment than the other thousands of over-packaged items in the modern grocery store. Bagged lettuce, for Heaven`s sake! One piece of nan bread in its own wrapper.
Show me the raw data. (I assume the price of the bags was incorporated into the grocery bill: did grocery stores lower their prices after the ban to make it fair?)
I know the argument: That these plastic bags end up out in the environment and do damage, damage that is visible to the naked eye, which is the kind we humans can get our brains around.
But, frankly, it all seems a bit childish and symbolic to me. Indeed, from my research I learned it was a group of school children who initially lobbied for the plastic bag ban in San Francisco.
Do you think they did the complex mathematical computations to figure out if banning the bags and substituting them with pseudo-canvas bags would help or hinder the environment? In the long run, after all is said and done. No. (Every day a new study comes out debunking some of our environmental sacred cows: that local salmon I eat. Gee, it’s farmed and the fish are carnivorous and its carbon footprint is way larger than if I ate imported Pacific salmon. And, I am guessing, this farmed fish is less healthy for me, and perhaps even bad for me.)
And then the political establishment picked up on it. Do you think that if this measure in any way compromised corporate profits that it would have been adopted. No way, San Jose!
That’s my point.
I used these plastic grocery bags for garbage and picking up dog pooh. (Now, isn’t that counter-intuitive, ecologically-speaking. Encasing each and every dog turd in the world in its own piece of plastic.) Now I have to buy more garbage bags from the grocer and I have to use other plastic bags to pick up pooh. (Has anyone checked if the profits of the garbage bag manufacturers has increased since plastic grocery bags were banned? Who is the parent company of the company that makes garbage bags? Sheinart Wigs?
Now, for those re-usable ‘canvas’ bags (that you see tucked under the arm of so many smug food shoppers as they climb out of their SUVs).. If you buy meat (which tends to be over-wrapped these days in styrofoam (horrible for environment) and some kind of absorbant napkin and plastic wrap.. it still leaks so you have to cover the piece of meat in one or two other plastic bags to keep your reusable bag free from salmonella. (Salmonella in the meat is caused by industrial processing methods, I believe.) Oh, and for health reasons, you are supposed to wash your ‘canvas; bags after every use. (How does that help the environment?)
It all makes no sense. We’re all damaging the environment every day with our sloth, and lack of time and our lack of cooking skills. Today, I bought a quiche. It came in an aluminum plate, wrapped in a surfeit of heavy duty plastic material, in a box. I could have found some free range eggs (well, hard to do at 0 degrees F) and made a quiche in that pie plate that once belonged to my grandmother. But I am lazy and de-skilled and you know, all this overpackaging is actually good for the economy, and whatever is good for business is ‘good’. I want to do my part.
From what I can see, the more packaging on any given product, the more the grocery store can charge for it. That’s why the marketing wizards and product managers are coming up with more and more over-packaged convenience products daily, instead of cutting down on them. That thin crust pizza I bought for 5.00… on sale. It’s just a bunch of flour…It’s worth about 3 cents! (Hey, I just noticed a new product in the grocery store, a giant plastic liner for your recyle bin. Marketers have figured out how to exploit the recycling craze to manufacture MORE plastic products.)
The grocery store hardly makes any money on meat or produce (and it overcharges for the fruits veggies, which taste like nothing. Sometimes I’d like to go back to 1910 just to see what a green bean really tastes like.)
So, if I wanted to help the environment, I wouldn’t shop at the grocery store at all. I would, like the Nicholsons, shop at a butcher and a green grocer and cook everything from scratch. I would only eat organic meat, from small farms and I would grow my own veggies and pickle them and eat the rest in season. I would join the SLOW FOOD movement and move to Italy. Molto bene.
And I would walk to the grocery store, or take my horse and carriage or velocipede with the basket in front. (And I could do all that and take one overseas plane trip and lose all my eco-points in one shot.)
Studying the 1910 era, (when planes just got off the ground and cars were just becoming a thing of interest to average middle class men) using Tighsolas, is a great way to get perspective on our mad consumer age. After all, 1910 was the Birth of Now as the BBC put it. The industrial age, the consumer age was just getting under way.
The processed products that became household names in the 20th century, were just being introduced. Heinz Ketchup, Quaker Oats. Etc. Why did some products take off and others languish? From what I see, mostly because of ADVERTISING. Spin. Convenience, too, maybe.
In 1967, Canadian historian Pierre Berton filmed his own rant on CBC, complaining about the now steam-rolling ‘ersatz food movement.’ “Who says instant coffee is better than the real thing? he raged on camera. The marketers said, that’s who, and we believed them. My parents did anyway. (My mother, a brilliant cook, drank instant til the end, turning her nose up in her eighties at my freshly brewed organic fair trade java.)
Today I am asking…. Who says banning plastic bags is better, in the long run, for the environment? And is this ban just a ‘diversionary tactic’, smoke and mirrors to keep us, the bloated middle class, from making real DIFFICULT choices about our lifestyles to protect the environment? (Are we ready to defer instant gratificiation and YIKES ‘do without’, on occasion? Maybe even suffer.) And if too many of us do that, will a Great Depression follow? And what difference can we individuals really make in a world where a few corporations basically control everything and where profits, short term profits, are all that matter. (And where billions of Third World Citizens are itching to jump on the consumer age gravy train.)
(Another case in point. Every year my husband covers our big picture windows and back doors with a protective plastic in winter. He bought a re-usable brand a few years ago. It tore last year. This year he found they stopped manufacturing the re-usable kind. (Doesn’t make money.)..I bought a high priced coffee maker two years ago. I broke the carafe and found that they are no longer making that carafe. I have to buy A NEW coffee maker. Where once appliances lasted say, 40 years, now they last 3 and they are not worth repairing. Built in obsolescence gone berzerk: But I’m the eco-villain because I question having to pay for plastic grocery bags. IT ALL MAKES NO SENSE.)
Maybe there’s nothing we can do. Maybe it isn’t in our control at all. Maybe we are as helpless as children,when it comes to environmental degradation, and we need to be treated as such. Hence that canvas grocery bag, as comforting as a child’s security blanket and about as effective.
