(no subject)
Mar. 19th, 2021 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: food, (mild) apocalypse, (fairly mild) unsanitary]
>>and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
>>The only thing you didn’t cover was how good the flavor is of your first vine ripened tomato or cantaloupe! Home grown really does taste better, both from flavor and the hard won sweat equity known as pride!
I hear stuff like this a lot (also that thing about people liking a wine more if they believe it to be expensive), and it always boggles me.
How...how does that *work*? I struggle to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of mind that perceives more expensive (whether in money or effort or time) things as being more enjoyable.
I enjoy expensive things *less*. They are tainted by the acute awareness of how much went into them: "I went through all that shit for *this*?". Peanut butter is tasty in isolation, but its flavour is further improved by the comfortable knowledge that this was a *fantastic* use of fifteen cents of materials and ten seconds of prep time. When I eat peanut butter, I have no regrets.
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I feel like I *ought* to practise gardening enough that I can grow victory gardens when needed, but god, growing your own food is always such a letdown. You're out there in the dirt and the bugs and whatever cocktail of airborne toxins the plants feel like putting out this week, labouring hour after hour, week after week, and after you've harvested (getting jump-scared multiple times by tomatoes that turned out to have rotten patches on the side you couldn't see until after you picked them), you end up with...some garlic scapes (which might seem irreplaceable because you can't directly buy them, but it turns out if you put a bunch of garlic on some asparagus it's basically the same), a few zucchini, *maybe* a couple bell peppers if you're lucky, and approximately one dollar worth of potatoes.
(meanwhile your mom is waxing lyrical about the glory of home-grown tomatoes, because apparently she is one of Those people; you never liked tomatoes anyway, not even when growing them was somebody else's problem)
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I guess if I *needed* to make my clothes look fancy for political reasons, I'd do what I had to do (while quietly resenting every minute of it), but if it's just for *myself*? No, dude, if I spent one zillion hours making the cloth for that dress, it is whatever fucking colour came out of the loom. *Fuck* decorating, I got *enough* shit to do.
---
I've been thinking of trying mushroom farming. Apparently you can do it indoors, avoiding most of the filth and bugs and poison normally involved in gardening. And if you manage to overextend and end up with too many mushrooms (I think this has only ever happened to us with tomatoes, but it's not *completely* unheard of), you can just dehydrate them.
I hear about permaculture and food forests, but it's always people approaching it from angles like Being One With Nature and Encouraging Native Species, and it's only if you read between the lines that it kind of sounds like there's only a *few* years of backbreaking labour and then things mostly settle down. I'm not sure if I'm actually reading into it correctly there or not.
(I have a mulberry tree and it's technically worth it, in that I put so little effort into it that the couple dozen berries I get each year are enough to be worthwhile. (The rest are snatched up by birds at zero-dark-thirty.)
(The birds will not be able to reach my mushrooms.))
>>and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
>>The only thing you didn’t cover was how good the flavor is of your first vine ripened tomato or cantaloupe! Home grown really does taste better, both from flavor and the hard won sweat equity known as pride!
I hear stuff like this a lot (also that thing about people liking a wine more if they believe it to be expensive), and it always boggles me.
How...how does that *work*? I struggle to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of mind that perceives more expensive (whether in money or effort or time) things as being more enjoyable.
I enjoy expensive things *less*. They are tainted by the acute awareness of how much went into them: "I went through all that shit for *this*?". Peanut butter is tasty in isolation, but its flavour is further improved by the comfortable knowledge that this was a *fantastic* use of fifteen cents of materials and ten seconds of prep time. When I eat peanut butter, I have no regrets.
---
I feel like I *ought* to practise gardening enough that I can grow victory gardens when needed, but god, growing your own food is always such a letdown. You're out there in the dirt and the bugs and whatever cocktail of airborne toxins the plants feel like putting out this week, labouring hour after hour, week after week, and after you've harvested (getting jump-scared multiple times by tomatoes that turned out to have rotten patches on the side you couldn't see until after you picked them), you end up with...some garlic scapes (which might seem irreplaceable because you can't directly buy them, but it turns out if you put a bunch of garlic on some asparagus it's basically the same), a few zucchini, *maybe* a couple bell peppers if you're lucky, and approximately one dollar worth of potatoes.
(meanwhile your mom is waxing lyrical about the glory of home-grown tomatoes, because apparently she is one of Those people; you never liked tomatoes anyway, not even when growing them was somebody else's problem)
---
I guess if I *needed* to make my clothes look fancy for political reasons, I'd do what I had to do (while quietly resenting every minute of it), but if it's just for *myself*? No, dude, if I spent one zillion hours making the cloth for that dress, it is whatever fucking colour came out of the loom. *Fuck* decorating, I got *enough* shit to do.
---
I've been thinking of trying mushroom farming. Apparently you can do it indoors, avoiding most of the filth and bugs and poison normally involved in gardening. And if you manage to overextend and end up with too many mushrooms (I think this has only ever happened to us with tomatoes, but it's not *completely* unheard of), you can just dehydrate them.
I hear about permaculture and food forests, but it's always people approaching it from angles like Being One With Nature and Encouraging Native Species, and it's only if you read between the lines that it kind of sounds like there's only a *few* years of backbreaking labour and then things mostly settle down. I'm not sure if I'm actually reading into it correctly there or not.
(I have a mulberry tree and it's technically worth it, in that I put so little effort into it that the couple dozen berries I get each year are enough to be worthwhile. (The rest are snatched up by birds at zero-dark-thirty.)
(The birds will not be able to reach my mushrooms.))
no subject
Date: 2021-03-20 03:48 pm (UTC):)
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>>as long as the wine is not super-gross
I mean, wine in particular is always super-gross because the "taste" of alcohol (it might be more accurate to say "the sensation of having alcohol in my mouth"?) feels like pins-and-needles. But that's another matter.
(I make a terrible wine taster. I can just about detect the apple in hard apple cider, but any flavour subtler than that is drowned out by the alcohol.
I suspect I could start to detect more distinctions with repeated exposure, the same way I start to taste the batch variation in processed foods I eat regularly, but I don't *want* repeated exposure.)
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>>Put another way, other people are getting the placebo effect and you're getting a nocebo effect.
Maybe it's the accountant in me.
Other people with a thirty-dollar box of chocolates: "ooh, fancy"
Me: "This was a deeply inefficient use of resources. Can I go back to my store-brand dark-chocolate-covered almonds now? I managed to stack two big discounts on a bunch of them recently, so right now it's about $2.30 for a week's supply instead of the full $5."
(not that I ever pay the full $5 in practice, but usually the discounts work out to more like $4 or sometimes $3.60)
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>>So it might matter where you're getting your seeds from: if you're taking seeds from vegetables bought in the grocery store (or a seedseller that's just buying it from the same place as the companies), they might actually be worse than the frozen or canned varieties.
Most of our other garden plants are basic garden-store or Walmart seed packets, but in the case of tomatoes specifically...we get a *few* garden-store seedlings, but also Mom has contacts who send her heritage seeds, plus she saves some of the seeds from heritage tomatoes grown in previous years.
(do you know how hard it was to track down some grow-lights for growing tomatoes from seed? it was *so* hard. I wonder if it's easier now that marijuana is legal and nobody is worried about What You Might Be Using The Grow-Lights For.)