Can Traditional Cuisines Survive Without Servants?
No, says the Economist, talking about Brazilian (and by extension) many other traditional cuisines.
Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. “For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in São Paulo’s fanciest restaurants,” says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone else’s job.
This from an interesting article on the parallels between the disappearance of servants in Britain (and I would add the US) in the early twentieth century and from Brazil (and I would add Mexico) in the early twenty-first century in The Economist.
Put another way, lots of the laborious “traditional” cuisines created for the well-to-do are going to vanish if the world keeps getting wealthier.
Domestic Servants Waiting for Street Car, Atlanta 1939. Farm Sevice Administration. Courtesy NYPL.
As if in response, the New York Times had an article on 27th December called Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés – NYTimes.com. The subhead for the piece went “A thriving movement of food producers wants to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions, and redefine American cuisine for a global audience.”
Hmm, still a few clichés I’d say. But that’s editors for you. I wish all those enthusiasts trying to raise great farm products the very best of luck. I’d love their pork and their fruit.
The article does, though, raise yet again the whole question of just who is going to do the work. One of the growers talks about the great days of Carolina rice.
The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.
Hand pounded rice? Certainly there seems to be evidence that hand pounded white rice tastes better. The Thai royal family, who knew good food, insisted that their rice be hand pounded even when rice mills had come to Thailand.
But is anyone seriously thinking of returning to this, except as an experiment? Surely not. Not with slave labor, to be sure. So by whom? And at what price?
Afterward. The Economist is on a roll about servants. The psychology of service: Why have servants? talks about servants as necessary to status as they certainly were through much of history. I know of families who could barely pay their bills but felt that if they “let the servant go” they were themselves on the downward path.
And a link to a roundup of my earlier posts on servants and cooking. Will there be a return to servants? (Open the page completely and the links work).
The more I think about this post, the more the analogies with textiles come to mind. Labour costs mean that couture clothes are only for the super-rich (they always were, but even more so now than they were in, say, 1930); custom-tailored clothes are expensive unless they’re contracted out to countries in Asia where tailors are currently cheap; mid-price and cheap clothes are increasingly becoming the sartorial equivalent of fast food – produced in huge volume, which means the pressure on farmers and garment manufacturers to cut the cost of labour rises constantly; and home-made clothes in the developed world are a sign of leisure and arty tendencies rather than necessity (it costs more to knit a jumper than to buy one, as a rule).
I couldn’t agree more. I think the parallel between clothes and food is a very fruitful one and far too often overlooked.
And also, at the bottom of the market, the increasing assumption that luxury (or a simulacrum of it) should be cheap and accessible -but this only happens by paying ludicrously low amounts for the manual labour needed for the luxury components.
Thinking of clothes again, Lucy Siegle’s recent book on the cheap clothing supply chain, To die for, points out that it’s easy to assume that beading or sequins on cheap clothes are applied by machines. In fact, this is almost never the case. I’d imagine there are all kinds of equivalents in world of food harvesting and processing.