Cottage/Industry
A combination of boredom and fear led me down a new path this week: I canned food. I’d been thinking about it for a while, both because my husband has a childhood nostalgia for home-canned foods and because our garden has an overabundance of collard greens, and our backyard more loquats than even the squirrels can eat. And, while we are all required to “stay at home” or “shelter in place,” like so many others I find myself anxious, yet with time on my hands. (For “knowledge workers” like myself, anxiety is typically the result of too little time, not too much time.)
So, after purchasing equipment (a pressure cooker and Mason jars), and reviewing several YouTube videos, I started.
The process is very time consuming (perfect for right now), and it has many steps. After my first few batches, I’ve realized it is not complicated. Still it was eye opening. Now in my third day, I’m finalizing the last of what will be ten quarts of collard greens and six pints of loquat jam. I’m pretty sure they will be edible, and maybe even good to eat. Looking at my week’s production, though, I’m stunned at how much effort—starting months ago—it took to make relatively little food.
Planting, watering, and picking the collards; picking the loquats from the too-many volunteer trees in our yard. Cleaning and chiffonading the collards; halving, seeding, and cleaning the loquats. Blanching the collards; simmering the loquats with lots of sugar. Preparing the jars. Pressure cooking the collards for nearly two hours; water canning the loquats for half an hour. Letting everything cool, to avoid breakage or injury. Hoping the lids sealed properly, so the food won’t spoil, or worse.
Because this kind of home-work allows for lots of reflection, I’ve been thinking about the cost of food from the local grocery store, vs. the labor and energy involved in preparing food at home. I’m acutely aware that I could have purchased the same amount of food for less than thirty dollars. I recall reading that a hundred years ago food costs were a much larger percentage of the average family budget than today. Put another way, the cost of raising and selling eggs, raising cows and selling their milk, raising, preparing, and distributing vegetables, fruit or nuts a hundred years ago reflected an economy based on personal labor, which was far less industrialized than today.
And, since we are all confined to our own “cottages” I’ve been thinking about what models of work might emerge from the COVID-19 calamity. What kind of industry can we each contribute, from our own cottage?
Internet resources helpfully explain that cottage industries share a few characteristics: They are home-based, and often family-based. They use locally available materials. Typically they use simple equipment and have modest overhead. Because they are labor-intensive they do not scale easily. While is some cases quality may be higher, it is also harder to regulate than in today’s factory economies. Most online sources I read point towards pre-industrial cottage industries, like weaving, lacemaking, and shoemaking. What might post-industrial processes, which could utilize an instant, international knowledge base, along with sophisticated but cheap technologies like 3D printers, look like? How might such goods be distributed, locally and globally?
A few emergent industries, tailored to the moment, are appearing locally:
In Gainesville, a Facebook group called “Gainesville Face Mask Crafters for COVID-19 Support,” dedicated to making bespoke face masks, has formed. You can download a pattern, follow posted instructions or watch a YouTube video made by someone in the Netherlands, then use materials from your home or purchase some from stores with outside pick-up sites, or online outlets, to create masks. Some examples that have been posted are beautiful—likely for personal use and reuse, rather than one time use in hospital settings. https://www.facebook.com/GNVFaceMaskCrafters/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARCasHFudNMPpZW7Jf-C3FrQ61x0YtR6fTtfVTOm7HYerRvYVmk72Nd7J5XEAIL3_5opM0X0vYS5Luf5
So far, it seems people can make a dozen or two, but not hundreds of masks, from their homes. This leads to the question, if single-use masks are not available, what will be the downside in terms of personal and public health? What if we can no longer live in a world where everything is disposable?
A second Gainesville story involves DIY ventilators. It turns out that a professor of anesthesiology at University of Florida, Samsun Lampotang, has experience inventing ventilators. His work has led to 43 patents held by the University of Florida, beginning with his work as a mechanical engineering student decades ago. He and a team from UF and around the world are designing a low-tech, open source ventilator that can be built using components available at local hardware stores. In this example, the knowledge required to invent the machine is sophisticated and global, but its production, like the masks, will be relatively low-tech and therefore available to many.
https://www.gainesville.com/news/20200325/uf-researchers-design-low-cost-diy-ventilator
Once this public health crisis has abated, how might these cottage industries transition into new forms of work? As I try to envision life after COVID-19, I think of the millions of people who will need new ways to make money and to provide basic necessities for themselves and those they love. Sewing and machine-making are two points of entry into different manufacturing sectors. How might such cottage industries evolve over the next year or two? Currently Etsy distributes customized goods—how might it be repurposed for new forms of making?
I wonder if the industrial revolution has coming to a crashing halt. Will factories, and other industries based on the factory model of centralized production, repetitive work, economies of scale, and radically cheap, overabundant, products, simply restart? Or, will we be willing to pay more for fewer items, in part to pay people more for their time?
Like many, I have been concerned that our culture’s ravenous consumption has lead us to an unsustainable future, in many ways. Despite its obvious, horrific consequences, might the COVID-19 virus, which has already reduced global energy usage and resulting carbon emissions, have another hidden upside?
Will this pause allow us to value quality compared to quantity and redesign our world, or is it too late?