Victorian Farm

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I had cousins in Alabama who worked at the US Steel mill, I think it was the pipe mill, but owned some hogs/pigs (I can't tell you the difference) on the side. When I was a little boy, I must have been 5 or 6 years old, I recall going out and slopping the hogs with them. Only after slopping hogs can a person understand what the term "eat like a pig" means. The way those animals rushed to the trough and pushed to get their share was amazing and a little bit shocking to a young boy. For some reason, I can still recall orange peels being part of the slop which actually looked pretty neat, as much of it came from fresh leftovers from the family meal. 

I watched some pig apologist video or documentary recently. It was about why pigs are considered by many to be unclean to eat.



The general theory was that pigs, in their native forested habitat, ate berries, truffles, nuts, whatever. But they never slopped around in mud. They didn't need to (in order to cool themselves) because of the shade of the forest.

But when the forests of the Middle East were cut down, the pigs did resort to wallowing in mud. Then, the theory goes, urban people started keeping chickens instead (more efficient to keep and use), making pigs expendable (and usable as a way for some religions to separate themselves from the heathens).

A lot of what-ifs. But Jews and Muslims still have prohibitions against eating pork. Pigs are still pigs. And pork is still a yugely popular food around the globe, no matter how gross pigs may be.

Funny thing is that in the second and third episodes of this series, they spend quite a lot of time fixing up a pig sty (more of a small house, really). Some families probably don't have dwellings this robust. It was also interesting that they embedded in the floor rows of wine bottles and then cemented them over. This was to provide insulation from the cold earth.

That's a lot of comfort for a pig.

We've all used the expression, "As dumb as sheep." Perhaps that's become a stereotype. Perhaps we slander sheep beyond all proportion.

So, surely, when we meet up (as we do in episode one or two) with a sheep expert, we're going to get a message like, "Sheep are actually more intelligent than they are given credit. They are remarkable animals and real survivors."

But that's not what the sheep expert says to our Victorian farmers. He cautions the new sheep owners saying something like, "Sheep are the only animals that will go out of their way to find a way to kill themselves. So you have to keep a good watch on them. They'll do the unexpected."

Rolling on the floor, laughing out loud. That's how that caught me. Another stereotype confirmed.

Definitely the opposite sort of vibe to "corn fed." I don't eat that much pork, but I like it just fine. Watch the series, Deadwood, and you may never look at pigs in the same way again. This one certain Chinese man's pigs were used for body disposal. Better than feces-fed but still not quite as good as grain-fed.

This series mentions often that the time period they are recreating (about 1880) is when industrialization began to take hold, and especially when many of the machines or products of industrialization (such as pie tins) became affordable.

In this series, Mr. Acton seemed to be some kind of a collector of farm implements and the crew thus had some at their disposal. In one case, all they had to do was free a piece of equipment from the weeds that had grown up over it. In other cases, pieces of equipment were borrowed from neighbors.

They're a bit blurry about this point, about what a small farmer might have purchased for himself and what might have been available to borrow or rent.

They make an interesting point that vegetables were more or less a luxury item. If you wanted them, you had to grow them for yourself. Poor houses and orphanages, for instance, likely had no vegetables on the menu and instead had potatoes and other high-carbohydrate foods.

But at this time there were some items available to the average farmer at reasonable prices, such as sugar. Due to the slave trade, sugar was a rather inexpensive commodity, and thus it helped bring forth the production of much jelly and jam.

Coal was coming online big-time at this time, replacing wood as the fuel of choice. Probably Ruth Goodman presented the most information in regards to what it was like to live at that time with information on food, clothing, methods of cleaning, and many other aspects (including cheese making). She notes, for instance, the different cooking methods that coal required. Coal was a dirty fuel. Unlike with wood where you might very much want the smoke to infuse your food, with coal the job was to separate it. Thus baking and boiling became more prevalent.

They do a cheese-making segment. But one of the flaws of this series is that you see many things started buy don't necessarily follow them through. I suppose it was part of the challenge of condensing a year into six episodes. By the way, Goodman had her young daughter helping her with the cheese making and she's quite a looker.

Stressed frequently in this series was that industrialization was driving many people back to many traditional practices, if only out of a sense of nostalgia. But many of the local farmers they talked to were frank: They preferred the machines. Farm work was literally back-breaking work. And as one fellow said, "Hard work won't kill you but it might bend and reshape your body." Or something like that.

But the participants in this series were all hard-workers and genuinely sad to have to leave their life. We don't really ever get the sense that a year has gone by. It seems as if they've been at it only a few weeks. But they all were fairly competent people and (at least on film) no major mistakes were made. Whether he was blowing smoke for the camera or not, their local sheep expert complimented them on the job they did with their sheep over a year. All the ewes (with a donor ram from this expert) became pregnant and gave birth. The had quite an increased flock at the end of the year and all the lambs made it.

The hard work looks honest and perhaps even fun. But I didn't find the food all that appealing, although Goodman seemed very knowledgeable about food-making techniques and seemed to be a splendid cook. It sort of is what it is. You'd better like boiled mutton or the things made from a pig's head or you're going to starve. But as noted by Goodman or one of the men, when you've been out working hard all day, you definitely have an appetite for things that a regular city-dweller would have turned his nose up at, including many fatty foods.

I might take a look at the first episode of the next series, Edwardian Farmer.

This comports with my experiences in Asia. Farmers, peasants and poor people in general are happy to use ugly plastic cartons, cheap plastic tarps and putt-putt motorcyles as these are all useful and make life easier. 

Only wealthy people who have never done physical work for 10 hours per day on a regular basis, or have never been at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather, pine for the good-old days-of-yore when everybody, but the aristocracy lived on the edge. 

To understand this doesn't require a lot of thought. All one has to do is figure out the difference between using an old reel lawn mower vs. a new self propelled one. Or maybe the difference between walking ten miles and driving it. 

I don't remember if it was Ruth Goodman who mentioned the slavery issue in regards to low sugar prices. But you could email her (agent) at vicki@take3management.com and relay the information you have and see if she responds.

I'm three episodes into Edwardian Farmer. This is the exact same formula with the exact same people. And that's fine because the formula and people are pretty good although there is much less a sense of three people moving into a strange place and living there. Basically this seems less a "live in that world" venture and more of a demonstration of technology and techniques. I find less sense of the "living there" aspect if only because they are doing projects seemingly all over Morwellham Quay in Devon.

An interesting factoid is that apparently wheat was not a good cash crop in the Edwardian era because of cheap American imports. The theme of this series is that farmers needed to diversify, including having "market gardens." Somewhere (I don't know where….the sense of place is sort of lost in this second series) Ruth is reinvigorating part of an old market-garden strawberry patch.

The boys were advised to plant oats (for animal and human consumption) rather than wheat. There was an interesting bit at the end of episode three about hedgerows and their maintenance. I'd never thought much about hedgerows but they do need to be maintained (lest the sheep escape into another field). And the way they do it is sort of strange but I guess it works.

And apparently hedgerows are renowned for outputting lots of various berries that you can harvest during various times of the year. Ruth picked some sloe berries and is going to make sloe gin out of them. And from what I can see, this basically means flavoring existing gin.

Ruth is cooking (I think) still on a coal stove. But she notes that at this point, coal was fast giving way to gas stoves. They've certainly packed a lot of different activities and crafts into these first three episodes, including making a feeding trough for the sheep out of a solid block of granite.

The producers are obviously in touch with a lot of local experts because they are constantly brought in to explain some long-forgotten art or craft. There are people out there keeping this stuff alive although often there might be only a few left. I think they said in the Victorian series that the guy making woven baskets out of (I forget which type of tree) lumber was the last known guy with that skill.

These are the guys who can survive a Zombie Apocalypse. The extent of the skills most of us have is swiping a debit card on a supermarket card reader. These old-timers can raise animals, fix things, and live off the land. Give them a Shire horse and they could remake the world...or at least a few dozen acres of it.

This man invented the process which made the possibility of large quantities of cheap cane sugar possible. Note that he invented it in the 1840s and it was well established within ten years. A large jump in the consumption of sugar in the U.K. pretty much coincides with this period. (Abt 1845-55)  After the ban on slavery in 1833, there was some shift from other Caribbean producers to Cuba, a country which outlawed slavery later than the Brits, so I must correct my statement that there was no slave-produced sugar in the U.K. in 1880. There very well could have been. 

Evaporation refining