Friday, July 22, 2016
Patient things 3
Convective thought triggered by the previous item about mammals and alcohol.
It's clear that human love of alcohol led to all sorts of technical innovation, INCLUDING the whole idea of storage and increase.
As I noted before, it's likely that the use of fire for cooking arose from spontaneous heat in a pile of fermenting barley. Much easier to imagine than the TEDX notion of carrying torches from a Savannah Fire. Fermentation heat is IN THE FOOD. No need to imagine the difficult and rare connection of Burning Savannah and Roasted Sabertooth. Just pile some wet barley on a flat stone, and you can make heat any time you want.
New thought:
Controlled fermentation led to storage. Beer, bread, cheese, sauerkraut, pickles, pemmican. Patient things. Without fermentation the only important thing you can store is grain.
After the practice got going, fermentation required keeping track of the stored items. You can't taste the wine every day to see if it's ready, and you can't risk tasting the pot of kraut after it's too far gone. You need a way to predict which containers are ready to use and which need to be emptied and cleaned. Spotting the location of the rising sun is a good enough calendar to mark planting time, but it won't help you predict when the wine can be opened.
Did fermentation inspire the idea of debt with interest and a specific maturity date? Interest has to be kept under control for the sake of both the banker and the debtor, just as you need to know when to empty and clean out the pots. Jubilee = pot-breaking time?
Barley = beer, barbecue, banking, bucks. All the 'exclusively human' stuff except transportation.
= = = = =
On the GIANT OTHER HAND: Alcohol is poison. No other naturally desirable material kills you so reliably and quickly. There are plenty of faster poisons in nature, but they immediately signal their lethality, so they don't need a culture-scale prohibition.
Well, we were warned about the 'fruit of the tree of knowledge', weren't we? Pick the knowledge, use the advantages of fermentation, but skip the poison fruit.
New thought:
Controlled fermentation led to storage. Beer, bread, cheese, sauerkraut, pickles, pemmican. Patient things. Without fermentation the only important thing you can store is grain.
After the practice got going, fermentation required keeping track of the stored items. You can't taste the wine every day to see if it's ready, and you can't risk tasting the pot of kraut after it's too far gone. You need a way to predict which containers are ready to use and which need to be emptied and cleaned. Spotting the location of the rising sun is a good enough calendar to mark planting time, but it won't help you predict when the wine can be opened.
Did fermentation inspire the idea of debt with interest and a specific maturity date? Interest has to be kept under control for the sake of both the banker and the debtor, just as you need to know when to empty and clean out the pots. Jubilee = pot-breaking time?
Barley = beer, barbecue, banking, bucks. All the 'exclusively human' stuff except transportation.
= = = = =
On the GIANT OTHER HAND: Alcohol is poison. No other naturally desirable material kills you so reliably and quickly. There are plenty of faster poisons in nature, but they immediately signal their lethality, so they don't need a culture-scale prohibition.
Well, we were warned about the 'fruit of the tree of knowledge', weren't we? Pick the knowledge, use the advantages of fermentation, but skip the poison fruit.Labels: Asked and sort of answered, defensible spaces, Patient things
¶ 12:56 AM
