5 ms·

Line-drying vs machine drying was, and I suppose still is for some older people (who probably inhabit the bulk of HOA boards and such) a class issue. People wi

• ultrarunner 7y ago
  This is such an interesting perspective. Though she's never said it, I suspect my grandmother (96! this year) sees vegetarianism the same way— people with means could afford meat, whereas poorer folks simply couldn't. Intentionally choosing to limit or eliminate meat consumption just boggles her mind. This perspective kind of boggles mine. I hadn't though to extrapolate that position to other topics!
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    In my understanding, this kind of thinking is how the American diet came to be so heavy in meat, sugar, salt, and fat, with such enormous portions.
    • lordgrenville 7y ago
      Surely that's just evolution/biology? People will naturally tend to eat bigger portions, and more energy-dense foods.
  • steanne 7y ago
    what food is easily available to the poor and hence looked down upon has changed significantly over the years. people used to be embarassed to have to eat lobster.
    • Gibbon1 7y ago
      Friend of mine has a masters in Medieval sociology. He said one of the places he studied there was a law that you couldn't feed your servants salmon more than X days a week.
      • molmalo 7y ago
        Some time ago I watched this video: What Did Peasants Eat in Medieval Times? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w) I was surprised to learn that some food we nowdays consider expensive was very low-class back then, and viceversa, as availability and costumes changed over time. Salmon being one of the examples. I recommend that series of videos if you like this kind of stuff.
        • Gibbon1 7y ago
          My mother said her 1958 cookbook she got as a wedding gift suggested that 'budget conscious' (meaning poor) housewives could consider cheaper types of meat like salmon. My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
  • ijidak 7y ago
    There is a story that made the rounds on HN maybe 3 weeks ago about beriberi in the Japanese armed forces caused because soldiers didn't want to eat brown rice as white rice (which is less nutritious) was a sign of wealth. This is just one of many reasons that it seems it will be difficult to get people in developing countries to forego the western lifestyle for the sake of the environment. It's hard to get humans to save their immediate self, if it requires foregoing a class symbol, talk less of something as relatively esoteric as the weather.
  • flukus 7y ago
    Where has she lived in that time? Many her age were very affected by the great depression along WW2 and it's aftermath, they learned to be very frugal. The one's I've met around that age bracket seem to see meat as only a small part of a meal with lot's of roast veggies and the like on the side, contrasted with the more modern expectation that the meat is the main course with the sides being much smaller. Manual labor and physical strength was also much more important in her day and meat is important for that.
  • vinay_ys 7y ago
    From drying clothes to getting the right nutrition, there are clearly superior and inferior ways to do get any particular result. But of course people don't have the knowledge/skills to figure it out for themselves and come to that judgement on their own. Instead, they use monetary value (price etc) associated a particular method as a proxy for superior/inferior. Once you are down this slippery slope, it is easy to jump the next few steps of this lazy-yet-practical logical staircase that leads to class hierarchy in society and what outwardly behavior brings class status in your society etc. Since these implicit logical models are taught and reinforced generationally, only generational shifts can break the cycle and that makes it hard to change the stereotypes.
• igravious 7y ago
  Can't hang out your laundry? Can't grow veggies? How common is this sort of thing in the States, I had no idea. Are there other things that are frowned upon or forbidden over there that might be perfectly normal elsewhere?
  • aiisjustanif 7y ago
    Casual sex in the south. I said it as a joke, but this is only comparing it to living in Europe, the stigma around sex or being called derogatory terms for it is much less of a thing in Europe. But other things like washing dishes by hand. Owning an old car while being middle class. In general everything "laborious" while being in the middle/upper class or living by.
  • asark 7y ago
    No permanent laundry lines is a very common restriction. Some probably restrict hang-drying clothes at all. Landscaping restrictions like that are common. Fence material/style/height restrictions guaranteed, and unless you're in a damn rich neighborhood with large lots you probably can't even do the full-on 50s dream white picket fence up to the sidewalk, since you aren't allowed to fence your front lawn. And the rich neighborhoods like that probably require brick or metal anyway. Exterior paint options usually restricted. No outbuildings or various restrictions on them very common. Shingle colors and/or material. Everything, really. It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning. This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another. Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever. Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association