No. You’re discounting the post-war immigrant wave.
I know the standard cultural narrative is that immigrants assimilated into the WASP status quo in return for acceptance, but that’s not really what happened. The immigrants brought new foods to the mainstream, like lasagne. Often they didn’t have the money to join the mainstream middle class, so they sewed their own clothes… and grew their own food.
Put it this way: in my little corner of English-not-a-first-language in the 1970s and 80s, home gardening and home sewing of a non-hippy type was still going strong, and kids like me were being inculcated against industrial food, because it was worse quality at greater expense.
Outside the home we fit in, so long as you didn’t look too close. Like how my peanut butter sandwiches had homemade jam and not grape jelly. Or like how none of our clothes had tags, because my paternal grandmother wore so much handmade stuff the commercially made clothes felt weird with the tags in, and she passed that on to the rest of us.
And while the hippies and Yippies were reading Steal This Book, the immigrants were quietly practising a cashless side economy based on family, favours, and bartering – something that the captains of industry did not like at all, though of course they do it amongst themselves all the time.
So the hippies didn’t preserve anything. They just appropriated it. But the previous incarnations never stopped.
This.
I’m the only woman in my family that doesn’t sew her own clothes.
Everyone else is great seamstress, sewing clothes for everyone. Not because they’re hippies, but because for the cost they can get better quality. Same goes for food. We grew as much as we could because it was cheaper and better. And we were poor. We weren’t hippies. My Mom always laughed and said she was married with two kids when the sexual revolution happened. She couldn’t afford to be “liberated”.
A lot of these skills were preserved among people who were 1st, maybe second generation immigrants and weren’t part of the money class. If you could afford a little bit of ground or some balcony space for pots, you grew and preserved food. I grew up with some amazing bread due to Polish and German neighbours. None of my (3rd and 4th gen) family baked or canned and fresh grown veggies were seasonal.
I learned to knit from that German neighbour but never stuck with it because I couldn’t get the knack for holding a steady tension and do not have the patience for practice unless it is something I really enjoy. Sewing, I have the same problem. But those women were not part of some back-to-earth movement. They would have (or will, that German neighbour is still holding on, still knitting, still baking) knocked you into the middle of next week if you called them hippies. Hippies were around (it’s a strange area, a real mix of conservative farmers, hardcore union labourers and hippies whose main cash crop is still not yet legal) but they weren’t canning and sewing so much as drying and rolling.
shrug My sister sews. I can cook and could figure out fermentation and canning. I know how to till soil and how to dig in fertilizer. I even know a few places to source good fertilizer starter. I can ride a horse and pluck a chicken. I could clean and dress one if I had to. None of this we learned from hippies, despite my dad’s beard in the seventies. Know what an entire deer or cow’s worth of raw meat smells like? I do. I have helped tie a whole pig (butchered) up in chickenwire for spit roasting. Find me someone who can weld and I can tell you how to build a kickass mobile spit-roaster. I am even aware of techniques for making charcoal.
It’s amazing what you learn when conveniences are a good distance away, not reliable or unaffordable.
i get what you’re saying, and it definitely plays a part, but it’s still the outlier experience. the mainstream experience was the commercialized, pre-packaged food version that was taking over. saying the hippies “appropriated” it is incorrect, because there was no permission needed. they simply saw what older (often immigrant) people were doing, understood the value in it, and helped spread it to the mainstream.
Hippies were the original hipsters.
They thought they were being revolutionary but they were just “discovering” things their grandparents already knew how to do, none of it was new, and they didn’t make it mainstream because as you say, they were outliers and not part of mainstream culture.
How is that not appropriation? Your argument still hinges on a homogenous culture that doesn’t exist. And it wasn’t always “older” people – like @MissyPants ’ mum, my mum was the same age as the hippies, except she grew up cleaning chicken coops and canning beets.
Three people now have provided family and neighbourhood histories to you, in detail, with broader historical references, and all you’re coming back with is, “mmm, yeah, maybe for outliers, but really the hippies are the heros of this narrative.”
because appropriation implies that consent was available from somewhere, or needed. preserving food, farming, and making your own clothing is not owned by any one culture.
I feel like this thread is sorta devolving into Apocolyse Club, as in, what skills can you bring to survive the aftermath. We’ve already established that a bunch of us can grow and preserve food, several can sew, and at least a few of us can make fabric from string.
Mr. Kidd can build whole houses and butcher pretty much any critter. What else do we need?
Like I said, I know the basics of making charcoal.
Most of us understand food safety, so we’re ahead of the curve there.
I have some animal husbandry skills. I know how to build and fix fences. Keep the waste far enough from your water supply and it composts into fantastic fertilizer and growing soil. Dry it,and you can have heating fuel. If we can work out methane capture… Well, then we’re cooking with gas.
I know how to make hay. It’s more labour intensive and finicky than people think. It needs a community, to do efficiently or effectively. Unfortunately, I do not know the mechanism of a baler, we can probably have some brains to work something out. Bales are safer than loose storage to mitigate moisture (mold) and dust (explosion) risks. I have some ideas that would need testing.
PS: speaking of food safety, I recommend boil-water advisories in any post-apocalypse society, until we’re sure we have large scale water treatment worked out.
Animals like me and seem to trust me for some reason. Whether it’s “the bitey dog” or “the skittish cat” or a wild coon/possum/etc., they’ll just sit down and relax and hang out with me. That’s not animal husbandry as such, I don’t really know what it is. But I can stand watch duty and deal with predators.
