Treehouse Writers

This is something I posted on my own website four years ago. Just re-read it and thought I’d post it here.

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)

Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?

Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.

There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.

Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.

Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.

Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.

My father would be 106 today, if he were still with us. It’s also Friday the thirteenth and in fact he was born on a Friday the thirteenth. I looked it up once just in case this was just one of those family stories, and found it was true.

My parents also got married on a Friday the thirteenth.  I looked that one up, too. It was our family joke – Friday the thirteenth was our lucky day.

Given that in this, the wealthiest country in the world, a place full of supposedly educated people, hotels (and possibly many other tall buildings) do not include a thirteenth floor, deciding that Friday the thirteenth is your lucky day is a small rebellion. Or a small statement of sanity.

Or, at least, out of step. My family was always a little out of step.

There is always at least one Friday the thirteenth in a given year, according to math wizards. 1918, when my father was born, had two, though the year my parents got married only had one. Every once in awhile there are three.

So obviously a reasonable number of people are born on a Friday the thirteenth – probably about the same number as are born on a Friday the first or any other day of the month (except 29, 30, and 31, since there are fewer of those in a year).

I suspect fewer get married on Friday the thirteenth for the same reason that tall buildings label the thirteenth floor the fourteenth. Continue reading “It’s Friday the Thirteenth!”…

I wrote about public health a couple of weeks ago: specifically how I became fascinated by the people who do the detective work of tracking infections and threats to the public weal to their sources. In doing so I was reminded of Typhoid Mary Mallon. She was an interesting and rather tragic character. And stubborn as hell.

Mary Mallon emigrated to the US from County Tyrone, Ireland, when she was 15 years old. She stayed with family for a while, but for most of her professional life she “lived in” as a domestic worker, almost always as a cook. And she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, which is not a quality you want in someone involved in food prep. It is possible that she was infected in utero: that her mother had typhoid when she was pregnant. But Mary was, initially at least, unaware. And cooking was what she knew.

In 1900 Mary started working in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New York City. Within a couple of weeks people there fell ill.  She left that job and went to the city. At her first post there several people became ill with fevers and diarrhea; she moved to another job soon after, and seven of the eight people in this new household became sick. In 1904 she went to work for the Gilsey family, where, once again, people became ill (no one in the family itself–Mary was cooking for the house staff). Once again Mary decamped, and got a job in Tuxedo Park, NY (yes, where the tuxedo was created). Within two weeks a member of the household staff came down with typhoid and was hospitalized. This time the staff member died, and again, Mary departed ahead of inquiry. Eventually, Mary wound up in toney Oyster Bay, Long Island, working for banker Charles Warren in a rented summer cottage. When more than half the people in the family came down with typhoid, the property’s owner became involved. Aside from the awfulness of the illness itself, the outbreak brought down the property value: typhoid was considered, at the time, to be a disease that only poor people in squalid circumstances got. Worrying that potential renters would believe he had a “sick” house, the owner had the pipes tested, looking for the possibility that the property itself was the culprit. The pipe and house came up clean. They had to look elsewhere.

So the owner of that Oyster Bay property hired an investigator, George Soper, to figure out how disease had come to his house in Oyster Bay. Backtracking, Soper could find only one person, an Irish cook who fitted a specific physical description, who had been at the site of all the outbreaks; Mary changed her name from job to job, but her accent and her description made her fairly easy to trace. Eventually Soper tracked her to  the city, working for a family on Park Avenue.

Their meeting did not go well.

We forget, these days, that when Mary Mallon was told that she was a carrier, many people didn’t believe in germ theory. The idea that there were little thingies in your body which could not only cause disease but could somehow leap to other people’s bodies and make them sick, was fantastic. Mary Mallon certainly didn’t believe it: she threatened Soper with a carving fork. She refused to give urine or stool samples. Without Mary’s cooperation Soper had to establish an airtight history, and he did it. Over five years, members of seven out of the eight families Mary Mallon had worked for had contracted typhoid. Mary, her livelihood imperiled, denied any possible involvement: typhoid was everywhere, the food must have been contaminated by someone else, this was a plot to implicate her, a poor, innocent domestic worker… and Irish to boot. (Anti-Irish prejudice was still a thing at the beginning of the 20th century.)

Having no luck trying to deal with Mary Mallon, Soper went to the department of Public Health. They went all in and arrested her: she was forced into an ambulance by five policeman and a female doctor (who had to sit on her). At the hospital she was forced to give samples. They were found to be teeming with typhoid bacteria.

Public Health was a new thing in 1907, and I don’t think there had ever been a case like Mary Mallon’s before to establish precedent. Mallon made it clear she didn’t believe she was a carrier and would not cooperate; when doctors decided that the likeliest reservoir of bacteria in her system was her gallbladder, and suggested having it removed could solve the problem, Mallon refused.* The DPH and the legal system was convinced she posed a danger to the community, and she was sentenced to quarantine on an island in the East River. There she lived, giving stool and urine samples three times a week (perhaps someone thought she might magically test negative some day? In any event, it did not happen). Mallon could not do the work she did best (apparently she was a very good cook) and was living on the verge of poverty when George Soper visited and suggested that he would write a book about her case and give her half the proceeds. Rather than seeing this as a unique business opportunity, Mary locked herself in the bathroom until he left: understandably she detested being called Typhoid Mary.

In 1910 Mary was released from quarantine on the condition that she never work again as a cook, and that she take pains to avoid communication of disease to others (it is reported that Mary Mallon didn’t see much point in washing her hands until she thought they were dirty… and they didn’t look dirty after she used the toilet, so why wash then?). Quarantine had been hard on her: she was used as a guinea pig with trials of various medications, and non-typhoid illness was ignored. I suspect she would have promised anything to get off the island and back to something like a normal life. Once back in the city Mary found work as a laundress, but it paid only half of what she could make as  a cook, and she didn’t like the work. After a year or so she started cooking again, using assumed names. Staffing agencies wouldn’t hire her, so she went directly to the kitchens of hotels and restaurants, and predictably, sadly, everywhere she worked there were typhoid outbreaks.

In 1915 Mallon went to work in the kitchen of the Sloane Hospital for Women. Patients got sick. Two died. George Soper, Ace Typhoid Investigator, identified Mary Mallon. She was again arrested, and again sentenced to quarantine on North Brother Island, where she stayed for the next 23 years. She was given a cottage to live in, and wound up working in a laboratory on the island as a technician.

Public opinion, which had initially seen Mary Mallon as a villain–not just disease, but that carving fork! the swearing and fighting back!–later reversed, and there was some sympathy for a woman who, through no fault of her own,  found herself a public danger and unable to do the one thing she was demonstrably good at. Mary Mallon had a stroke in 1932 and died in 1938 at the age of 69. The nickname she hated is still in use, associated with recklessness, callousness, and the spreading of disease. Poor Mary.

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*gallbladder surgery was not the commonplace is is now. Mallon could legitimately have feared that she would die on the table.