Luxury and the consumption of labor.
By Lisa Wade, PhD
I came across this fascinating poster advertising tea at The Coffee Bean in Irvine, CA. The ad features tea leaves balled up into small tea “pearls” and spilled into a person’s palm. It reads:
Three minutes to fragrant perfection.
It takes a full day to hand-roll 17 ounces of our Jasmine Dragon Pearl Green Tea. But in just three minutes you can watch these aromatic pearls unfurl gracefully into one of the world’s most soothing and delicious teas.
This ad suggests that others’ toil should enhance one’s experience of pleasure. The fact that it takes a significant amount of human labor to “hand-roll” tea leaves into balls — an action that is in no way asserted to change the taste of the tea — is supposed to make the tea moreappealing and not less. We are supposed to enjoy not just the visual, but the fact that others worked hard to produce it for us. A whole day of their labor for just three minutes of curly goodness.
This is a rather stunning value pervading U.S. culture. Luxury may be defined not only as pleasure, or as the consumption of the scarce, but as the “unfurling” of others’ hard work. What could be more luxurious than the casual-and-fleeting enjoyment of the hard-and-long labor of others?
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
i saw this post like five years ago, and i still think about it weekly, literally, if not more often. luxury as the knowledge - and delight in the knowledge - that you’re undoing someone’s work.
I recently read “Consider The Fork” by Bee Wilson (excellent book, something I really recommend) and this topic came up a lot. The book is a history of cooking utensils, essentially, looking out circumstances shaped them, and how they in turn shaped what we eat.
And there’s this very persistent theme – that there are always a handful of dishes that go out of style once technological innovations turn up that make them simple to create. The evolution of the balloon whisk wrecked everyone’s taste for a “Dish of Snow” (basically egg whites whipped for a day until stiff by other people) in the seventeenth century and the
food processor meant that all of the popularity of molded mousses evaporates overnight in the eighties.
Especially in the case of food, we seem to love the suffering of other people and find it not just an addition to our pleasure, but in many cases the entirety of it.
There’s also the thing where people view food made with difficulty as more “authentic” - I have a recipe book which suggests hand-whipping egg whites for a pavlova. Spoiler: I did this, one Christmas in America, because I didn’t own an electric beater, and it was a bitch and a half and I never did it again and also my arms fell off. It didn’t taste any better, of course. But the book suggests - playfully, I think, but there all the same - that doing it that way is more “real”. Even when modern technology or methods get better results, it’s often seen as cheating. And I think this is also about class, in some ways, because when you’re poor you just don’t have the time to do things the “proper” way.
this is also why white europeans eat bland food—up until the 17th century european elites were eating meals with complex and contrasting flavor profiles due to the heavy use of very expensive spices. but starting around 1700, the growth of european colonialism meant that sugar and spices entered europe in huge quantities, making them much cheaper.
then all of the sudden, when everyone could have spices, they weren’t special anymore. the french especially pulled back hard from the prolific use of spices and pursued simpler, “elegant” flavor profiles.
[this info is basically a very condensed version of this fantastic npr article which also goes into detail about the influence of religion as well!]
I think this is very important to look at and critique both in fiction and in activism.
This is such a fascinating critique of the existence of luxury
I just realized how fucking disgusting it is that it’s considered healthy and normal for teenage boys to eat everything ever yet teenage girls are obviously also growing but are fucking dieting all the time and shamed for eating while they’re growing
That’s not even the half of it because
- often when a teenager (male or female) puts on some fat it’s in preparation for a growth spurt. Grownups know this.
- teenagers grow in weird gawky ways, like a girl’s hips will spread out and look “fat” until her legs get longer, or they’ll shoot up super tall and then slowly put on muscle and fat. Grownups know this.
- it’s very common for a women’s body weight to fluctuate plus or minus 5% with her menstrual cycle
but in the diet mentality all of these things are considered personal moral failures, a failure of control, when controlling it is literally impossible. I am so incredibly saddened by women who weigh themselves multiple times a week and fuss over ten freaking pounds when that’s well within the bounds of menstrual fluctuation + just-ate-lunch. It’s horrible.
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
– Naomi Wolf
Grown ups really do not know this. I tell this to parents at least once a week, your child is sleeping/moody/putting on weight because their body is preparing to more or less jump the Grand Canyon of maturation stages. Hormone changes start a full YEAR before first menses.
My own mother, who works in the medical field and has worked solely for OB/GYN for the last 16 years, gave me grief about all of those things. And she knew about hormone level changes and weight distribution changes and she STILL did it. Don’t think hard facts will outweigh societal norms. Keep talking about it until they can’t ignore the facts
Eat!!! Food !!
