Pork and Sauerkraut

 My husband makes a very good winter-time dish, pork and sauerkraut, which could also have been made in the Middle Ages.  It takes him a couple of hours to make.  Onions, apples, sauerkraut, and caraway seeds are fried up together with pork loin, then it's baked with some citrus juice (one could substitute white wine, though we don't).  These are all ingredients readily available in the Middle Ages, except for the juice (medieval people would have used wine).  Though it takes a while to make, mostly because of the time to slice everything up, he knows that by making a double batch we can have it again with no more effort than reheating.

Okay, but let's think about what he is not doing.  He's not planting, tending, harvesting, and drying the onions.  He's not tending the apple trees and picking the apples, going over them carefully before storing them.  He doesn't plant, tend, and harvest cabbage, chop it and mix it with salt, and let it ripen into sauerkraut, instead just opening a jar.  He doesn't slaughter the pig or cut it up.  He doesn't even harvest the caraway seeds.

So if you added up how much time all those things take, maybe rather than thinking of it as a 2-hour supper we might think of it as a 6-week supper.  And we aren't even including how long it would take to gather the wood for the cooking fire.

Somebody certainly does all those things so that he can go to the grocery store and get nicely trimmed pork loin, apples and onions, and a jar of sauerkraut, plus juice and a little jar of caraway seeds.  If they're working all day in the sauerkraut factory, how do they ever have time to do anything other than eat sauerkraut for supper?

Now in fact it's not as amazing as it may seem.  Part of it is the increase in what the economists call worker productivity, how much each worker can produce in an hour, which has been increasing steadily for over two centuries, largely due to machines that do a lot of the labor.  Part of it is also division of labor, where people who are just doing one thing can do it more efficiently than those who do that thing occasionally.

Now in fact in most pre-modern societies, including parts of the Third World today, people basically spend a major part of their waking hours involved in food:  finding it, cultivating it, harvesting it, storing it, cooking it.  Ha, ha, you say, reaching for a bag of chips and a tall cool one, I spend much of my day involved with food too.

But it's different.  We don't have to think about food because we know it will be there when we want it.  Our relationship with food, for most people in the modern West, is that we have too much of it and "need to cut down."  We're all living like high medieval aristocrats, not having to work to get our food, just making sure the "little people" are producing it, even eating more than we need.

An ordinary grocery store would have been beyond the dreams of avarice for even wealthy medieval people.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.