Food advice for time travellers
Today I started on my big winter stockup. One of the interesting aspects of life in a cool climate is that there is a distinctive winter and flu is a very common side-effect. I don’t drive, and I can’t keep calling on friends whenever things get low, so I do a giant stock-up at the beginning of the season (I do the same just before Christmas – but that’s for different reasons). Anyhow, replacing the flour and sugar and etceteras I used up just before Passover got me thinking.
If you had your very own time machine, the kitchen and the food storage areas of a house wouldn’t be a bad place to land, if you were to go time travelling. Not only would you not starve, you would have some indication of when and where you were.
My first check would be to see if there are any potatoes and what sort of beans are there. Lots of people keep potatoes and beans around, because they’re handy backup. Not only were potatoes and most of our modern bean varieties not known in Europe until the Americas were settled, they didn’t instantly come into common use, so a sack of potatoes is an indicator of you not having travelled any earlier than the eighteenth century. If the potatoes are in plastic, then you’ve hardly time travelled at all.
Actually, my first checks would be for electrical appliances (twentieth century) and cast iron stoves (mostly 19th century and later) and ways of keeping food cold. Hmm. I can see I need to make a diagram to take with me on my time-travel. If I do a series of checks, I can know a bunch about where I’ve ended up, and if my time machine has completely stuffed up and landed me four houses down, at least I won’t try assaying “Ave” and acting as if I’m in Ancient Rome.
May 6th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Great post. We still haven’t the potatoes from Pesach. The advantage of potatoes is that you don’t need water. The other starches, like rice, pasta, all need to be cooked in water, and you can bake potatoes.