No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

socimages

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.

proudheron

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.

leighalanna

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.

sixth-light

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.

meloromantics

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!]

watsons-solarpunk

I think this is very important to look at and critique both in fiction and in activism.

essayofthoughts

Y’all are focussing on the “suffering” aspect but uh… like a lot of the time that wasn’t the factor? It was he time and the expense that goes into it - spending all day whipping egg whites means that you have the time to do that, meaning you don’t have to work on other things .’. are wealthy enough to have free time or, if you get another to do it, you’re saying you’re wealthy enough to have servants and, more than that, wealthy enough to have one specific servant spend a day doing that.

Mousses, spicy foods, all these things its not just due to the fucking suffering. God, tumblr I swear, you like to make everyone out to be 100% awful but like seriously look at your fucking history you goddamn morons.

Seriously.

It’s due to the expense and it’s a show of wealth. It’s a way of going “look at me, I can afford to set aside a servant to do this, look at me I can set aside the money to by ridiculous spices you’ve never heard of.”

You know when the pineapple was first brought over to Europe no one would eat it? They just kept it there, in there homes, until it went off, as a way of going “look, I’m so wealthy I can afford to have this exotic foreign fruit shipped to me and/or buy it.” (seriously, go Here. This guy literally makes medieval food for a living, he researches it and creates mixes so you can try it at home yourself. He knows what he’s on about.)

Yeah that is problematic as fuck - so look at the actual fucking history rather than just go “oh they all want us to suffer”.

No. Its not about the suffering, it’s about the expense. These things were all shows of wealth. Its for a similar reason that for a very long time women were considered especially attractive if they carried some extra weight - it meant they were well-fed, that they lived comfortably. It indicated wealth.

Modern times… maybe for some people the suffering is a factor and sure, that is bullshit. But much of the time, especially in history? It’s a factor of wealth, ask any historian or archaeologist. And that’s is own problem. Check the history kids. Don’t leap to assumptions and bandwagon. Do some research.

notyourexrotic

Well it’s a bit of both isn’t it? Like, they’re so wealthy they can afford to *not care* if people are suffering for their luxury. Which is a dynamic that gets played out all the damn time up till now (see: how most luxury goods are made, or if you want a fictional example, the plot of the Hunger Games).

essayofthoughts

Yeah, but as with Hunger Games, to many of those giving these shows of wealth, the suffering is secondary - it isn’t the goal? In some cases it will be because suffering keeps people trodden down and all, but that isn’t the sole reason. Admittedly, this is largely due to a certain degree of entitlement and self-centredness on their parts but, as with the example of the pineapple that I gave… sometimes it is really only going to be a show of wealth, a way of showing off one’s status. Those aristocrats and, later, the wealthy merchants, who kept Pineapples for talking points weren’t about who grew them (be that far across the ocean or by a valued retainer managing a hothouse), It was entirely about the expense.

The early reblogs of this post all seem to suggest that the suffering is the be-all and end all, but it isn’t? The show of wealth - the need to have this wealth, the need to show this wealth - are also equal causes and should be tackled as well, beyond just “oh you want people to suffer, you’re horrible”. We get that, we get taught that as kids. What we don’t get taught is “showing off - showing off wealth - at the expense of others will hurt others” and that, hell, showing off wealth alone can be harmful because it can make people feel lesser - create an us vs. them dynamic. We aren’t taught this one, which is why it ends up not always factoring in for people, especially when they’re giving a show of wealth. Indeed, it’s probably why it didn’t factor in for those people reblogging?

The point I’m trying to make is, unlike what the early reblogs would have everyone believe, its not just the suffering. Often, the suffering&/effort isn’t the focus when the suffering&/effort is present.

Often people are self centred pieces of shit and its all about showing off the wealth, especially if they’re talking in a historical context - as some of the reblogs above do.

There’s certain assumptions and judgements made here that completely disregard other motivations.

tobermoriansass

man…. only one person from what i can tell, mentions suffering in this thread. everything else is about the labour that goes into producing food being treated as something that makes a food more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ and therefore that much more of a luxury commodity, because the idea is that someone personally is serving you on the other end, someone is personally sitting down to hand roll your 17 ounces of jasmine pearl green tea so that you personally can enjoy it instantly in the luxury of your home, isn’t it wonderful?

it’s a pretty common advertising tactic, to try and create a more personalized relationship with the consumer - but the thing it obscures is the violence inherent in that relationship and fails to ask questions like ‘is this person doing this one day of painful labour being adequately compensated for their labour’, ‘is this person doing labour so alienated from what they are creating that they will never get to enjoy the fruits of their labour’, ‘is this person being exploited’. nine times out of ten the answer is yes.

and look, even if you want to get into talking about the past and talking about the time and effort that went into creating those dishes - nine times out of ten those dishes were being made by the rich who could afford the servants to stand around in kitchens beating eggs to infinity or preparing dishes that mean you stand around in the kitchen for hours on end. even if you’re talking about pineapples, the whole concept of expense again fails to ask: what is being hidden? and what’s being hidden is the cost of shipping this across the sea, of the sailors and sailors boys who sailed these ships across the sea and (probably) never got to enjoy pineapples; it obscures the people who grew and harvested those pineapples and fails to ask, again, whether or not they were adequately compensated and whether or not they wanted to grow pineapples in the first place or were forced into it by trade and tariff mechanisms just to make ends meet in the first place (c.f. indian farmers being forced into growing cash crops to export to britain because of the exploitative taxes and being left therefore without actual food to eat, also the exploitative history of the sugar trade and the west indies).

so no its not exactly about suffering, but it is about human labour and the prestige that being able to afford that kind of human labour involves that goes into positioning something as luxury - i am so rich i can afford to pay for a human to labour and create these frivolities that i can consume at the drop of a hat, which might bring me only a few moments of pleasure, which might not be sustainable, but look here i can afford it. so in a way, yes it is about suffering. you don’t have to suffer to own this, but you’re rich enough to afford to pay someone else to do the suffering and labour for you.

cosmictuesdays

One question I always try to ask: what goes into making this possible?

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.