The cover bills the book as "old world recipes, hospitality, barns & farmhouses..." (much more); this is partly true, but it's equally striking as a slice of 1970s half-measures.
The authors left the US and toured Greece and Turkey, Yugoslavia and Switzerland, on a motorcycle in 1971 & 1972; they had no plan but to get in touch with a highly developed attunement of humankind and nature
. They brought back pictures and recipes; they considered settling as mostly-subsistence farmers in Northern Europe, but didn't.
It's not as annoying a book as some of these are, largely because it's not idiotically romantic. They point out that the stone walls that charm them in Greece are horribly vulnerable to the frequent earthquakes, for instance. They notice that goat-culture around the Mediterranean is a final and destructive stage - goats browse practically anything to death, and nearly all the wood and soil is therefore gone, but because the wood and soil are gone goats are about the only way left for agriculture to support people.¹ (This is, I deduce, why Heifer International teaches people to bring their animals prunings instead of letting the animals browse - more work, but safer in the long run.) They're wonderfully full of the ineffable joy of simple pleasures, which I am hardly against, but am a little suspicious of in tourists. (They were hardy tourists, but not up to finishing an apprenticeship as a white cooper, for instance. Began it, though.)
What they liked that I admire, and am glad they photographed, is the brilliant handmade work of people who are very nearly self-sufficient. A good stercorary is a worthy thing. The canny use of light, irregular wood to brace Mediterranean roofs is a great art; so is the Lapp and Norwegian and Swiss use of enormous quantities of enormous timbers to build complex buildings that last for centuries against snowfall, avalanches, and bears.
Clever ideas from the last: a bow-tie-shaped floorboard running the length of the house to handle seasonal compression; logging only in winter, when the freeze and the snow cover protect the delicate alpine topsoil - otherwise dragging logs gives one runnels in the soil, which tend to compound themselves even in less challenging climates.
The Turkish drop-spindle is, they report, easier than the Greek for the beginner to use, and when full it slips apart and comes out of an already-wound ball of yarn.
¹Which came first?
ISBN: 0-517-514206
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). , Technology. | TrackBack