The yoghurt has got me thinking about how much cultural (excuse pun) and intellectual capital we're losing.
I had to learn from my mum how make and mend clothes, but would need to go back to my grandmother for pickling or preserving fruit. It was my great grandmother who would have known how to keep chooks or grow veggies, and I'd probably have to go back to a great-great grandma to know how to help birth a baby.
And I can do a myriad things that they could never have even imagined (blogging being an obvious one). But I can't relate epics around a campfire (I can't even tell a good joke - as you'd have witnessed from my first post). And for all my internet research fetish, I can't tell you what local plants are edible. And if the power went down for any length of time, I wouldn't even know where to go to find out. And I'd have no idea how to find my way home if needed to navigate by the stars.
Yet most of these things would have been common knowledge for my ancestors and others, refined through many generations of evolution. Presumably, if I went far back enough, my ancestors knew how to hunt, survive ice ages.
My tentative steps to reclaim this have been paltry by comparison. I've learned to sharpen kitchen knives. Grown sweet basil from seed. And then there's that continuing yoghurt experiment...
1 comment:
Perhaps we have to accept that there are different types of knowledge. Apparently kids today have much higher IQs than children tested in the 1950s. Many of today's problems are the result of mankind' successful search for knowledge.
It is sad that we have lost some skills that our forefathers had but let' s hope that we are also ideally placed in time to contribute with the knowlege we DO have.
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