The other day I found myself in an antique/junk store staring at a huge old iron kettle, and I wondered out loud how many one could feed using that for soup. A man next to me, who looked to be in his 70s, said: that’s not for soup; that’s for rendering hog fat!
He went on: when he was a kid in West Texas, they would slaughter the hog, put the fat in an iron kettle and boil it. It would produce cracklings for cornbread, lard for baking, and the rest would be mixed with lye to make soap. “That stuff would get you clean, I can tell you,” he added.
I found myself a bit overwhelmed at the strange reality of standing next to a man, a merely thirty years my senior, who used to make his soap rather than buy it at the grocery store. What an image of how standards of living have changed in such a short period of time—owing entirely to the vibrancy of the market economy in making and delivery products and acting as the mechanism that allows for the wider and wider expansion of the division of labor.
I asked him if he would go back to those days, given that moral values were said to be much better then than now, and family and community much tighter. He answered: moral values weren’t any better then than now, and family and communities have always had their ups and downs, but the difference was this: they were desperately poor. There was no romance in that. No one is that poor today. True, his grandkids don’t know the value of the dollar, he added, but he would never wish such poverty on anyone.
