[Steppes] RE: Living in the past

[AlKudsi at aol.com]

Of course, there have been a number of successful groups that practiced 
purity/ chasity/virginity as a part of their religion, not the least, the Catholic 
Church.  The key to their survival is that those groups have select members 
who give up their procreation rights in order to make themselves instruments of 
their idea of God, a living conduit of prayer and good works for those without 
the discipline and will to follow in their footsteps. Those that don't have 
what it takes are, of course, considered somewhat lesser, but support those who 
seek the ideal.  That, of course, gives you the best of both worlds -- 
species continuity and those who seek the ideal.  My own beliefs run counter to this 
philosophy, but far be it from me to prevent or even look down on those who 
follow it...as long as they give me the same latitude. 

Of course, we digress a long way away from vegetarianism due to the quality 
of food during the past.  My counter to that is that, if you check, except 
during peak growing seasons, the vegetables weren't all that much better off and 
were fairly limited too.  Between smoking, salting, drying and other forms of 
preserving, meat and vegetables could be kept reasonably well for a season...my 
own grandmother used to tell me about pickling pork, smoking beef and storing 
it either in salt (ugh, the worst of both worlds) or in vinegar, and other 
ways to preserve meat before refrigeration, not to mention canning vegetables.  
But that is for a season -- heaven help you if there were floods, droughts, or 
incursions of insects.  

Getting back to the original piece of this thread, it sounds as if the 
Colonial recreationists neglected to follow through correctly with their own 
practices.  You do hear stories of such maggoty food on board ships, especially when 
provisions got wet, but properly prepared and stored foods could be kept quite 
edible.  In my cooking research, quite a number of cookbooks contain ways to 
remove salt from meat, reconstitute dried meat, and to balance vinegar or wine 
used to preserve meat.  

All this is making me hungry, however, and it has been WAY too long since 
I've had one of Michael's steaks!!

Saqra

P.S.  If there is any GROUP that could survive in the past, I would think 
SCAns would be that group.  We have archers who could bring down wild game, 
herbalists to conjure up cures, cooks to prepare food and store it, vinters and 
brewers to make the food more palatable, spinners/dyers/weavers to make cloth, 
leatherworkers to tan, prepare and use hides, fighters to protect the others, 
bards and poets to pass down lore from one generation to the next with the help 
of scribes as well as entertain and teach, and a myriad of other arts.  The 
key is to work as a group...the description of civilization.  That doesn't mean 
I want to give up my A/C, modern conveniences, computers, thousands of books, 
and modern medicine -- just that as a group, we are better prepared than most!