Material girls

The best part of Slavenka Draculic's book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, is the way it shows that material culture -- what you can buy -- is so integral to life. For example, under communism in Eastern Europe, at various times you could not buy much food other than onion and garlic, any sort of fashionable clothing, a washing machine or kitchen tools like toasters, or even feminine hygiene products. It might seem superficial -- who cares about clothes, people were dying -- but Draculic shows that people's inability to buy these things affected the very core of who they were and what kind of lives they could live.

Reading it has made me a little more concious of what I take for granted, from cereal in the morning to a bath at night. And it resonated with something Abigail Adams said (well, at least she said it on the HBO miniseries last week): Food is politics. When I go to the cupboard and there's no coffee, no bread, that is politics. (I'm paraphrasing.) More thoughts on Abigail Adams will be coming soon!