how should/could laundry work?
how should/could laundry work?
Under communism, how do we clean our clothes?
- It's not really efficient for every housing unit to have its own washing machine let alone dryer
- some people can dry clothes on lines but some can't
- Washing clothes by hand sucks
- Laundromats suck
- Industrialized clothes washing? I have no direct experience with this
And it needs so much water.
To my mind laundry is one of the most intractable issues.
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Probably just do commcerial laundries. For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers. You bag up your clothes at the end of the week, they pick up the bags, wash everything, and send it back to you the next day or whatever. It's been handled at all levels from individual mostly women doing laundry for clients to pretty substantial operations serving large numbers of people at once.
Right now hospitals and hotels have laundry systems with pretty high throughput. It's very doable and largely a solved problem.
For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers
For rich people sure. But for normal people?
Yeah, pretty normal people. Doing laundry by hand is really labor intensive and you have to have fuel to heat water. It was worth it for relatively poor urban people to have someone do their laundry for them in many times and places. Like economically having one person heat a whole bunch of water at once just made more sense. If you did it at home you'd have to do laundry plus all your other daily tasks.
During the colonization of the American West, who did your laundry mostly depended on your marital status. Since laundry was "women's work", bachelors wouldn't do it. But there weren't a lot of women around during the early era of colonization, so you got Chinese immigrants (largely from Hong Kong) who would establish these commercial laundries to cater to all the single men who couldn't or wouldn't do their own laundry (it was also very time-consuming and arduous work). American racism against Chinese immigrants who held these jobs led to things like the avowedly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which was a labor organization that fought to keep these jobs legal.
Meat was also for rich people 500 years ago, but the wonders of industrialization led to many previously unattainable goods to become widespread.
Such a nonsense take, chickens and cattle were very widespread, as well as fishing. Inuit famously had a diet of almost entirely meat, though of course it wasn't healthy and there were many vitamin issues.
This definitely varies from culture to culture, but being Spanish, I can tell you that meat was more often than not a cause for celebration, to the point that the pig slaughter was a community event that took place in the main square of the village. Data for meat consumption over time in the former Russian Empire and the USSR also suggests that meat wasn't a thing people used to have often, and whose access increased with industrialization.
I don't even know how you'd begin to measure meat consumption when basically everyone owned chickens and reporting them would be bureaucratically impossible until the modern era
Even modern peasantry often have cattle for milk and chicken eggs all the time.
There's variety within any profession like this, at many points in history it hasn't been the norm for normal people in urban settings to cook their own food or have cooking facilities at home, instead they purchased food from people whos job it was to cook.
But there would still be a difference between a business serving everyday people and personal chefs/cooking staff.
people in urban settings to cook their own food
I've already solved this problem in my mind. Got the basics of a system worked out for neighbourhood cafeterias.
You can still cook at home if/when you want to, but you can also attend the local cafs. There is 1 caf per x population, adjusted according to how heavily used they are. You can eat there or pickup (returnable, standardized) tupperwears for a middle ground if you prefer to have private at-home meal. I think it would be a great benefit especially for families. Reduce the amount of time you need to spend at the grocery store, cooking, cleaning, dishes etc. Would overall reduce the amount of food waste at both the individual kitchen and the grocery store level.
The food would be prepared according to healthy guidelines. We also have some sort of accounting for regional availability of foods. The selections would be subject to some sort of democratic control so that people could get food they liked. Regionalism would be accounted for. Some kitchen teams might decide to be extremely specialized in a given cuisine. I'm sure at the end of the days we'd have something that takes things like lent, ramadan, whatever, into consideration.
You don't have to go to your own neighbourhood caf, you can go to other ones too for variety or it's more convenient for you. Maybe there is some sort of reservation system (website/phone/walk-in) so that food can be produced in correct amounts. But extras can always be portioned and frozen for pickup later.
For those who have extremely specific dietary requirements such as intolerance/allergy, religious, ethical, cultural, there can be specialized cafs which they can either attend physically, or if too remote, have pickup/delivery of meals. Delivery could be either at the home or to their local caf. So if you are a tiny minority vegan in a constituency which largely favors vegan-unfriendly food, the vegan kitchen can drop off meals for you at your caf and you can still go to the collective meal with everyone else.
Kitchen teams could do fun events things like swap locations, tours or guesting at other kitchens, come up with contests etc if they wanted to. In a dense urban environment you'd have lots of cafs all over the place so it wouldn't be like needing to travel a long way (unless they wanted to!). In terms of a workplace, I think you could keep some of the elements of kitchen culture that suits a certain kind of person, like competitiveness and showing off, but without it being so toxic and abusive. Because there would be many, many teams in a city, they could sort themselves by work-style preferences. Those who wanted a totally different wokrplace culture could have it.
Also include some way to teach cooking skills, particularly with an eye to preserving cultural styles of cooking. both to other professional food workers but also to whoever just wanted to learn.
This is my delicious dream.