Do You Really Want To Return To the Past?

All eras have to be judged in perspective; after all, a thousand years ago people could never envision the things of today; in fact, neither could people from even a hundred years ago. Remember, in the more distant past, if you wanted to eat, you had to go find food, and not at the local grocery or convenience store either. If you wanted water, you had to go get it, either from a well, stream or pond. If you wanted hot water, you had to heat it, and not in the microwave or on a stove top where you flipped a switch, but you had to actually build a fire, you know, with wood and brush. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of those who want to return to the more distant past would not find such practices as quaint as they seem to think other things were back then. Like it, not like it, it's called "civilization" folks, and it has seen mankind develop procedures or devices in many parts of the world to make human life easier. Now, I'll bet you wouldn't want someone to call you lazy the next time you walked into the kitchen and turned on the hot water faucet, but that wouldn't necessarily surprise me, with some of this reactionary nonsense being espoused by an element of the country.

The other day I was having some medical tests done and there were two younger nurses talking about bread, and the one mentioned she needed to have several loaves on hand for some company she expected soon. I couldn't help but say to them, "When I was a kid, you wouldn't have been able to do that. When you bought bread on a Monday, it would already start to get stale by Tuesday and most certainly by Wednesday, depending upon the time of year" (hot, humid conditions made bread go bad more quickly). Bakeries had "day old stores," as they were frequently called back then, because they picked up bread from stores that hadn't been sold after one day on the self, which they then sold for reduced prices in these stores. If you bought bread in one of these stores, you had to look to be sure it didn't already have mold developing; that is, unless you planned on making your own penicillin. The two nurses said they had heard it was like that "in their parents' time," and in spite of the three of us agreeing that we aren't exactly sure that we're completely confident in the preservatives they use today, none of us decided we wanted to go back  Sometimes we need to remember that about other things too.

WORD HISTORY:
Mush-The ultimate origin of this word is unclear, but it goes back to Old Germanic "moes," which seems to have meant "food." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "mos," which meant "food, porridge." It later became part of the compound "appelmos,"  which meant "applesauce" (close relative German still has "Apfelmus" ("applesauce"), as in the English form and some other Germanic language forms, the meaning of "porridge" led to the additional meaning "pureed food;" thus the "applesauce" meaning. This led to the more modern version "mush;" that is, "cooked cornmeal," but it can also be used in reference to just about any "sticky, gooey" substance. Other Germanic languages have: German "Mus" (puree, and the more limited use, 'jam'), Low German "Moos" (porridge, mush), Dutch has "moes" (porridge, pulp, puree), Danish, Norwegian and Swedish all have "mos" (puree). Apparently Frisian no longer uses a form of the word, nor does Icelandic.