Book Summary: At Home
Bill Bryson’s At Home, is a look at the evolution of the rooms inside the modern house over time.
Related Book Summaries To At Home:
Happier At Home – Gretchen Rubin
The Social Animal – David Brooks
The Year Of Living Danishly – Helen Russell
Quotes from At Home:
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
At Home Book Summary Notes:
Food Safety
When canned goods first became a thing around the early nineteenth century food safety was quite a concern for the general public. The first iterations of food cans were made of iron and incredibly durable. So durable in fact the author points out that soldiers would use guns to shoot them open or the bayonets on their weapons to stab them open. The can opener wasn’t invented till 1925.
Along with impossibly difficult to open cans of food, eating used to be frought with other dangers as well. Sugar was diluted with sand or dust, tea was mixed with dirt and chalk was commonly added to milk. This all lead to the food safety standards that we all know and love today.
An Uncomfortable Bed
Beds of the nineteenth century left a lot to be desired. They were often stuffed with whatever you could get your hands on, including; straw, feathers, hair, sea moss and sawdust.
The odd collection of bedding also gave rise to the issue of bugs and rodents. Hearing of these conditions it’s no wonder that so many diseases were so easily spread.
Bathing Through The Ages
What we now know of the health benefits of keeping clean and bathing, took the bubonic plague for us to learn. Initially being unclean was a way for people to prove they were living “close to god.” Eventually the romans popularised bathing with the introduction of their grand bath houses.
Until the romans however, it was thought that bathing opened the skins pores which allowed the introduction of diseases and sickness. People believed themselves safer to be covered in dirt and sweat.
