It has strong soil preferences - acidic, well-drained, deep and not too heavy.
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In order to turn the plant into tea, the leaves must be harvested and dried. (Sometimes fermented. There's a lot of types of tea and a lot of ways to process it.)
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If your chilly and damp or icy and cold country has access to tea - if tea is common, available to most social classes, and popular - then there's a whole history of trade and social development (or possibly colonialism) that goes along with it.
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Either that, or you mean something entirely different when you say "tea."
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The same goes for spices - pepper, for example - sugar, coffee, chocolate.
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Climate, trade, and technology limits both *what* a certain group has access to, *how much of it* they have access to, and *which sub-groups* of that group have MOST access.
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The rarer a substance, the more likely it is to be an expensive luxury. Without refrigeration, cream in winter? Rare, and often accessible only to the wealthy. Even milk: a modern cow gives milk for about ten months, but that depends on if it's appropriately fed.
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Technologies of preservation determine what food is available, and to whom. Hot-housing gives fresh fruit in winter, but not a lot of it.
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Every item of food, every item of clothing, how much of these are available and to whom: each of these are a storehouse of information on climate, trade, supply, and LABOUR.
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Before the invention of the spinning jenny, cloth production was incredibly labour-intensive. Every household, at least in temperate climes, was its own miniature cloth workshop.
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Clothing wasn't trivial either to make, repair, or replace, and became even more expensive if you needed good quality dye. You couldn't simply order three new coats and have them ready the very next day unless you could pay a lot for both materials and a hell of a lot of labour.
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So many assumptions about logistics, technology, and trade are baked into our own current interactions with the world of food, clothing, and communications.
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I eat meat every day. I put milk and honey on my porridge. My bread is white and soft. I can have, if I want, new clothes more than twice a year. I can send a letter anywhere in the world, almost, and be reasonably sure it will arrive - and at that, within the month.
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It doesn't take me a full day of walking to get to the nearest large town, and if I want to cook with ginger and cardamom and cinnamon and nutmeg, it's not a huge expense that's only available when certain trading concerns arrive.
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But all of that is predicated on certain logistical and technological assumptions about the world I live in. Which are not, in fact, true for everyone in it, even now.
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Though, honestly, the history of things like food supply - famine and responses to food crisis - like trade, like the technologies of transport and preservation, are fascinating and enriching.
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Did you know, for example, it's harder to preserve mutton by salting and brining than either beef or pork? That salt fish will spoil much sooner that salt beef, even if both are preserved with every attention to good practice? That lime juice has much less vitamin C than lemon?
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And that lime juice exposed to air and run through copper piping has virtually no antiscorbutic powers at all, which fact helped obscure the causes and cures of scurvy so that it continued to be a disease of sailors *long* after the first proofs that fresh fruit would cure it?
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Basically, society as we know it is underpinned by logistics. And technology that supports the logistics.
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...Since this is more popular than I thought it'd be, and speaking of logistics:https://ko-fi.com/hawkwing_lb
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An addendum: I'm not annoyed when novels don't address this sort of thing with detailed monographs - that's not what novels are for. But the sense of the world as a connected system? That's important to my suspension of disbelief.
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"Land is cheap and labour is expensive because we're recovering from a plague that caused Great Mortality." "Salt's expensive this year because Big-Salt-Exporter is being blockaded by their enemies." "Oo, coffee? Who did you rob THIS week to be able to afford that?"
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And with that, I should probably take myself off to do paying work.
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...I'm still distracted, so have an extract from the standing rules of the British Navy's Victualling Office, first issued 27 June 1716:
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"For Beef The oxen are to be haltered in the slaughterhouse (and not suffered to run loose about the same, as hath been heretofore practiced to the great prejudice of the meat), and to hang twenty-four hours after slaughtered to cool before cut out...
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"So the four quarters being weighed, and having taken out the four marrow bones and four shin bones, for which eight pound is allowed in each [cw/.], every hundredweight is to be cut into twenty-six four-pound pieces...
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..the randers and messers taking care it be done with as little waste and scraps as may be; thus messed, to be well rubbed with a mixture of two thirds white and one-third French Bay salt, and so stowed into bins, with two-thirds white and one-third Bay salt between the layers...
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...where they are to lie five or six days, but rather five; and then to be taken out on the tables and well rubbed again with two-thirds Bay and one-third white salt, and stowed close into the cask with two-thirds Bay and one-third white salt between each layer...
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...every other layer being trod close down; which cask being bunged up and made very tight, are to remain so for at least twelve days, after which they are to be laid with their bung downwards twenty-four hours to drain.
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"And so the pickle is to be put to them, that being well boiled and clean scummed, and so strong that a four-pound piece of beef will swim on the top when cold...
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