Thursday, February 10, 2011
At work I am looking at bags of animal bone from sites in Phoenix, dating between 1920 and 1945. I open each bag, sort the bone into identifiable and unidentifiable piles. The identifiable bone is then sorted by animal species and meat cut. I enter the information into a spread sheet, recording the weight, butchering method, and a retail meat cut ranking. Science!
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The residents of the neighborhoods were mostly eating beef, followed by pork. Very small amounts of chicken, mutton, and geese. Occasionally I find some fish bones or pigeons (not sure if the latter were eaten). When I am finished analyzing the bone I will write a chapter on meat consumption, adding in some information I am collecting from contemporary newspaper accounts. Science!
I will admit, it gets tedious after a couple of weeks. And the bone dust and dirt make me very sneezy. I hope whatever I write is interesting.
In other news, I took my mother to the supermarket last night and she ran into things three times with the cart. The third time I said, unhelpfully, "be more careful" and she snapped, "I can't help it." She becomes so focused on getting to the yoghurt or the toilet paper, that anything in the way (including other customers) deserves to be run over. I have been really embarrassed when she literally bumps people to get them to move out of her way. 'Excuse me," she will say. I don't know what the hurry is, except my mother has always acted a bit odd around strangers.
