To Dye For

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Francesco Farnese by Unknown Painter at the Court of Parma (18th century)

Nowadays, subdued colors are considered proper business attire, especially for men. But to people of the Renaissance, muted, earthy shades were the colors of poverty. Noblemen, princes and high church officials wore bright colors. The brighter the color you were wearing, the more important you were.

It wasn’t until bright colors became available to the masses—with the discovery of synthetic dyes in the mid-19th century—that blacks, grays, and navy became the colors of choice for the fashionable.

Louis de Sylvestre, 1783

I learned a lot about the life of textile dyers in a fascinating book called A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, by Amy Butler Greenfield. As I’ve blogged about before, red was an extremely difficult color to obtain. It’s why popes and cardinals wore it. Deep red could be made from the ink of the murex snail (which also produced royal purple, another extremely expensive color), but it was the cochineal scale insect, discovered and stolen from the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistadors, that produced the brilliant scarlets so sought after by the wealthy.

Over the course of centuries, the life of a dyer was never a pleasant one. It was horrible work. The best dyers were highly sought after, but they lived low on the social ladder. It was extremely complicated, dangerous, and smelly work. Dyers worked with corrosive acids, poisonous salts, and steaming vats. Because bright colors faded quickly, dyers used chemical binding agents called “mordants” to prevent fading. And red wasn’t the only color fraught with danger, difficulty, or disgusting ingredients. To achieve blue, dyers used urine as an important ingredient. Indigo was harvested by slave labor, blue woad was incredibly smelly, and we already know how purple came from smooshed, rotten snails. Green (as I’ve blogged about before) was derived from a compound of arsenic.

French School, "Mary, Queen of Scots," c 1558-60

When Mary, Queen of Scots walked to the execution block in 1587, she was dressed in a black gown with a white veil. But underneath it, she wore a red satin bodice and a red velvet petticoat. That was no accident. In Tudor England, red had a rich meaning. It was the color of martyrdom and royal blood.

 

You Say Potato, I Say Don’t Eat ’em

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Albert Anker, die Kleine Kartoffelschalerin, 1886

I know, I know. Buying organic fruits and vegetables can be really expensive. I can’t afford to buy organic everything (I have three teenagers), but certain produce just skeeves me out, and I will opt not to buy it if I can’t afford the organic version (or I’ll grow it myself in the garden). I only ever buy organic versions of berries, celery, apples, carrots and grapes. And organic bananas, which are almost the same price as the regular kind, so that’s an easy one. But here’s one more you might want to add to your list: potatoes. Please, buy organic potatoes if you possibly can.

I’ve blogged before about the Irish potato famine and how susceptible potatoes are to blight, rot, fungus, and insect infestation. On the huge industrial farms where they grow nothing but potatoes, farmers use enormous amounts of chemical fertilizers, soil fumigants to control nematodes in the soil, insecticides at planting, which are absorbed by the seedlings, herbicides to control weeds, and fungicides to control blight. And then more insecticides—organophosphates to control aphids and the feared Colorado potato beetles.

In my forthcoming insect book, I talk about how the potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) may or may not have been an agent of biological warfare during World War II. The Germans accused the Allies of planning to drop thousands of Colorado potato beetles on German potato fields; the Allies denied they had such a plan. It’s no wonder the Germans feared for their Kartoffelkloesse (potato dumplings); both the adults and the larvae of this extremely destructive pest feed on potato plants so enthusiastically the plants usually die.

Michael Pollan wrote this article back in 1998, when he visited some of these industrial potato growers, fifteen thousand acre farms, where pesticide applications are managed by computer monitors. He reported how these toxic chemicals are absorbed into the potato while it’s growing, so as to kill any bug that bites into it. After harvest, the potatoes must be stored for six months in enormous sheds, to allow time for the chemicals to “fade.”

Some of the farmers Pollan interviewed admitted that they wouldn’t eat the potatoes they grew, and had their own plots for their family’s consumption.

On the flip side, it isn’t easy to grow potatoes organically. Organic farmers have certain tactics, like crop rotations to prevent a buildup of crop specific pests, and planting flowering crops to attract beneficial insects. So you see why they’d be more expensive.

As soon as my kids were old enough to understand English, I made them watch the movie Supersize Me. It was my bald-faced effort to use scare tactics to make them avoid McDonalds. It worked for several years. My youngest actually shrieked in terror when we passed a Golden Arches. Hey, you have to do what you can.

 

Le Roi, ‘e Stinks

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Henry IV, grandfather of Louis XIV, hardly ever bathed. He purportedly smelled so bad that his new queen doused herself in perfume on their wedding night to mask his smell.

Dames et Monsieurs

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The first separate toilets for men and women appeared in Paris in 1739. They did not flush.

Rickety

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Due to poor diet, poverty, and sooty air, rickets was a common affliction of the English population of the 19th century. During the Boer wars, the minimum height for British foot soldiers was five feet.

 

Source: Terrors of the Table by Walter Gratzer

Reel Bugs: The Swarm

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My loyal readers know that from time to time I review insect-themed horror films on this blog. It’s one way to understand the relationship between humans and insects. Today’s review: The Swarm (Warner Brothers, 1978).

The Swarm is about a swarm of  killer bees that terrorizes a big part of the state of Texas. Bodies pile up by the tens of thousands, mostly offscreen, but it’s actually not a very scary movie. It was directed by Irwin Allen, who had a string of seventies disaster hits that included Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno. And like those other disaster movies, it features a star-studded cast, led by Michael Caine as an entomologist, and featuring Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland with a lot of hairspray, Fred MacMurray, and Katharine Ross.

The movie opens with ominous music, and white and orange-clad guys creeping through a military building, braced to encounter enemies . . . but the scene goes on for about six minutes and all the suspense trickles away after about one. You’re actually relieved when they finally come upon all the bodies in the control room, mysteriously dead at their posts. We will eventually learn (duh) that they met their end by being stung to death by the bees.

There are several unfortunate references to “the Africans” and how they’re invading, and I didn’t see a single black actor whatsoever in this huge cast.

The script is full of awful dialogue. Michael Caine ends several scenes by shouting at Richard Widmark (who plays a general). Michael Caine is onscreen almost the entire movie, and manages somehow not to get stung once.

As the swarm (bent on revenge?) is fast-approaching the town, Olivia de Havilland as Miss Schuster, the school principal, gets a frantic call from the sheriff, telling her to get everyone inside. She delivers this speech, excruciatingly slowly, over the school’s PA system:

[Hangs up the phone in slow motion. Walks as though in a daze toward the mike, picking it up very slowly]: Attention. Attention. This is Miss Schuster. Please listen very carefully. [another pause as she gathers herself to deliver the awful news] A swarm of killer bees is coming this way.

By the time she finishes delivering the warning, a few dozen pupils have already been overcome by the bees and are lying lifeless on the sidewalk.

Entomologically speaking, the movie is, of course, absurd. Apis mellifera scutellata, popularly called the “African bee,” is just one of at least ten species of bees from Africa. Although more aggressive than European species, it does not travel en masse, harboring a grudge, intent on destroying humankind. It tends to be more easily disturbed than its European counterpart and stings more readily, but it is also a more efficient nectar gatherer and produces more than twice the amount of honey than does the European species. And it’s not a carnivore, for Pete’s sake. The movie has quite a few scenes showing the bees clustering en masse on the bodies of their victims. I’m not sure what we’re meant to think the bees are doing, and neither, I think, are the film makers.

Icky Berlin

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Eighteenth century European cities were filthy with refuse. Berlin could be smelled from six miles away.

Spot On

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Francois Boucher, "La Toilette" 1742

What was the must-have accessory for the style-conscious French courtier of the 17th century? Patches. Patches were made of black velvet, silk, or leather, and often cut into whimsical shapes like stars, circles, hearts, and moons. People stuck them to their faces with a sticky tree sap called gum mastic.

Both men and women wore patches. Smallpox, syphilis, and other dreaded diseases could leave the skin blemished, pitted, and permanently scarred, and patches could cover up the worst of the damage. But as the patch fad swept through France and other parts of Europe, people began wearing them to send messages. A woman wore a patch on her right cheek to let people know she was married. A patch near the mouth signified that a young woman was available for wooing. In England, at the height of the fad, members of one political party wore their patches on the left; another party wore them on the right. People carried around small boxes with extra patches in case one fell off, or to change them over the course of an evening, according to their whim.

Patch wearing persisted for nearly two hundred years. The craze declined by the end of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the introduction in 1798 of the smallpox vaccine, which led to a vast decrease in scarred and pitted faces in need of cover-up.

William Hogarth

A Penny for Her Thoughts

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In 1666, the beautiful Frances Stuart, mistress to Charles II, was chosen as the model for “Britannia” on the first minted coin. According to one chronicler, “It is impossible for a woman to have more beauty . . . or less wit.”