🐾 Meet your new best friend! Choose between a dog or a cat to join you on your farm. Not just a cute companion, your pet can help gather resources like wood, stone, and forageables! Plus, you can change their appearance anytime in your journal 🐶🐱
One of the most common ways you preserve pork without refrigeration is keeping it in really salty water. This makes the pork borderline inedible because it’s so salty. What you don’t see in medieval fantasy is people soaking their meat in water for a bit before they cook it.
That’s also a reason to boil your meat though. Like yeah meat tastes better if you sear it first but sometimes you’ve gotta get that salt out.
You can also smoke your meats and make them into jerky basically. It’s not as juicy as pickling them though.
Also medieval peasants had more meat than you’d think because of these preservation methods. You can feed a pig scraps for the whole year and then butcher it at the start of winter and preserve the meat. Because of this they also often had access to lard.
Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.
These days chicken is usually the cheapest form of meat available. If someone is eating a chicken in a medieval setting though it’s either because they didn’t need that chicken anymore or because they’re rich enough to have chickens for eating.
If we’re talking mutton, European sheep are more often kept for wool or milk while middle eastern or African sheep are more often kept for eating. Europeans would of course eat sheep sometimes but it’s another one of those cases where it makes more sense to keep the animal alive rather than eating it.
Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.
Goats weren’t super popular in Europe during medieval and ancient times. Very common in the Middle East and North Africa though both for milk and for meat.
A cow or ewe must have a calf or lamb every year to produce milk. Half of those offspring will be male, and thus will not produce milk. Ergo they were eaten, because you only need one bull or ram for a much larger number of breeding females.
The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder–there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs–all the males and some of the females–would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or “baby beef”, depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.
Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that’s much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.
Pork was plentiful due in part to the large size of a sow’s litter. Over-winter one sow, and you get eight piglets or so, much more than a cow’s single calf or a ewe’s one to four lambs. Even if you didn’t keep your own sow, buying piglets to raise and fatten was common. Most medieval pigs would forage rather than being fed scraps–hence the ubiquity of swineherd as a humble occupation.
I see this post all the time and I’m so confused. Most people throughout history were busier than your average resident of a developed country is now. My primary reaction to reading about the past since I was a child has been “I’m glad I don’t live then, I’m too weak for that, I could not do that much work all the time.”
In the past things took longer to do but they often required a waiting period. You had to chop wood, put it in your stove, and light it, but it took a few hours for it to get hot enough for baking and then another hour for the bread to fully cook. History books will say things like “It took 4 hours to make a loaf of bread” but they don’t mention that you only had to do actual work for a fraction of that time and the rest could be devoted to other tasks or relaxing for a while
Employee workload has doubled or tripled because of modern technology. It makes things faster but also creates less downtime which employers have filled with more responsibilities. You can do more work in a 10 minute period if all the files are on the computer but in the olden days you got to take a short walk to the filing cabinet and let your mind wander while you thumbed through folders, which means a modern 10 minutes of work is more mentally exhausting. The amount of work one employee has to do today used to be split between 2 or 3 people. We lost those moments of downtime we used to get by having to do things the slow way
Y'all don’t know icon Allie Brosh of ‘Hyperbole and a Half’ fame?
Her heyday was 2009 - 2013; some of the people here may legit have not been born by then. (2013 is when she started withdrawing from the public. I think if she’d been able to keep posting, she’d be just as popular now, if not more so.)
She also has two books out collecting her comics: Hyperbole and a Half (which came out in 2013), and Solutions and Other Problems (which came out in 2020.) I hope one day her depression relents enough that she feels up to doing art and writing again….whether or not she she chooses to share any of it with us. (Or to do whatever now makes her happy to do, really.)
Ok, but if you’re an independent contractor in the US and this happens? Find a lawyer, because you might have just gotten a huge payday.
Your position was just referred to as employment. Independent contractors do not have employers; they do not have employment. Congrats, your contact at this company just provided evidence that you were illegally missclassified.
This contact is claiming that you have set hours you’re obligated to fulfill. Unless a work task can only be done at a set time for practical reasons (i.e. you’re an audio freelancer paid to support a live event that occurs at a particular time and requires a certain amount of pre-show setup), a company cannot set an independent contractor’s work hours. This is further evidence that you were missclassified.
The whole exchange establishes that the company is interpreting an employer-employee relationship rather than expecting a service. Discipline and potential for firing (you cannot fire an independent contractor; no longer purchasing their service is not equivalent) establish that this person views themselves as a manager. Independent contractors cannot have managers.
This one text exchange could:
Get you back pay for the full duration you’ve worked there, to bring you up to the compensation that an employee would have gotten
Get you back compensation for lost benefits that an employee would have gotten
Get you back pay for the additional self-employment taxes the company should have covered
Get the company to pay back taxes to the government
Get the company to hire everyone who performed a similar role, or face further penalties and fines
A win would encourage the rest of their missclassified workers to sue for the same, or give them leverage to demand a better deal
If the company is going to screw you over like that, may as well make them pay for it.
Since this is getting a lot of reblogs, here’s a federal source that can help you determine if you’re illegally classified as a contractor:
You can also file a form with the IRS to force the company to correct your classification (assuming you meet the criteria), without necessarily having to sue:
Keep in mind that this is just federal. Most states also prohibit missclassification as an independent contractor; and even if states have more lenient rules, companies still have to comply with this federal law. The rules have largely been bipartisan and existed for decades, so they’re common.
States also have an interest in having regulations about missclassification: it’s a significant loss of tax revenue. Your self employment tax does not fully equal what a company would have paid for you in payroll taxes.
A lawyer can help point you in the right direction if a company is currently missclassifying you.
Another complaint we get is that when we plant trees, we only plant small trees which isn’t equivalent to the ones we chop down. And it’s like… the trees are small because they’re younger. I promise if you go to the older parts of town you’ll see that they do not stay small.
Do they… do they not realize that trees grow? That the act of them growing is what makes them establish root systems that prevent erosion? That them growing is what enables them to absorb carbon dioxide? The growing is what makes them useful!!! And as a fun bonus- young, healthy trees are far less likely to drop a branch on your head!
There’s a lot of work that goes into these kinds of evaluations that I don’t think people really understand. Like there’s a lot of older trees in our uptown area and we love them very much, but they present a hazard to the man-made structures because they were planted with limited knowledge of how to keep them healthy while sharing space with brick.
Tree boss explained it to me once that the older trees have a black mold problem because they just kinda planted them. Because of this, they’re root bound. Root bound trees get mold and rot. Sure enough- a big storm happened this summer and one of those trees that looked healthy on the outside came down, hit the roof of city hall, and you could see the decay inside.
There is a way to plant trees near streets and businesses so that the roots run under the structures and I think that he called it a ‘root shelf.’ But the people who planted those trees didn’t have that knowledge, so we try to replace them with proper techniques when we have the opportunity.
But unfortunately, in order to do it properly for the health of the trees and the structures, we have to plant a sapling instead of an adult tree.
A lot of the time, I hear people talking about 'old growth trees’ and how they can’t stand to see us cutting them down. But the majority of these trees aren’t old growth- they’re maybe 50-75 years old and weren’t planted with the future in mind. So sometimes we cut down an older tree that looks 'fine’ from the outside, but the soil sucks or there’s an infestation or the storm damage is worse than it looks from the outside.
I once saw Tree Boss just… push an adult tree down by leaning on it and the inside was fuckin’ paper.
And its like… welcome to City Planning: where we fix the problems made 50 years ago by people who meant well.
