I’m not sure I’ve seen a set of ice tongs in real life before. But there I was at the antique market in a section that mainly collected old tools for the kitchen. The merchant had a few of them hanging there, and I took them down, opening and closing a pair.
History flashed before me. Before electric refrigeration, preserving meat was a struggle. You could salt it, store it in snow in winter months in the right climates, dry it out in the sun, or smoke it. You could preserve it in vinegar, with regrettable results. This was a problem for all human history. It wasn’t always successful: Rancid meat was a major source of infectious disease.
The advent of the commercial ice industry was a glorious thing. In winter months, you would break it up and put it in an ice house, carrying it block by block to the ice box in the house where it would gradually melt.
I’m pretty sure that my grandmother on my mother’s side always referred to the refrigerator as the ice box, a nomenclature she preserved from childhood. That’s how recent these innovations are. My own memories in my own family record a history of incredible industrial progress.
In any case, the ice tongs were essential for lifting these large blocks of ice for refrigeration. In urban areas, ice was a commodity sold to homes and apartment dwellers. They would arrive on trucks, and the tongs were the way that the blocks were carried from truck to doorsteps. The household’s ice tongs took it from there.
We see in a feature of such tools the essential point: They made the work you want to do more possible, less arduous, and more practical. It was the same with the hand beaters for turning cream into whipped cream and eggs into an integrated mixture for cooking or omelets. So, too, for the can openers, potato mashers, pastry blenders, ice picks, and nut and coffee grinders.
The result was more work to do with better results.
Somehow this store created in me a wave of nostalgia for generations that had a passion for work and a desire to innovate to make the work we do serve human interests better and to create infinite numbers of things to increase mastery over the elements.
The tools of old celebrate and inspire work, allowing for great efficiency, strength, and productivity. They were not sloth-enabling shortcuts.
Our modern tools seem different. They do everything for us so that we do less. A home equipped with every “smart” tool requires little more than sitting and vocalizing commands to listening devices. Presumably, these things save time, but what are we saving it for? What are we doing with this saved time? We read and socialize ever less. The dinner party is nearly a thing of the past. Fewer people know how to cook and sew than ever before. And yet we claim to be busier than ever before.
Being in this antique store inspired in me a weeping level of nostalgia, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it comes down to this. All this old stuff everywhere really traces to a human passion to be more enterprising, not less. This seems very unlike the innovations of our own time, all of which seem to be designed to allow us to be more lazy; that is, to do less.
This has taken a toll on the human spirit. We no longer see work as an act of virtue, a fulfillment of God’s command to till and keep the garden. We see work as an inconvenience, a distraction, an annoyance that prevents us from doing what we really want, which is to be entertained and otherwise pass the time. This tendency does not bode well for human prospects in general.
Back in the day, all these tools were considered a subset of art: the practical arts, the industrial arts, the mechanical arts. It was in the 1910s and following that the word technology came to replace those old terms. Technology sounds more scientific and managerial, requiring less involvement from common people and more innovation from experts.
Technology also deprecated a key feature of the practical arts: It was far less beautiful. You see this in the antique store. The flatware and glassware are incredible to look at, as were the old record players and lighting fixtures. The ambition was not only to make life more practical but also more grand. I’m not sure that ethos exists at all anymore.
The store reminded me, too, of a vague childhood memory that I now treasure. There was a row of Ball jars for canning vegetables, sold now at rather high prices. I was very young, but I recall that my grandmother enlisted my help in a fall canning session. She had a sister with a large garden in a neighboring town. At harvest time, all of the sisters picked up beans, carrots, cabbage, squashes, and onions, among other things, and brought bags back to their respective houses.
Then the work began. We cleaned off the dirt, shelled the peas, cut the carrots, and shredded the cabbage and onions. Huge pots on the stove were deployed to cook them all up. Then they were moved to jars and sealed. We had an entire operation going, a real structure of production.
After the jars cooled, I would take them to the garage and line them up on high shelves using a stepladder. As the weather grew colder, it became a nightly task to pull down a jar or two to serve with the roasts served up for dinner, alongside fresh rolls.
Amazingly, my grandmother had 10 sisters. All of their families ate all winter from the produce of just one sister’s small farm—more like a large garden than a farm actually. Looking back, I find this simply remarkable, along with the processes that made it all possible. Now people head to the store and grab frozen or canned vegetables—pick up fresh produce from everywhere—without even thinking of it. There are surely people out there who still do canning the old-fashioned way, but it must be rare.
This is what we call prosperity, and it is grand. It does come at a cost, not only in diminishing the value of physical work but also in detaching ourselves from the knowledge of how things are done. Back in the day, people knew from where their food came. They were aware of all that went into making the good life possible. Same with clothing: My grandmother could not bear buying retail when she could make clothing herself on her sewing machine, which, to her, was the greatest invention of her life.
Here again, the sewing machine was a mighty achievement because it made human hands more productive, not because it diminished the use of human toil. Old tools valorized the work they made possible; new tools aspire to eliminate work entirely.
Perhaps the most preposterous dream right now is the idea of a home robot for household tasks—I’ve not seen even one that can do something as simple as unload a dishwasher or hang a suit. Even if it could, why should we want that?
We should resist the temptation of neo-Luddism, the naive romanticism of ages gone by, much less the politics of revanchism. And yet, spending a couple of hours in an antique store certainly fires up the nostalgia. Perhaps this traces not so much to the wonderful things there, but to what they represent: an enterprising spirit that the new technology seems to be draining away.
