Everyday Abundance: The hidden stories behind everyday technologies

Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course. But they were nothing like the modern grocery store, with its shopping carts, self-service selection, shelves of branded, packaged goods, and lineup of cash registers. Walk the store aisles with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the now-invisible network of technologies that arose to create the supermarket.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Nowadays a Cracker Barrel is a restaurant where you eat down-home food amid rustic décor. But crackers and other provisions used to actually come in big wooden barrels from which store proprietors scooped out and weighed goods for customers. They represented a whole lost world of grocery shopping. Service was personal, choices were limited, prices were high, and quality was inconsistent. This is where “bottom of the barrel” originates. You didn’t want crackers—or flour or anything else—from down there.

The cracker-barrel model fell under attack in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of the first packaged goods—items made in factories, stuffed into branded boxes, and transported to stores.

But the real beginning of the end was February 1898, when 114 different bakeries making a host of different products merged into a cookie colossus: the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco). Its head, Adolphus Green, dreamed of making a single baked good that could be sold across the nation—an identical product, identically fresh, identically packaged, sold everywhere from Boston to Bakersfield. Green’s dream would become a landmark in the history of consumption.

Subjects discussed include:

Fig Newtons, Origin of
Actors in the Aisles
Inflation, Effect on Price Stickers
Fame of Tristam Shandy, Lack of
Uneeda Biscuits
Architecture of Shopping
Frank Peters, Package Prodigy
Self-Service as Means of Fighting Segregation and Sexism
Bar-Code Brilliance

References, further reading, and credits:

The Nabisco story,from the invaluable American Business History Center

Fun short account of Adolphus Green and Frank Peters: David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century, 1998, pp. 287-295.

Out of the Cracker Barrel;: The Nabisco Story, From Animal Crackers to Zuzus by William Kahn

General origins of packaged food: Anne Murcott, The (Not So) Secret Lives of Food Packaging, 2024.

Clarence Saunders, Piggly Wiggly, and effects of self-service shopping: Lisa C. Tolbert, Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, 2023. Slightly exaggerated but fun short video on the same thing. Parallel story about African-American customers and Sears catalogue.

The Cart That Changed the World: The Career of Sylvan N. Goldman by Terry P. Williams

Origin of the bar code: The History of the Bar Code, Smithsonian, 2015. Earliest bar-code scan...

Chapters

(00:00:52) - From Hunting & Gathering to the Cracker Barrel
(00:04:04) - Biscuit Abundance
(00:19:52) - Why Clerks Used to Do Your Shopping
(00:22:55) - How Self-Service Changed America
(00:28:46) - The Surprising Equalizing of Supermarkets
(00:33:44) - The Shopping Cart Nobody Wanted
(00:38:56) - Fake Shoppers Save the Shopping Cart
(00:45:09) - The Barcode Revolution
(01:00:28) - From Mr. Jones to Grocery Apps

Doing Laundry: Appliances of Freedom

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 05:00:00 +0000

The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry.

That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.

Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the first electric washing machine appeared. In a few decades, it upended the domestic life of half the human species. A way of life that had endured for centuries was so thoroughly and rapidly ended that most of us today have no idea it existed.

Forget the flying car. We’re going to the laundromat!

Subjects discussed include:

Charles’s Mumbai Laundry Epiphany
Vermin Evolution
No More Open Pores!
Undercover Laundry Reporter Elizabeth Banks
Not-so-trad Tradwives
Rural Electrification
1900 U.S. Census Categories
Charles’s Attempt to Use a Washboard

References, further reading, and credits:

Lice, human hairlessness, and the origin of clothing: Ian Gilligan, Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, 2018. (Gilligan bases his fine account on, among other things, these two scholarly articles.)

Prize-winning student essay on Lenin’s battle against vermin: Prisca Allio, The Louse Manifesto,2018.

Soap: Ferris Jabr, Why Soap Works, Yale School of Medicine, 2020.

Research article on Babylonian laundry: Nathan, Wasserman. Treating Garments in the Old Babylonian Period: “At the Cleaners” in a Comparative View, Iraq, 2013.

Elizabeth Banks’ laundry career: Elizabeth L. Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, 1894, pp 153-208.

Correction: In discussing journalists like Banks, Virginia says 18th and early 19th century when she means 19th and early 20th century.

Famous economics paper evaluating the washing machine as liberatory technology: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Engines of Liberation, The Review of Economic Studies, 2005.

Cleaning in general: Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygien...

Chapters

(00:01:23) - The Laundry Mountain of Mumbai
(00:04:08) - What Lice Reveal About the Origins of Clothing
(00:08:55) - The Science of Soap
(00:12:35) - Babylon's 4,000-Year-Old Dry Cleaners
(00:16:33) - My Washboard Disaster
(00:20:00) - Laundry as a Profession
(00:33:12) - Bleach, White Clothes, and Respectability
(00:40:12) - The Washing Machine That Sold Electricity
(00:45:49) - The Technology That Freed Half of Humanity

Listening to Music: Treble Makers

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of. Listen along with Virginia, Charles, and special guest musician/historian/engineer John Hardin as they play the chords of the great transformation of music from dearth to digital, from scarcity to Spotify.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

One of the most popular books published in the 19th century was Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy’s science-fiction novel about the fantastic, faraway world of A.D. 2000. Characters listen to music in their homes through cable “telephones.” Bellamy correctly predicted that future listeners would have near-instant access to music from anywhere.

But he missed the crucial breakthrough: recording.

Instead, Looking Backward portrayed live musicians playing over the wires. And that made all the difference.

The ability to capture, reproduce, duplicate, store, transmit, remix, and stream sound transformed music from a fleeting experience into a permanent and infinitely reproducible one. Entire industries emerged. Old business models collapsed. New art forms appeared. The very meaning of listening changed.

Subjects discussed include:

Player Pianos
Music, Strangeness of AI
Music Copyright, Endless Complexities of
LPs to CDs
Invention of Radio
Home Studios
Technological Backlash
Mixtape and Sampling Culture
Digital Divas

References, further reading, and credits:

Traces of ancient music: Graeme Lawson, Sound Tracks: An Archaeological Journey through our Musical Past, 2025.

John Hardin’s Substack, “Creative Frontiers”

“Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture,” Virginia’s 2000 talk referring to Bellamy and CDs at Best Buy

Looking Backward on Project Gutenberg

Duke Ellington, “Mood Indigo” on YouTube (1962 version)

Charles’s somewhat outdated but still useful Atlantic article on music copyright (from 2000).

History of sampling and mixtape culture: Nate Petrin, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, 2020.

Overview of format changes in music from two industry experts: Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry, 2023.

Metronome video courtesy of The Museum of Music History, https://momh.org.uk/

Chapters

(00:02:26) - Music Before Recordings
(00:04:48) - Every New Music Technology Was 'Cheating'
(00:06:05) - Bellamy's Dream of Unlimited Music
(00:11:26) - The Phonograph and the Birth of the Recording Industry
(00:20:32) - Radio Changes Everything
(00:27:10) - Microphones, Tape, and the Modern Studio
(00:37:02) - Hip-Hop, Sampling, and the Digital Revolution
(00:41:10) - Streaming, AI, and the Future of Music

Brushing Your Teeth: The 12,000 Year War

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:10:00 +0000

When George Washington was inaugurated, he had only one natural tooth left—a condition far more typical in the past than modern people realize. For thousands of years, tooth pain was simply part of human life. A primary reason for the problem: effective tooth-cleaning methods simply didn’t exist. Join Virginia and Charles as they celebrate two overlooked but vitally important technological innovations: the toothbrush and toothpaste.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

As schoolchildren learn, the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago was among the great turning points in the human story. Farming created reliable food surpluses that allowed for the creation of big cities and states.

It also wrecked humanity’s teeth.

The new agricultural diet—full of carbohydrate- and sugar-rich cereals and grains—triggered an explosion of tooth decay. Millennia of oral misery ensued. Painful jaws were an inescapable part of daily life, and nothing could be done about it. As recently as the 1970s, most American 70-year-olds didn’t have a single tooth in their head.

Then the dental outlook changed—slowly, at first, then rapidly.

In 1780, William Addis, an English rag trader, was thrown into jail, supposedly for inciting a riot. Confined in London’s infamous Newgate Prison, he carved a chicken bone into the prototype for a now-ubiquitous occupant of contemporary bathrooms: the toothbrush. He began selling them soon after he was released. Then, in 1873, came the first mass-produced commercial toothpaste: Colgate (yes, the same Colgate sold today). And the world began to change, or at least the world’s mouths did.

Subjects discussed include:

The Grisly Dental Aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo
Apparent Failures of Evolution
Charles’s Astounding Dentists
Early Modern English Prison Conditions
Proper Stick Etiquette
Origin of George Washington’s False Teeth
Tidal Wave of Dental Exemptions from Second World War Draft
Statistical Failures in Twentieth-Century Oral-Hygiene Testing
The Fluoride War(s)

References, further reading, and credits:

From Mount Vernon (Washington’s home, now a museum), a full exploration of the president’s false teeth, replete with images and videos.

The story, surprisingly interesting, of how our teeth evolved: Peter Ungar’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, 2018.

Scholarly history of the toothbrush: Aditya Tadinada, et al. The evolution of a tooth brush: from antiquity to present: a mini-review, Journal of Dental Health, Oral Disorders & Therapy, 2015.

The wince-inducing tale of dentistry: James Wynbrandt, The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, 2000.

World War II military video in which the army instructs recruits on how to brush their teeth. “Whatever it is, the majority of you fellas simply refuse to look after your teeth.”

Virginia’s Bloomberg Opinion article on t...

Chapters

(00:02:08) - Agriculture vs. Your Teeth
(00:05:49) - Why People Brushed With Urine
(00:10:47) - The Invention of the Toothbrush
(00:14:34) - The Army Discovers America Has No Teeth
(00:16:18) - Nylon Changes Everything
(00:23:11) - Crest and the Fluoride Revolution
(00:25:47) - The Great Fluoride Controversy
(00:30:57) - From Flossing to the Future

Making a Meal of the Family Meal: Cooking Dinner

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:05:00 +0000

Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Zillow photographs today routinely feature glamorous expansive kitchens with islands, track lighting, and gleaming appliances, inviting viewers to imagine gathering friends and family for dinner.

Historically, this is extremely strange.

For most of human history, people neither gathered around the table for a family meal nor hung around the kitchen. Instead, they mostly ate whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted (although, to be sure, people have always celebrated communal feasts).

Far from flaunting their cooking areas, the first thing anybody with money did with the kitchen was to hide it—outdoors, if possible, in a separate space, where its smoke and smell would be unnoticeable. In the 19th century, the kitchen was brought indoors, but even then it was kept away from view. It was a place for servants. But over the twentieth century the entire interior of the house inverted itself…

Subjects discussed include:

The Honeymooners
Charles’s Pilgrim Ancestors
Starches and Cellulose, Ripping Apart
Slow Horse Digestive Systems
Tiny Human Teeth
Algonkian Stews
No Chimneys, No Nails
Virginia’s ‘70s “Breakfast Nook”
Raw Carbs
The Kitchen Triangle
Biochemical Sugars
RISD’s Universal Kitchen Project

References, further reading, and credits:

Ground-breaking examination on the role of fire in cooking and the rest of our lives: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009.

Scholarly study of oldest known pottery: O.E. Craig, et al., Earliest Evidence for the Use of Pottery, 2013.

Archaeologists on Natufian feasting: David Eitam and James Schoenwetter, Feeding the Living, Feeding the Dead: Natufian as a Low-Level Food Production Society in the Southern Levant (15,000–11,500 Cal BP), Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, 2020

More than you could imagine knowing about Plains communal hunts: Eleanor Verbicky-Todd, Communal Buffalo Hunting Among the Plains Indians, 1984.

Algonquian cooking: Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1588.

Early colonial cookery: Trudy Eden, The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World, 2010.

Tower of London: Edward Impey and Geoffrey Parnell, G. The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History, 2000.

Supper vs dinner: Anon. Has “Supper” Always Meant “Dinner”? Merriam-Webster.com, 2018.

William Bradford complains about Billingtons in Plimoth colony: Bradford, W. Of Plimoth Plantation. Boston: Wright & Potter, 1898 (1647-1648). Online

House fires in 19th century: Tebeau, M. Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003. Online

Kitchen triangle: Andrew. The Kitchen Work Triangle: An Expert Guide, Naked Kitchens, 2023.

RISD Universal Kitchen Project: Archives and summary, Rhode Island School of Design.

Lavishly illustrated volume on Julia Child’s kitchen: Paula J. Johnson, Julia Child’s Kitchen: The Design, Tools, Stories, and Legacy of an Iconic Space, 2024.

Child’s kitchen on exhibit at the National Museum of American History.

Virginia’s The Power of Glamour on Amazon

Good popular history of cooking, eating, and the technologies that make them possible: Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bea Wilson

General histories of the Western home and kitchen:

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, 2010.

Judith Flanders, The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes, 2014.

Winifred Gallagher, House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live, 2006.

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, 1982.

Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, 2011.

Image credits:

Modern kitchen Seattle Municipal Archives

Working Out: The Invention of Exercise

Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:01:00 +0000

I worked out after work: Few sentences would have been more baffling to people in the 19^th century, especially if spoken by a woman. Join Virginia and Charles as they explore a little-noticed revolution in daily life: the transformation of hard physical labor from a daily burden to an emblem of personal virtue—and a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry whose omnipresence is as much a sign of our time as social media beefs or flying drones.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

They are everywhere: women carrying gym bags filled with sneakers, sports bras, and high-waisted leggings; men hauling duffels stuffed with performance joggers and training gear. So ubiquitous today is exercise culture—and so large the industries that support it—that it is hard to realize that they are thoroughly new phenomena, enabled by recent breakthroughs in textiles and materials.

A century ago, people expended so much effort in their daily lives that the idea of seeking out more was literally unheard-of. A few isolated souls promoted “physical culture,” but exercise was not a common ideal, especially for women, until the arrival of one of the more important U.S. cultural figures in the 20^th century: Jack LaLanne, who launched the first televised workout program in 1953. And then came the 1960s, the discovery of “fitness,” and a revolution that literally reshaped the human body.

Virginia and Charles explore how exercise evolved from necessity to aspiration—and how gyms, Lycra, bodybuilding, aerobics, and athleisure conquered the modern world.

Subjects discussed include:

Virginia as Class Traitor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Body-Fashion Icon
Charles Dickens’s Ideal Life
Impact (Astounding, Decades-Long) of University of Oregon Track Team
Indolence as Ambition
Spandex, Empire of
Jogging, its Rise and Fall
Jane Fonda, Lioness of Leotards
A Tiny Bit of Polymer Science and Engineering

References, further reading, and credits:

Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, by Shelly McKenzie

“The Long-Run Growth in Obesity as a Function of Technological Change” by Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner

“Americans' waistlines have become the victims of economic progress,” Virginia’s 2001 New York Times column explaining this research (gift link)

Arthur Jones, New York Times obit (gift link), Seattle Times obit

Frank Bond obits here and here

Kathrine Switzer’s account of becoming the first woman to officially enter the Boston marathon (registering as K.V. Switzer) in 1967. She was attacked by the race manager but finished the race.

Lycra by Kaori O’Connor

“If you love your workout gear, thank the girdles and Flexatards of the past,” by Danielle Friedman, Popular Science (excerpt from Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World).

“How Polyester Bounced Back,” Virginia’s article for Works in Progress

Correction: The President’s Council on Physical Fitness was renamed the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition in 2010.

Nautilus demonstration video/photo courtesy of Aly Wilson, The Extreme Fitness Studio, Shreveport, Facebook, Instagram

Bowerman waffle sole shoes courtesy of Mark Cullen, The Cullen Collection