Stealing Pies

There is this trope in story telling of the vagrant, hobo, bum, or cartoon character steeling a pie from a windowsill.

It is good story telling. But, in my opinion, we forget what is actually happening.

We can go to the supermarket and buy a decent, almost edible, pie for 5 dollars or so. We are going to put that price at 15 umms.

Let’s take a step back in time. It is the late 1800s in the rural outback. It is a 20-mile trek to town to get supplies. But you have your homestead, there is food in the larder, there is food in the pantry, and there is food in the root cellar.

While you are out working the fields, your wife is baking an apple pie for the family.

The basics going into that pie are flour, lard, water, apples, sugar, some cider, butter, salt, and spices.

She starts with pairing the apples. The apples are from last fall when she and the children spent a couple of days picking apples in the orchard, all three apple trees. Those apples were preserved and stored, they look ugly, but they will taste wonderful.

The cost of those apples is the cost of picking, cleaning, storing, and preparing them. Call it 45 umms.

The lard came from the pig they harvested last fall. There were many hours of tending the pig, feeding it, caring for it, then the slaughter, processing the pig, and rendering the lard. She’s only using a palm full of lard, so about 30 umms.

The flour came from the store. They grew their wheat. While the total labor that went into growing that wheat was in the 1000s of umms, again, she is only using a couple of cups worth of flour. 30 umms.

Sugar was purchased, the cost was 5 umms.

The spices were expensive, but because she is only using a small amount, 5 umms.

The pie is going to bake in the oven. That oven is heated with wood that was chopped from a tree they harvested. Total of 15 umms for the wood to heat the oven.

In total, excluding the preparing of the apples, she has 30 umms invested in this pie.

The total cost of that pie? 45 + 30 + 5 + 5 + 30 = 115 umms.

An umm is a Unit of Man Minutes. So that 115 is 2 hours of labor. At $20/hour, that is a $40 pie. When that vagrant steals a pie, they are stealing at least 2 hours of labor from that family.

This doesn’t even touch the cost of not having the pie for themselves. That might have been the last of their apples.

It could have been a meat pie instead of an apple pie. If it was a meat pie, it would represent meals for the family for a couple of days, at least.

As an aside, why did they put pies on the windowsills to cool?

Because it was hot in the kitchen!

You want the pie to cool, it isn’t going to do that as fast in the kitchen, plus, all that heat from the pie goes into making the kitchen that much hotter.

Of course you want to cool that pie outside.