DOMESTIC PRODUCTION II 



I looked around the kitchen, and then at the table 

 covered with shining glass jars filled with tomatoes 

 and tomato juice. 



"It's great," I said, "but does it really pay?" 



"Of course it does," was her reply. 



"Then it ought to be possible to prove that it does 

 even if we take into consideration every cost the 

 cost of raw materials, the value of the labor put into 

 the work yourself, the fuel, the equipment." 



"That ought to be easy," she maintained. 



It didn't prove as easy as we anticipated. We spent 

 not only that evening, but many evenings, trying to 

 arrive at a fairly accurate answer to the question. It 

 wasn't even easy to arrive at a satisfactory figure on 

 the cost of raw materials she had used. Some of the 

 tomatoes had been grown in our own garden; some 

 had been purchased. How much had it cost us to pro- 

 duce the tomatoes we had raised? We had kept no 

 figures on gardening costs. Even if we had kept track 

 of all the odd times during which we had worked in 

 the garden, that would have helped little without a 

 record of the time put into caring for the single row 

 of tomato plants we had planted. 



It proved equally difficult to determine how much 

 time should be charged to the actual work of canning 

 since several different kinds of household tasks in 

 addition to canning were often performed at the same 

 time. While the jars were processing in the pressure 

 cooker, work having nothing to do with canning was 

 often performed. 



