Menial? 

The Freakonomics people seem to have fallen down their own rabbit hole a wee bit.  Like anyone running wild with a pet theory, these guys seem to find the same patterns in anything, even when making something fit the pattern means you have to twist it pretty hard and nail it down to keep it in place.  My friend Lianne showed me this article, and it set off a few BS-bells in my head.

I had an interestingly visceral reaction to the authors' categorization of things like knitting, cooking, and gardening as "menial labor," and realized I have a very definite mental line dividing things like cooking (which, thanks to John's skill and interest, I don't do every day - not even close, but often enjoy doing when I do it) and laundry.  The authors (of the article and the study) lump these things along a continuum, but I'm not sure it really works that way for everyone.

For me, the difference is the element of artistry or creativity.  There are many ways of making a dish interesting or adding creativity - flavor and aroma are certainly key, but there are visual elements as well - color and presentation.  There's little or no artistry or creativity in laundry (at least for me).  Clean clothes is clean clothes.

Notice I stayed away from knitting?  Well, yeah - because, honestly, I don't think it belongs on that continuum at all.  Production knitting is so archaic as a household necessity, it sticks out like a sore thumb.  Gardening, too (especially in urban or suburban areas where property values are high and space to grow things is at a premium).  I grow flowers and herbs, because I appreciate the color and the scent (and with herbs, to a lesser extent, the culinary value).  John grows tomatoes because it's fun to watch things grow - but also because there's no damn way to reliably find a tomato that tastes like a tomato anymore except to grow it yourself.

So - back to knitting as an archaic household activity.  There are other household activities that have fallen away in popularity because of modern mass-production methods.  Nobody churns their own butter anymore just for fun, right?  Well, I'd imagine because ratio of creativity to sheer backbreaking labor in the average pound of hand-churned butter is about zero to a zillion.

As for "menial," I have a definition in my computer's dictionary as, "not requiring much skill and lacking prestige."  Hell with that.  Cooking, gardening, and knitting all require a fair bit of skill to do well.  You might as well ask yourself why people blog, when typing is such menial labor?