Life's Pleasures Quote by Oliver Evans

Evans slips a whole social critique into a line that sounds like shop-floor sarcasm. “Even then” yanks the reader backward, implying some hazy past we sentimentalize as tougher, simpler, less squeamish. He punctures that nostalgia: people have always hated being fed garbage. The trick is the qualifier, “if they could see it.” It’s not appetite he’s diagnosing; it’s information. Visibility becomes the dividing line between consent and exploitation, between what a customer would reject and what a producer might still sell.

As an inventor operating in the early American industrial pivot, Evans lived in a world where processing was becoming power: mills, machines, and systems that could transform raw stuff into “product” at scale. That scale introduces distance. The more elaborate the production chain, the easier it gets to hide contamination, cut corners, or simply let the consumer assume the best. Evans’s phrasing suggests he’s thinking like an engineer with a moral streak: design and transparency are linked. If you can see the dirt, you won’t eat it; if you can’t, you might.

The subtext lands uncomfortably modern. It’s a proto-consumer-protection argument before the language existed: not a plea for purer people, but for cleaner processes and honest presentation. Evans isn’t romantic about human nature; he’s practical about incentives. Hide the dirt, and someone will try to sell it. Let it show, and the market suddenly discovers standards.