You skipped one key point (which I can't really comment on the veracity of): cows were traditionally slaughtered in the winter, making it really hard to connect fresh ground beef with ripe tomatoes.
What about the sesame seeds, then?
At the risk of opening up an old controversy, I also note that In 'N' Out struggles mightily to make a cheeseburger even today. There's clearly some knack to it.
In-N-Out.
As penance, I'll write 'Trav-O-lator' a hundred times, maybe.
I think he went off the rails when he defined lettuce and tomatoes as being of the essence of a cheeseburger. They are not. A cheeseburger needs meat, cheese, and some sort of bun. The rest is fixin's.
Also as long as you have glass you can have greenhouses which used to be much more common.
1: No, I didn't skip that point -- that's what I meant by saying the whole claim is that it was impractical to have fresh meat in September. And AFAIK, there's just no basis for that. You wouldn't get much or any meat in late winter/early spring, sort of the Lent period, where you've already eaten the (nonpreserved) meat that got fat last summer and fall, and the spring grass hasn't started to grow yet. But that's a far cry from saying meat was only available in November/December.
4: I'll give him lettuce and tomato, because he needs them to make it hard at all.
And even if you spot him the claim that you customarily only slaughter cows in the winter, the dude says (in the update stating that it was only impractical, not impossible) that "A time-traveler with unlimited resources could probably pull it off." You don't need a time-traveler. All you need, if you give him all of his (unsupported) claims, is someone rich enough to slaughter a cow at a non-optimal time of year. That's a far fucking cry from a time-traveler.
I must second Spike's comment above - what is he doing including lettuce and tomato in his definition of a cheesburger? Nope, I simply do not buy that.
What was his bigger context - a golly-gee-whiz we oughta all be thankful for what we have?
True enough, but the cheeseburger is not a good example. Modern medicine, sanitation, and reliable power sources are much better examples.
As I understand it, (1) it is impossible for a single pioneer household to assemble all the parts of a cheeseburger, and (2) there are no cheeseburgers before 1800 because:
(a) grinding meat is hard enough work that nobody grinds "reasonable" cuts of meat--only offal and such.
(b) except in summer, access to lettuce and tomato is a real problem.
(c) assembling it was a labor-intensive enough process that it didn't occur to anybody to try--that people thought they had other, tastier ways to spend that much labor on that complicated a combination of resources.
All hail the Earl of Sandwich!
(a) seems transparently false. You only have to look at old recipe books, and at peasant cuisine the world over. And (c) is beyond stupid [harsh, but true]. Again, peasant/traditional cuisine the world over is amazingly labour intensive. Massively more labour intensive than a burger.
Yes, but what would it take to make a Happy Meal from scratch? Like, really from scratch?
The problem with the post, which you identify, is that it jumps seamlessly from "it's quite impractical--nearly impossible--[for one person] to make a cheeseburger from scratch", which is basically true, to "a cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society", which is basically false. It's like he didn't realize that trade was possible in agrarian societies.
Grinding meat is also, fwiw, a piece of piss. It's not like grinding granite, or something.
Hmmm. I agree that it was impossible to get a McDouble (tm) for the equivalent of 0.99 USD a hundred years ago, but it seems a big leap to then state that it was 'impractical' to get one. Impractical for whom?
In 10, c) seems correct to me as an explanation for why there were no cheeseburgers,* but it isn't really a convincing way of saying it was impossible. a) seems off, a bit. Plenty of cuts beyond offal were ground up to make sausages, but it seems mostly correct that it would be unlikely to eat ground meat fresh.
On the subject of other tasty 20th century creations, I bet a chilli dog totally would have been possible before 1900, had they only thought to do it. After all, chilli is very old frontier food, and the early waves of 19th century German immigrants surely brought hot dogs with them, right?
*Why go to that sort of labor for a sandwich when you could construct elaborate follies or stuff 12 birds into one? Actually, while I'm on this tangent, I feel compelled to note that the author hasn't really thought about how complicated many pre-20th century dishes made for the rich were. Sure, if you're talking about an average person, the equation is quite different. But the nobility/gentry/rich ate extravagant and amazing dishes that took hours to prepare.
I think the real issue is now that we engage in this weird practice of grinding choice cuts of meat, which isn't a practicality issue so much as a change in the social status of ground beef. Prior to like 1920, the only association people had with ground beef was shoddy cuts of meat mixed in with non-meat fillers. This is still what most hamburger is, except that "non-meat" has now been elevated to "non-food." The total success of marketing fast food, though has led to the creation of status hamburgers, which are made from all real beef, and are as paradoxical really as status blue jeans.
I don't think it would have been hard a hundred years ago to make a cheeseburger. Its just that no one would think to do it.
(I believe I'm getting most of my information here from Fast Food Nation.)
10: (1) A single household could still do it, it's just that a pioneer household would be too poor to bother. Cheese is a single-household problem (see, e.g. Ingalls Wilder passim, so's bread, so's meat and a vegetable garden. It'd be a hassle to pull it together, but within the capabilities of a well-functioning, fairly well-off single pre-industrial household. Also, 'single pioneer household' is very different from the claim he was making. Society pre-exists 1900 -- he said you'd need a time-traveler, not that you'd need a fairly well-off person with access to a cheesemonger who could afford meat; (2) (a) scraps and trimmings have always been with us. Meatloaf is medieval. (b) seasonal ingredients are seasonal. If the whole post is "wow, we can eat tomatoes out of season now" sure, but that hasn't got anything to do with cheeseburgers particularly. You could only have had lettuce and tomato on a burger in August/September, but you could have done it. (c) If the argument is that no one invented the recipe for a cheeseburger before 1900 or so, I can't argue with that.
Well, ttaM, first you gotta invent metal, or ceramics, or flat rocks, or build a millhouse, or something like that.
It's as though Marie de Medicis did nothing for the West.
A cheeseburger may be in a style that hasn't been very popular before,
at least, only in the centuries since the Earl of Sandwich -- but
there have been a lot of complicated cuisines.
I am willing to believe that fresh-tomato dishes used to be a lot more
seasonal. (Glasshouses went from freakishly to amazingly expensive
only after the Crystal Palace, and Planet Money says pork-belly
futures were interesting for a while because BLTs had to wait for the
fresh tomato season. Salt, etc.)
And, finally, in my limited experience, I'm nto croggled by the
calendar time it takes to assemble a cheeseburger, but by the breadth
of competence. Being a good baker or cheesemaker is a respectable life
competency now, when it doesn't include hauling a lot of wood and
estimating things we have sensors for. Doing all that while spending
half your day out keeping the animals alive... well, people did and
do, or I wouldn't believe it possible, lazy thing that I am.
Again, peasant/traditional cuisine the world over is amazingly labour intensive.
I read 10.c to mean that not they were adverse to labour, but that they already had labor-intensive yumminess to eat.
Sure, cheeseburgers. But let's see a 19th-century peasant make a McRib.
The linked post also makes odd and unbacked assertions about pre-refrigeration people towing icebergs into harbour and selling the ice.
And, yes, the cheeseburger = impossible complexity argument is very silly. I remember having to translate the Satyricon at school. Trimalchio would have had no problem getting himself a cheeseburger (tomatoes excepted).
assembling it was a labor-intensive enough process that it didn't occur to anybody to try
This looks especially silly compared to the Satyricon. Life may well be too short to stuff a mushroom (or a dormouse), but it's not too short to say "You there! Slave! Stuff this mushroom!"
Since ttaM also tries to convince us that punches to the chest and face are fun hobbies, I am not sure he is a reliable narrator about what is an easy task.
And Ttam is totally right regarding the ease of grinding meat and how labor-intensive peasant food is.
"Meatloaf is medieval." From your mouth to God's ear, although I got hold of my Mother's recipe for Meatloaf that she got from Pat Nixon (yes, that Pat Nixon) and the meatloaf is excellent.
Well, will, punches to the face and chest lead rather easily to ground meat, don't you think? So I'm with ttaM here. Lest he punch me.
Of course one wouldn't grind meat at home; one would mince
it. (Leftovers, very often, but not always.) While checking Beeton for
minces, I came across:
-----
Broiled Mutton and Tomato Sauce (Cold Meat Cookery).
710. INGREDIENTS.-- A few slices of cold mutton, tomato sauce, No. 529.
Mode .-- Cut some nice slices from a cold leg or shoulder of mutton; season them with pepper and salt, and broil over a clear fire. Make some tomato sauce by recipe No. 529, pour it over the mutton, and serve. This makes an excellent dish, and must be served very hot.
Time .-- About 5 minutes to broil the mutton.
Seasonable in September and October, when tomatoes are plentiful and
seasonable.
-----
All her recipes end with a comment on when they're seasonable.
28: Based on what you see at little county/city historical museums, I think meat grinders were fairly common by the 19th century. That, and all sorts of things that are completely incomprehensible to me.
True french fries will remain impractical until the price of liquid nitrogen comes way down. (Referring to the improved way of creating french fries which requires liquid nitrogen and very controlled temperatures.)
Actually, the cheeseburger story reminds me of I, Pencil. It seems to be thereabouts in spirit.
I'm going to defend the time traveler thing; it's not that he believes that one would have to be equipped with futuristic skills and techniques in order to make a cheeseburger. It's that he believes nobody contemporaneous (no matter how rich) would think it made any sense as a project (as indeed it doesn't particularly in the absence of relatively cheap beef).
In addition to 13, which I think identifies the crucial problem, the post also just has various weird unthinking stupidities such as:
A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular "from scratch," but really from scratch. Like, I'd make the buns, I'd make [the other shit too]... [B]y the following summer, .... I realized that my prior plan hadn't been ambitious enough--that wasn't really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I'd need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter.
What the fuck did he think was involved in "make my own buns" in the first instance? Drop them in the toaster?
Though, TBF, the reliable domestic mincing machine only seems to have come in at some point in the 1850s - although there's references to cottage pie from 1791, whether or not the meat was minced isn't clear from the context, apparently. Shepherd's pie, which has unquestionably been minced from the start (1870s or so) has only merged into cottage pie over time.
That said, the wider point's undeniably true - even a rural backwater such as Montaillou was never autarkic.
34: one can coherently talk about making bread from pre-ground wheat and store-bought butter, urple.
At least one source places the invention of the hamburger prior to 1900. (I'm quibbling about the date when I'm sure the blogger was just using it as a rough marker for 'modernity' or something, but that's what historians do.)
23.last: I've long wanted the insane hors d'oeuvres platter in the form of the Zodiac.
Shorter original linked to post: an idiot playing at being self sufficient for no good reason is easliy impressed by the complexity of things he took for granted.
Lesson to be learned from this: past civilisations/societies, though less technologically advanced not actually less complex than contemporary society.
Oh hey I'm going to argue with something else in the OP:
The dude seems to have gotten confused between "Wow, making cheese, and growing your own grain for bread, and slaughtering animals is complicated and intimidating for me to think about doing within a single household," and "So it would have been impractical for people to eat anything but gruel before 1900."
No, he's definitely (specifically) not saying that. He talks about giving turkeys to friends in the course of a massive thanksgiving feast that could almost have been produced just at their house. He's saying that a cheeseburger seems like a less complicated meal to produce than (for instance) a full thanksgiving feast with all the fixin's, but historically (certainly in this country) the opposite situation obtained. Which seems like a reasonably clear and cogent point, to me.
The chocolate shake is a mighty achievement.
I'm with LB. to the extent that the claim has content it seems to be a seasonal observation about tomatoes and lettuce. and yet, some people live in the southern part of the country, you may have heard? they still have tomatoes hanging around on the vine for ages depending on how many times they planted. and once it starts to get cool again you can grow lettuce for a second time. the first lettuce will have been really early in the year because it gets hot early. and hey, sesame seeds? you know how we're making benne brittle and benne biscuits and shit all the time (god, now I would kill someone for a benne biscuit). benne=sesame. and people in the agricultural band below my beloved SC, as in florida or NO, would likely be able to grow both at the same time whenever. they would have had to use "farmer's cheese," or fresh curds or something, because they can't age cheese, but still. I call bullshit. in real life they were eating shrimp and grits or pulled pork like sensible people, but I see nothing but conceptual problems holding my great-greats from cheeseburgers.
This may be pedantic, but I'm pretty sure you could use canned sliced tomatoes without the cheese burger being terrible.
I see nothing but conceptual problems holding my great-greats from cheeseburgers.
Heck yes they could have done it. That used to be us.
indeed. one can put up tomatoes in jars.
Heck yes they could have done it. That used to be us.
This will be us, when our great-descendants are marveling at our ability to make cheeseburgers.
This (topic of the OP) is the kind of silliness I associate with Thomas Friedman.
Beef was certainly available during the prime months for lettuce and tomatoes (September, October) - Martha Bradley places it in season as far back as 1756, so I imagine that means forever. Probably you would only grind the bits that weren't too appetising whole, but if you're going to kill a cow you certainly wouldn't waste any. Bread and cheese were staples since antiquity - you might make your own cheese (not too hard) but you almost certainly get your grain milled by a miller, even if you grow it yourself.
Possibly there were settlers in America who were out of reach of a mill from time to time, but this wouldn't be typical. All in all, I don't see it's much harder or easier than a full Thanksgiving dinner in principle. One or the other might be easier at various times, depending on where you were and how the harvest had gone. But not to generalise.
Also, conceptually the Earl of Sandwich was putting roast beef between a couple of slices of toast in the middle of the 18th century, as Brad points out. That's the conceptual part. Everything else is mere decoration.
That link about the history of burgers refers to one recipe that includes *coffee*. A hamburger that contains CAFFEINE? This I must see.
one can coherently talk about making bread from pre-ground wheat and store-bought butter
No one can't. You don't make bread with butter.
and relish! like chowchow! soooo good. all kind of mixed vegetables in there, cauliflower even. and tomato sauce? we make that. usually wicked-hot with bird's eye chilis, but yeah. and you know how we make mustard-based BBQ sauce? and anyone can make mayonnaise at any time? yeah.
You do if it's brioche, and brioche buns are mighty tasty with a burger.
The writer says it would be possible but "wildly expensive," and later clarifies that by "wildly" he means "with unlimited resources" as opposed to maybe "costing the equivalent of $50", which is probably closer to the mark. I rather get the impression that he considers "cheap and in everyone's grasp to make" implicit in the definition of a cheeseburger.
He seems to conflate "usually" with "only ever" (as in X vegetables in season, cows slaughtered in winter).
Finally, you don't need eggs or butter to make bread.
How would make the foil wrapper that the burger is served in?
Wikipedia says tin foil was in common use by the late 19th century.
57: oh, urple, do you really mean you don't know how to make your own tin foil?
True brioche isn't, yes, but there is a whole class of butter-enriched breads (including one that I use for buns that is called 'light brioche') that aren't exactly pastry, either.
39: No! Nothing was ever more complex or praiseworthy than the childhood era of America's pundits! An economics professor is the meaning of the Earth!
Some people live in the southern part of the country, you may have heard?
We try not to talk about those people, Ala.
I'm pretty sure the late 19th century counts as a "highly developed, post-agrarian society."
I also put melted butter in one of my sandwich loaves, come to think of it.
For a burger, you generally want a softer bun, so you will probably have an egg or butter additive.
The claim in the OP seems very silly to me. But for a related claim made at length and tested quite amusingly, see how to make a toaster from scratch.
Some challah recipes use butter, and challah is bread.
yeah, I put a little butter in my white bread, along with a boiled potato passed through the finest blade of the food mill, because that's how my dad makes white bread, so I consider it supreme it's objectively the best. but butter is by no means required to make bread. damn, now I want to eat some of my dad's white bread. at our house we always had a freshly-cooked starch at the table, often rice or grits, naturally, but even then, also either cornbread, biscuits, or white bread in a stack of 6 slices or so, and the whole tower cut in half. (to be replenished as needed.) mandatory. for dessert I would have the bottom half of a slice of cornbread, into which most of the butter had melted, saturated with cane syrup. there is a delicious crust on the bottom of my step-mom's style cornbread, from being baked in a cast iron pan which is heated before the batter goes in. alternately the bottom halves of a few biscuits with my dad's most wonderful jam/jelly thing: whole figs in syrup with paper-thin slices of lemon. my god-father's moms' recipe. goddamnit, now I'm starving for my dad's home cooking.
There are a lot of good books already on how `everyday food' has been
changed by the means of production, ideology, accident; I think
Schenone and Shapiro and Strasser and Luard are great, for instance,
as is Helen Witty for more practical purposes; Zimmerman
terrible, way worse than Martha Stewart.
33, 40: He's saying that a cheeseburger seems like a less complicated meal to produce than (for instance) a full thanksgiving feast with all the fixin's, but historically (certainly in this country) the opposite situation obtained.
If he were saying that, I wouldn't be fussing at him. I'm not sure it's right (that is, I think that at any time where tomatoes were available in Europe, in a household rich enough to employ a cook and be able to buy meat, if you wanted a cheeseburger you could have told the cook "I want about a third of a pound of beef chopped or ground, formed into a flat patty, and cooked on a griddle. Serve it on a flattish bread roll, cut in half, with a piece of cheese melted on top, a slice of tomato and some lettuce" and it wouldn't have been a particularly excitingly difficult project.
He said "Time traveler with unlimited resources". Unless that backs off to "Time-traveler with a recipe and access to an upper middle class household," it's nonsense.
dad's most wonderful jam/jelly thing: whole figs in syrup with paper-thin slices of lemon. my god-father's moms' recipe
Do you have this recipe? Because, uh, WANT.
(All of that sounds amazing. I really think having a quick bread on the table with dinner is one of the easiest ways to make it feel absolutely decadent.)
On eating meat in summer: from Wikipedia on the Smithfield market:
In 1174 the site was described by William Fitzstephen as:
a smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be sold, and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks, and cows and oxen of immense bulk.
*Every Friday*. If you don't have refrigeration, you find a market -- in money or favors, human or divine.
If you don't have refrigeration, you find a market -- in money or favors, human or divine.
I love this sentence.
I do usually do a softer, egg and butter type roll for burgers or pulled pork. we always have standing rib roast for xmas eve dinner; maybe we should have pulled pork this year instead. mmmm, but it's like the only time of year I ever eat roast beef because you get ass-raped by the butcher on some prices over here. my piece usually ends up costing $140 or something. the meat is very good, though, all from australia, sent as whole pieces and then butchered for you there. I have never been able to find bottled horseradish, which is needed for the sour-cream and horseradish sauce; I grated a fresh one last year but it was totally bland. my grandfather once commented on my horseradish sauce that "you could get a good husband with that sauce." you know, since I have no other appealing qualities? or the way to a man's heart etc.? he was just messing with me.
If he were saying that, I wouldn't be fussing at him.
Okay. Well, he is saying that. Fairly explicitly! Where he gets into trouble is when he keeps saying "about a century ago". What he really means is "at least 160 but probably more like 200 years ago, in the United States".
By 100 years ago, yes, you had canning, you had meat grinders, you had home refrigeration (via iceboxes, probably, but still), you had ready access to bakers and cheesemakers and butchers across most of the US. Shit, you had automobiles. The reason hamburgers gained popularity in the 1880s was not just that they were practical, but that they were (already) easy and cheap to make and sell. That was not the case in 1810 in most of the US, and in 16-twentysomething not anywhere in the US (per his reference at the end to the first thanksgiving).
It seems clear to me that's what he probably means, but he was fuzzy about his timing.
whole figs in syrup with paper-thin slices of lemon.
My mom spent a summer eating lemons sprinkled with sugar, and ended up with ~20 cavities, which were filled in the 3 days before she went to college. She basically had to live at the dentist's office and he would tend to her between patients.
I admit, having written 78, that confusing the United States of 1630 with the world circa 1880 or 1910 is a not insignificant misstep.
Yeah, 100 years ago is 1911. By 1911 you have vending machines.
Well, he is saying that. Fairly explicitly!
No, he's not (again, time-traveler, unlimited resources is what he says would have been necessary), and the problem isn't the timing. There's nothing about a cheeseburger that would have been difficult in ancient Rome if they'd had tomatoes and a recipe -- at any time where tomatoes were available, a cheeseburger might have been expensive, but there's nothing about it that's particularly impractical.
Off by a century and refusing to admit it is still idiotic, though. Also, when North America was unsettled, most people lived places where they could get complex traded food. He makes sense only in a US TV based 'history everybody knows'. There's too much of that already.
AG: aw.
If you say "Impractical in the US in 1630" I still say no. Say they ate tomatoes (which I don't think they did yet, but that's not the point. If it is, move forward until they first ate tomatoes). None of the components are hard. Bread and cheese are pre-industrial staples for a reason: they are the easiest possible foodstuffs to store. Ketchup is a preserve. All you need is a piece of meat in September, and either a meat grinder or a sharp knife.
(Thinking a little harder, I don't actually know what spices are in ketchup. Vinegar's no problem, we already have tomatoes in the meal, sugar is expensive before the nineteenth century, but expensive doesn't mean unavailable. That's enough to get you to some kind of ketchup, and the spice trade is older than dirt, but there might be something in Heinz 57 that would have been difficult to acquire depending on when and where you were.)
Ketchup has a complicated history, deriving from fermented Chinese and SE Asian sauces and then being transformed in England into what we'd call ketchup. It's definitely a product of empire; Wiki says it was an English (and thus probably colonial American) staple by 1740.
(Oh, and, the tomato version is later than that. I should probably read the whole Wikipedia article rather than rely on my hazy memory from my history of food class.)
I remember it coming from the Philippines? And the original normal form being mushroom ketchup, with the tomato variety being later. But if any of this rests on "There couldn't have been a cheeseburger because no one had a ketchup recipe," I continue to call shenanigans.
85: wiki says onions, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, garlic, and celery may be involved. I buy it all, and a bit of most of that wouldn't be unreasonable at all.
Also, While canning wasn't invented until the early 19 th century this was not for technical reasons, but because microbes were not well understood.
88 - China, and then Malaysia and Singapore. Again, according to the possibly wrong wiki, it seems to have originated there in the late 17th century, and then was picked up by the English. It didn't contain tomatoes until the end of the 18th century. I don't know about mushrooms, though! And all of the spices would have been available via trade.
I think actual modern ketchup is going to be hard, recipes seem to have lots of spices and spices are expensive.
I'm unconvinced that large enough-scale cheese production to make the cheeseburger practical would have happened in early colonial America, but 1) I don't actually know a damn thing about the history of cheese (why isn't there a popular book about the history of cheese? Cheese: The Food That Curdled Civilization) and 2) I really, really, really shouldn't be procrastinating like this today. So okay. As penance for being wrong, the dude has to eat a toaster.
This all reminds me of the story (cherished by me as a little kid) that the ice cream cone was invented during a hot spell at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair so that patrons could hold the melting ice cream easily. Turns out that people had been eating ice cream cones for years.
But he totally was not saying people had to eat gruel. On that point I stand my ground.
Also, you don't need a meat grinder to grind meat - you need a sharp knife, a pestle and mortar and a bit of elbow grease. The ancient Romans ate sausages for god's sake.
93: This is just so unlikely. Cheese and cheese-related products arose primarily as methods for preservation of dairy. It's just right there in the sweet spot of what our colonizers would have regarded as heritage food.
Wikipedia says that 18th century cloves are still worth their weight in gold.
I'm not sure about the specifics of early colonial America, but cheese was a staple of the European peasant diet after the advent of early capitalism (which made meat too expensive for regular consumption by the lower classes).
Cheese is how you store milk for later. Milk is very seasonal. Cheesemaking is enough to make a person marriageable into the 19th c anywhere rural.
... also you could rephrase his point to make it totally unobjectionable:
A cheeseburger cannot didn't exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors --in all likelihood, a couple of dozen-- and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh in order to make the cost-benefit tradeoff of what is basically a quick lunch staple worth it.
93: I don't know anything about the history of cheese-making, but I do know that the New English would have routinely had cheese. An estate inventory of Francis Plummer in 1672 recorded that in the dairy house they had "four and a half sides of bacon, a quarter barrel of salt pork, 28 pounds of cheese, and 4 lbs. of butter." (Ulrich, Good Wives....) Plummer was of the middling sort - a linen weaver who didn't really practice his trade but instead farmed a small holding of 16 acres plus 20 acres of grazing land in Newbury, MA.
Anyway, ketchup is not a standard part of a cheeseburger, so it's a moot point. At a normal cheeseburger place the lettuce/tomato/onion come on the bun but the ketchup is added by the eater if they want it.
So, so pwned. But, uh, I added specifics?
large enough-scale cheese production to make the cheeseburger practical would have happened in early colonial America
Pounding the dead horse into the ground, and I realize you've mostly surrendered already, but you don't need large-scale cheese production; it's a household product for a farm household, as well being the sort of thing that farms exchanged for other goods they didn't make. I will say that getting a functioning dairy set up might have taken a couple of decades -- this is prosperous, well-functioning household stuff, not so much First Thanksgiving "Oh my god we actually didn't starve to death this year, thanks for the help Squanto" stuff. But that's not about being pre-industrial, that's about being on the brink of starvation.
102, cont.: Also, I feel compelled to note that it was not Francis that was responsible for all that cheese, but his wife, Beatrice.
in order to make the cost-benefit tradeoff of what is basically a quick lunch staple worth it.
Oh, dude. If you have to rewrite the post from "you would have needed unlimited resources" to "This would have been an expensive, rather than a cheap, food"...
*Although*:
"Americans got serious about cheddar; by 1790 they were exporting wheels back to England, the original motherland of the breed."
There's a cheese series on Mental Floss. Cheese politics! Mammoth polemic cheeses! Cheese riots!
sugar is expensive before the nineteenth century,
if you want cane sugar, yeah, that's expensive. but if you have a maple tree, or sugar beets, you can make your own sugar.
Pounding the dead horse into the ground
Okay, so now you need a dead horse and the tools to actually pound it into the ground in order to make cheese? This is getting more complicated by the minute.
You can't forget about Andrew Jackson's massive wheel of cheese at his inauguration - the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese!
A nearly ancient bit of poetry:
I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well, good god Almighty which way do I steer
A 19th century farmer would have found it quite a struggle to invent the internet by himself and discuss cheeseburgers on a website with other people that he also invented.
113 first line suggests that lettuce and tomato are not of the essence of the cheeseburger, but are optional. Like fries and beer.
I still haven't been able to figure out why he thinks he needs three whole cows.
More on 101: The funny thing is that for a big farm, there actually wouldn't be anything weird about making literally everything but the spices in the ketchup yourself. If you raise cows for dairy and beef and grow grain and vegetables, that's the whole shebang. You'd need a mill nearby to turn your grain into flour, but that's it. No vendors at all.
Modern ketchup appears to be from the last century. But that mostly seems to be because the recipe hadn't been invented. Tomato ketchup goes back to 1801 and the spices don't seem to be a problem. So I think if you had the recipe you could make ketchup as soon as tomatoes and the spice trade overlap. (Tomatoes are American and the spices are mostly Asian, so that's pretty late.)
At any rate it sure seems that ketchup itself is harder than the rest of a cheeseburger.
108: well, if you distill the post down to what might be a fairly banal point, if you don't think about it a Thanksgiving dinner seems complicated and expensive and a cheeseburger seems cheap and easy, but that's a product of relative modernity. I recognize that he could have said that without getting quite so many things wrong in the process.
116: You need one cow to kill for the beef, one cow to milk for the cheese, and one calf to kill for the rennet. He's right that for him to make a cheeseburger all from his own property, that's what he'd need, but a big pre-industrial farm would have all that as part of the workflow, and all of it would have been procurable.
112: Sigh. I confused the gift of a massive wheel of cheese to Thomas Jefferson in 1802 (with the motto 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God' engraved on it) with the Jackson inauguration party that got way, way out of hand. Damn you, memory.
Ingredient-wise, a cheeseburger isn't any more complicated than a meat lasagna (with lasagna noodles taking the place of the bread). I wonder how long that's been around?
You need one cow to kill for the beef, one cow to milk for the cheese, and one calf to kill for the rennet.
Perhaps revealing my ignorance of bovine agriculture, why couldn't one dairy cow serve all three functions? The meat's not the best quality (although that's more true in modern dairy cows than in agrairian ones), but it's passable.
Once it's beef, you can't milk it.
Once it's beef, you can't milk it.
This is true, but you can milk it before it becomes beef. And turn the milk into cheese, which takes time anyway.
Bread, cheese and chopped meat still seems about as simple as food gets. It's hard to see where his argument is.
You need the rennet to be from a calf stomach - it's a special enzyme (?) that reacts to cow milk.
121: huh, I had always thought it was Jackson who had a giant wheel of cheese just sitting around the white house for visitors to snack on. Have I been misinformed?
129: I did too, but on a cursory attempt to double check my comment I couldn't find it, and all my books are too far away to consult. I'll either have to wait for someone wiser to swoop in with knowledge, or until I can do a better search later.
I think you also need the rennet at the same time as the fresh milk to make cheese. So you need a dead calf at the same time you have a live cow. You're right that once you had the cheese, you could kill and eat the dairy cow, so only two.
128: Right, 125 was meant as a correction to 123. You need two, I guess, at most. But not three. And that's if you want to use rennet, which of course you don't have to. This is a very long list of cheeses made without rennet. (Is non-rennet cheese only possible with modern industrial technology? That's a genuine question--I don't know that much about cheese-making.)
You would have eaten all your surplus male calves, and they would supply rennet as well. Veal (not crated) was everywhere from about August onwards.
re: 128
There's cheeses that don't need rennet. Not that rennet would have been hard to get, unless one is stipulating not just a pre-industrial society, but some sort of post-zombie-apocalypse type society.
Haven't read all the comments, but I am firmly on Team LB here. In the recently re-published autobiography of Yellow Kid Weil, he talks about an early scam (around the fin de siecle) where he pretended to sell the hot dog concession at a Chicago race track to a deli owner. The deli owner thought $.10 was a fairly exorbitant price to sell hot dogs at. So tomato seasonality aside, there was already fast food as we know it 100+ years ago.
129: Aha! You (and I) were not wrong. It was for his last public party, and was very impressive.
And now my computer can run out of battery without me still wondering.
re: 133
Paneer, and things like queso blanco, anyone can make, at home, with just milk and something to make it sour.
One cow, one calf. Not that hard. They often come together.
America had direct trade with China starting sometime in the 18th century (ginseng for tea.)
Oh, of course there are plenty of cheese made without rennet. I was just trying to clarify. And yes, it's perfectly possible to make rennet without modern technology and it is, in fact, still done the old way all over Europe.
I've never had a paneer burger, but if it's the 19th century way, count me in.
Also, to refine the pedantry of this discussion one iota: Lettuce and tomato are the essence of a California burger, not a cheeseburger. I think the classical cheeseburger is more properly bun, patty, cheese, onions, pickles, catsup. Note that the last three ingredients are shelf-stable for quite awhile and the cheese could be too. Also, surely people traded cheese over some distance? How hard would it be to put a wheel of cheese on a boat in Boston harbor and have in Savannah or Charleston a short time later? Plus, railroads.
I thought that a California anything meant add avocado. Which is a whole nother problem.
Hammering on LB's dead horse, there are places that have been the centre of not just cheese-making, but the making of a particular distinct variety of cheese, since the middle ages or before. Shit, wiki speculates that cheddar cheese derives from a recipe brought to England by the Romans.
Once you're making weird requirements like lettuce, tomatoes, and ketchup, shouldn't you also Require that they be made with "processed cheese product" and not cheese?
What I want to know is how people ever baked anything before the 20th century, outside of large commercial ovens. Maintaining a consistent, uniform temperature when stacking logs or shoveling coal seems too difficult.
We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
Also:
We'rt though suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.
It would be kinda fun to try to create a steampunk Happy Meal, ca. 1850. (With chicken McNuggets as an option.)
146: A lot of baking was done in large commercial ovens -- city people bought bread. Other than that, keeping a uniform temperature in a wood/coal stove was a real skill, but it was a skill that people developed (and some people were better at it than others.)
Processed cheese products go back exactly a century.
re: 146
As far as I know, people would just use the village bakehouse.
146: Wouldn't that be more a problem with really fussy stuff like souffles? I'm not much of a baker, but it seems like, once you had been using your own oven for awhile, you'd get a pretty good sense of how long things took, at least within the margin of error that most baked foods would have.
That's disappointing. I was hoping for images of people roasting individual rolls or cookies over an open fire like marshmallows.
"Yeah, 100 years ago is 1911. By 1911 you have vending machines."
Steering this back to my favorite topic, by 1911 they had discovered superconductivity, and had demonstrated it in the lab. Yes. Seriously.
And I *still* can't get my trip to the moon. Sigh. Come on, people, COME ON!
146, 150:Rocks or stones hold heat real good, better than metal, and I have a set I bought 5 years ago for baking.
146: Check out Schenone's book. She learns how to do it, in a not-annoying way.
154: Your *fuel* wasn't necessarily consistent -- not all coal was the good anthracite, etc.
155: How old are reflector ovens? The 'pedia article says they're mentioned (as "tin kitchens") in the Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook.
And somebody really really needs to post about the experimental evidence CERN has found for the Higgs boson. The physics world is a rocking, and we need to go a knocking.
157 - you bought baking rocks?! You know how that sounds, don't you?
159:And most villages made their own charcoal
Folks, they made pottery and smelted pig iron. You think they couldn't bake cookies?
There's lot of breads one can bake on a stone with radiant heat, and things like tandoors and clay ovens that I imagine were within the reach of ordinary people. Still not super great for baking traditional 'European' type leavened bread, I suppose.
162 - Cookies would clearly burn in those ovens.
||Does anyone know of a source about the demographics of antidepressant use -- which groups use antidepressants? Google is not helpful. It seems to be 20-30% of the American population (various numbers cited), more men than women, more white than black, but I'd like to see a thorough breakdown like you get with election results. |>
161, 165, 167. It sounds like something I've done, having bought two pizza stones (I cleverly broke the first one). I think a cast iron griddle or pan is just about as good, though....my mom (den mother extraordinaire) once baked two biscuits on an ordinary brick she had put inour backyard charcoal grill. They came out pretty well.
So tomato seasonality aside, there was already fast food as we know it 100+ years ago.
Of course there was - poor people in industrial cities didn't have kitchens, so it was street/fast food or nothing. Eel pie and mash. Stout and oysters. All that good stuff.
Pie shops were the Macdonalds of the early modern period. Mashed turnips before potatoes were accepted.
If he wanted to make some point about processed crap we take for granted is actually hard to make, would have been better to use a Snickers bar than a cheeseburger.
If he wanted to say we're better off food-wise today than way back when...we're infinitely better off in terms of cost per calorie, but probably worse off in terms of typical quality, particularly today compared to the U.S. 1750-1850.
So, the thing linked in the OP is dumb. It's still mysterious, though -- why does the cheeseburger (or hamburger) not appear until the very late 19th century/early 20th C? (For that matter, why does the sandwich not show up until the Earl in the 18th century).
In the case of the hamburger, my guess is that it's not a very appealing or efficient food for either self-sufficient farmers or aristocrats with servants. It's quintessentially a cheap restaurant food, and my guess is that it doesn't show up there until there's relatively cheap refrigeration for the meat, demand from urbanized/industrial workers and, possibly, relatively cheap beef due to railroad cars. It would be interesting to know the real answer.
167-8: I already have my own intutitions, I was just asking about a source.
I thought that a California anything meant add avocado and a label warning about it causing cancers, birth defects, or a tow-away zones. Silly old bear, all growl, all bite.
||
I'm not sure what the most interesting conclusion is about this.
1. We have already reached Peak Unfogged.
2. The possibly, though not necessarily spurious correlation with the search term "undead rogue"
3. The fact that my own commenting frequency peaked around the same time as searches for unfogged.
|>
we're infinitely better off in terms of cost per calorie, but probably worse off in terms of typical quality, particularly today compared to the U.S. 1750-1850.
Oh, hell no. Think about what meat was like in the pre-refrigeration days. Come to that, think about what staples like bread and milk were like before the Public Health (Adulteration of Foods) Acts or their US equivalents.
my mom (den mother extraordinaire) once baked two biscuits on an ordinary brick
This has got to be a mnemonic for the planets in some solar system other than our own.
177: If you limit it to rich people at the right time of year, maybe.
Also, the poor were forced to eat lobsters.
179: limit it to rich people at the right time of year on both ends of the comparison, or just on the U.S. 1750-1850 end of the comparison? Because the latter seems unfair. And I don't think I buy the former. Rich people at the right time of year have a lot of good food available to them now.
Native Americans ate well. Or, at least, I like buffalo.
Dsquared pointed out that the Romans and the Greeks (he says the Homeric Greeks, but surely the MacGreeks of Alexander's time count too), and (say I) presumably the Persians as well, were highly developed post-agrarian societies that were practiced in moving food around from one place to another, and that other such highly developed societies as the Incas and Aztecs didn't even have to worry about slaughtering at particular times of the year.
staples like bread and milk were like before the Public Health (Adulteration of Foods) Acts or their US equivalents.
It seems to me that this was a problem more of an industrialized food supply rather than an agrarian one, so really, for the US, post-1850 in most places. I believe there is research showing that nutrition-levels in the US specifically started going down first with industrialization and then again with the rise of processed food. Once you got past the initial settlement period, colonial and antebellum North America was a good place to be eating, calorie and quality wise.
That being said, I wouldn't trade this food moment for any other. I like all the variety, and while I'm happy to push back against the idea that prior to 1900, everyone ate gruel!, they really didn't have the same selection available to them, either.
It appears that Jackson's wheel of cheese was specifically meant to outdo Jefferson ("Jackson's admirers thought that every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid him," link).
Emerson, I know of some national surveys that might let me get your answers. I'll report back.
181: By rich people, I mean me. Not big rich, but top percentiles of the population. If I don't bake my own bread, the bread I can buy conveniently sucks, and the 1750 version would have been better. Same, I think, with meat (if I don't put in the effort to search out the leash-walked pork, and so on) and fruit and veg (if we only compare at the moment when whatever it is is locally in season).
Now, I could probably eat as well in season as someone in my income percentile in 1750 did, but I think it would be easy to eat worse.
177: Quite. As I believe I've mentioned before, the Civil War diary of one of my ancestors is mostly complaining about how they had to eat nasty, rancid tinned beef and weevily bread.
Rail shipment of cattle is indeed kind of a watershed moment for food culture in the US. I believe there are whole books devoted to the subject.
The cheeseburger piece brought to mind this passage from Wealth of Nations:
Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilised and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the seller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brickmaker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on... [numerous other examples omitted] [I]f we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that, without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilised country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.
But I bet the African kings had more fun.
Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Smith?
187: War conditions are not exactly normal ones, though.
Both the rail shipment of cattle to processing centers like Chicago, and then, the later development of refrigerated cars to ship butchered meat were huge developments. But that's really post-1850; Swift got his start after the Civil War as well.
191: No, but they often presage what normal conditions will be after the war, what with technological advancements and realignments of power and access to resources. Thoreau makes a similar point in recounting John Brown's early life:
I heard him say that his father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there, in the war of 1812; that he accompanied him to the camp, and assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of military life,--more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier; for he was often present at the councils of the officers. Especially, he learned by experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the field,--a work which, he observed, requires at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. He said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war.
192: Right, but the specific point being made was that quality of food was better prior to 1850, not after.
I guess you could also make the point as well that May Resemble Excrements are not that much of an improvement on the rancid tinned beef.
According to the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (all racial categories are also non-Hispanic unless indicated), the percentages of adults who have used prescription medication for a major depressive episode in the past year are:
Men: White 33.0, African American 22.7, Native American / Alaska Native 29.7, Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander 0, Asian 24.5, more than one race 9.8, Hispanic 31.1.
Female: White 48.6, AA 32.3, NA/AN 18.8, NH/OPI 9.7, Asian 13.6, more than one race 36.5, Hispanic 37.0.
I can also break this down by family income if you want, but need to discard either race or gender to keep it from getting too complicated. The survey doesn't seem to have use of antidepressants for other purposes like social anxiety, but I'd bet it would be in similar patterns.
177, 187: but the civil war (and the navy beforehand) is notoriously the big driver of preserved, industrialized meat and produce. You can't use army/navy diets as your comparison. I'm not sure where to put the dividing line in terms of dates but I meant to distinguish agrarian from industrial diets. My general feeling (could be wrong about this) is that the latter half of the 19th century in the U.S. is where you get the entrance of Upton Sinclair type industrialized food problems.
Basically, a traditional agrarian diet in an abundant, well-off peasant society is what you get at the luxury high-end restaurants today (local, organic, "slow food", raw milk, etc.). The 18th century U.S. was wealthy and had abundant natural resources, the biometric and health data we have are strikingly positive (if you trust them).
194: I think I'd take them over weevily bread, personally. I love that quote from Thoreau, btw.
Those numbers are pretty 'Holy Fuck!'.
199: Yeah, half of all white women? I had no idea I was in the less depressed half of the population for my race and gender. I thought I was fairly morose.
This thread was making me hungry so I went to grab some lunch and what was parked in front of the office but The OnlyBurger Truck! OMG is this delicious.
Is there a link? The more variables the better. Where is the depressed/anti-depressant vote?
Emerson was the bad ice skater, Thoreau was a show-off.
There could be something I'm not getting about the numbers, because the weighted totals it gives add up to only 30 million. Maybe just an artifact of them only asking the mental health questions of 1/10 of the survey-takers.
Here's where you can navigate to the online analysis tool. I was doing it myself because I thought you needed an ICPSR login, but I tried with an incognito window and all I needed to do was accept the terms of use.
I have nothing to add here but wanted to drop by to say that this is surely the greatest blog post headline ever written by anyone anywhere.
Did we talk about that image that was making the rounds some months ago of the extrusion of ground chicken for chicken McNuggets (comparisons were made to strawberry ice cream)? I felt it was fairly ridiculous to go into what is essentially a sausage factory and be all "gasp! it's disgusting!"
But yeah, I think what we're getting towards here is a more accurate periodization of food culture in the US.
I'm thinking of something like:
1960ish-to-present: Essentially the food culture we have today, with all industrial inputs and materials present.
1945-1960: Proto-TV dinner era, rapid changes in sources, materials, energy inputs
1920s-1945: Mid-period of industrial food, change is somewhat slower than in the subsequent period, significant chunks of the population still sustained by some pre-industrial food culture.
1860-1920: Earliest developments in industrial foods, a large plurality of the population still sustained by pre-industrial methods.
1700s-1860: Growth of food transport as a major sector of the economy, various developments in mechanical agriculture and food processing first invented.
Pre-1700s: Food is pretty much all local, all handmade, earliest developments in plantation-based industrial agriculture for certain high-value commodities (coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, etc.)
And then of course you look at India or China where there was a much more gradual and long-standing development of proto-industrial methods.
It has an n of nearly 60,000, but I don't think that's enough to drill down by state; that data isn't offered.
Maybe this will be more useful for political analysis: metro status vs. income category. Read across are "yes" percentages for family income categories of
Large metro area: 46.0, 35.6, 34.4, 32.4.
Small metro area: 44.6, 40.3, 40.9, 42.5.
Nonmetro area: 53.4, 39.7, 53.3, 36.7.
Sometime between 1960 and now, and in much of the country between 1990 and now, the US got non-European ethnic food. I think that's a big enough deal to go on your list.
200: this thread also made me grab a cheeseburger for lunch.
208: I guess what I was thinking about was more along the lines of "When could you go into a food store, and find it in the form of a supermarket, which offered prepared foods of all types, including pre-cooked, easily-reheatable complete meals which consisted of various out-of-season foods from a vast geographic footprint, and preserved through freeze-drying, refrigeration and the addition of chemical preservatives."
211: Or a fast food restaurant chain. Of course, White Castle dates from 1921, but that was with a very limited menu.
188: many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.
Mmmmm-hmmmm.
I grew up down the street from this, but it was never a functioning White Castle restaurant in my memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:White_Castle_Building_8.jpg
This thread makes me want to go home and make cheeseburgers, especially now that I've learned the correct way to do it: seared on both sides, followed by roasting at 450 for a few minutes.
213: Just watched Highlander for the first time in forever last night. What's up with the totally offhand racist comment from the cop? "The things I gotta deal with: Some guy's callin' 'cause his Vietnamese neighbor ate his dog."
Overall, it's kind of a disappointing, incomprehensible movie with lots of plot holes, and then they put that bit in just to underscore the utter lack of redeeming social value. Hmph.
216.1: I remember that line! A particularly weird instance of Police Precinct Scene-Setting. (Also there's Connor McLeod's disposable buddy Castagere, who in his brief scene actually turns in some of the only decent acting in the film but is obviously just there to provide more fodder for the bad guy.)
Regarding 176, I think it operates on some subset of the search terms. Queries for mobile phones and service seem to be correlated with everything. Mind you, the more data series you have, the more of them will be correlated with a given series, by construction.
Lots of food-related hits, especially in Austin, TX, which I guess makes sense. Also "dress up guy" and "solo girls" and "san diego child support".
Cheeseburgers aren't made with cheese. They're made with pasteurized, processed cheese food. It would be an interesting challenge to see if that can actually be made in a modern kitchen, even one equipped with a Thermomix.
176.
The data is suspect. Look at the time profiles of "Harvard" "Worcester" and "pubmed." I suspect that their filtering of automated queries as opposed to human-typed ones has either changed over time or is optimised for current queries and performs poorly against older spider interactions.
My understanding of the Higgs situation is the following. (Keep in mind I don't actually know anything, but anyone who does know anything is busy working hard to figure out how to write papers about this at the moment.)
The LHC has found some evidence suggesting a Standard Model Higgs at a mass of 124-126 GeV (a proton is slightly less than one MeV, so this is around the mass of an Iodine atom). There's data from two different experiments, one detecting something around 124 and the other around 126. Neither experiment has particularly strong evidence, they're between 2 and 3.5 standard deviations so you'd see them just by chance around .3% of the time. If they were seeing some brand new crazy physics at 3 sigma, no one would believe it. However, what they're finding is totally expected and reasonable. The most boring possibility is that there's a standard model Higgs and the mass range has to be somewhere between 115 and 145 GeV, so since it's such an ordinary claim people aren't as worried about it being a false positive.
It'll take another year or so for them to really nail things down, and there's some interesting details here (one of the experiments is saying 124 and the other is saying 126, and one of the experiments has one of the kinds of decay happening more often than the standard model would predict).
It's both very exciting, because new particles aren't found very often, but also very boring because it's looking like it just fits into the standard model and so doesn't tell us a whole lot new.
For more info from someone actually knowledgeable: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/12/13/science-it-marches-on/
224. That's what Sean Carroll is saying, and I tend to believe him unless there's a good reason not to. His piece finishes by pointing out that this time next year there'll be another year's worth of data, and the Higgs has hung around for 13.7 billion years so it's not going anywhere.
Er, right, a proton is 1 GeV. I typo-ed because I was converting from Wikipedia's 938 MeV, so was looking at MeV and trying to type GeV. But that's just a typo, the Iodine comment should still be vaguely right (I picked the closest atomic weight that I'd heard of).
226: Wow, those graphs are noisy. The one stays in the 2σ band for most of the range.
Yeah, someone points that out in comments at Cosmic Variance, and it sure does seem like if your graph is mostly in the 2σ band then you have a systemic error somewhere.
Cheeseburgers aren't made with cheese. They're made with pasteurized, processed cheese food.
Maybe the cheeseburgers you eat, pal.
Wrenching the tread back on topic -- is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work? Out of season fruits and vegetables are an easy possibility (there's a Wodehouse story, so maybe from the twenties sometime, where a wealthy girl challenges a suitor to get her strawberries in the winter. And he does with much difficulty from a greenhouse somewhere, but absentmindedly eats them while waiting for her.) but I'm hoping for something surprising.
Sweets were disproportionately expensive, anything frozen was hard, but none of that feels exactly like the original post.
Back to the hamburger/cheeseburger for a second, the Wikipedia page on the hamburger is pretty interesting. Apparently there's a pretty well-attested 19th century "hamburg steak" consisting of chopped meat, but according (supposedly) to the OED, "It was a hard slab of salted minced beef, often slightly smoked, mixed with onions and breadcrumbs. The emphasis was more on durability than taste."
Convenient meat grinders for butcher shop use appear to be a mid-19th century innovation. If you had to pick a technology story for the absence of hamburgers/cheeseburgers previously, that looks like a big part of it.
The modern hamburger itself starts showing up in the late 19th century and is clearly attested by 1895. The bun was not invented until later; indeed, the first bun was made by one of the founders of White Castle.
Wrenching the tread back on topic -- is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work?
Soyrizo?
Convenient meat grinders for butcher shop use
I recall now Wimpy's portable grinder for impromptu burders.
Poking around in these early food stories (who really had the first hamburger, plus the ice cream story mentioned above) reminds me of Gould's fantastic essay on the creation myth for baseball. It's really true that people want creation myths for things that have clearly evolutionary histories. There's no one moment you can distinguish catchup from non-catchup or cheeseburger from non-cheeseburger, it's a complicated messy evolutionary story.
Wrenching the tread back on topic -- is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work?
I know I couldn't get through the week without my
Convenient meat grinders for butcher shop use appear to be a mid-19th century innovation.
When did emulsified sausages become common?
At the Lower Haight Rosamunde, there's a picture of sausage-making: a butcher with two mighty cleavers, one in each hand, going nuts on some thereby finely diced yea unto being ground meat.
If you want a good entertaining read about ice cream and history, this is excellent.
is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work
When was the modern chocolate bar developed? I have no idea, but it seems like the sort of thing that might depend on an industrial infrastructure.
239: Don't know, but sausage is quite old. I guess I thought there had been mechanical meat grinders for a long time, but possibly I've just been underestimating what's practical to do with a knife.
232: is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work?
I don't think so, because the original post is completely broken. I mean, there are any number of foods that would be impractical for one single household to produce -- his original constraint -- and many that would have been more difficult and expensive to reproduce before refrigeration and industrial freight systems, but nothing that makes either his original or revised claims make any sort of sense. Curry, for example, first emerged as a British dish in the 18th century.
241: Chocolate candy is high-tech, you need a conching machine -- I don't know the date without looking it up, but not before the nineteenth century I'll bet. That works.
(His original constraint would have been interesting as an art project, but he seems to have ridiculously imagined that households anywhere, in any culture, had ever produced their food purely autarchically.)
Wrenching the tread back on topic -- is there a good replacement food that we think of as a basic staple that would have made the original post work?
I think this kind of is related to UPETGI's point about the difference between evolutionary accounts of culture and single creation myths. The answer is probably not, because the OP is misjudged -- it's not so much that, putting aside obviously processed, industrial food, things were impossible to make, it's that there didn't seem to be much reason to do so. I think it's going to be pretty difficult to find a common nonprocessed food that was literally impossible to put together by, say, 1800, assuming that you were in the right part of the world and had access to the ingredients. But seemingly small technological changes that accrue over time will make a huge difference in what seems sensible to eat; in the case of the hamburger, it may be that mincing beef made sense when you were going to put it into a pie or a salted slab that would have durability, but little reason to just mince beef, stick it together, and grill it. Some combination of the meat grinder, refrigeration, availability of beef cuts, and demand (I'm just guessing here, but this makes sense) eventually produced what we know of as the hamburger through a series of mostly imperceptible innovations to existing things.
TVP. The ancients had no way of making TVP.
Don't know, but sausage is quite old.
Yeah, sausage, sure, but that can be fairly coarse. For an emulsified sausage you need to get everything really fine, and you need (or so I'm told) to keep your implements cold while you're doing it.
There are lots of frozen foods which require freezers. How about Mochi ice cream? (Invented in 1981.) Certainly Dippin Dots.
Is there a dish that requires a microwave?
244: It's not that high-tech, though. The chocolate bar dates to about 1830 - 1850, so it doesn't count as a food that would have been "impractical" before the last century.
241, 244: True, but I claim priority for 172.1
Don't know, but sausage is quite old.
The assumption among modern experts is that Roman sausages (Apicius offers several recipes) weren't emulsified but more the consistency of a coarse salami. I think that assumption is made because that's what you can achieve experimentally with knives and a mortar.
possibly I've just been underestimating what's practical to do with a knife
The words for "hamburger meat" in German (Hackfleisch or Gehacktes) and French (viande haché) hint at their pre-industrial origins. Interestingly, the Italian carne macinata/tritata is closer to our "ground meat".
I bet you could have made emulsified sausages using mill technology to power spinning knives of DQQM.
Milk caramel is mid 19th century, nougat is quite old, and peanuts are even older. So for Snickers it's really just the chocolate. I think this is a bit of a problem, it shouldn't be hard to find particular ingredients (milk chocolate, frozen things) or particular machines which weren't invented, but the point he was trying to make about the cheeseburger is more complicated: even though the individual ingredients were gettable the combination was not. That seems much much harder to find.
For an emulsified sausage you need to get everything really fine, and you need (or so I'm told) to keep your implements cold while you're doing it.
...or you make one of the various liver- or blood-based sausages, which go back well into the pre-industrial era.
Conching is 1879.
High fructose corn syrup. Honey is a poor substitute highly variable in fructose content.
Right, the point that "this all looks so simple, but actually you need a modern economy to get it in the same room" looks like a plausible point that should be supportable, but I'm not getting it with a foodstuff.
It works fine if you're talking about food prices, out of season produce, and so on, but not really for anything that feels like his cheeseburger example.
Robert Duvall had a chocolate bar from Switzerland in Open Range. And thought it pretty good, iirc.
It's a fact that the first baseball game west of the continental divide was played by members of the Corps of Discovery and their Nee-Mee-Poo hosts. Don't even try to tell me otherwise, unless you want to set off a tirade of Flippish mumbling.
I'm not getting it with a foodstuff
Quorn?
257: Although I just looked at a page which suggests it wasn't as important as I thought -- I thought you needed conching for anything recognizable as candy (as opposed to a basis for a beverage), but a biographical page on Lindt suggested that it just improved chocolate's quality and ease of manufacture immensely, not that it was different in kind from pre-conching candy.
Conching sounds like something that could have been invented by any enterprising man and woman at any time in history.
It's still mysterious, though -- why does the cheeseburger (or hamburger) not appear until the very late 19th century/early 20th C? (For that matter, why does the sandwich not show up until the Earl in the 18th century)?
Really? That doesn't seem particularly mysterious to me. Neither are particularly obvious foods, the burger especially. It seems no more mysterious than why they appeared at all. And you have to be fairly cautious about what is obvious when it comes to food. I mean, most people didn't use forks in Europe until the Middle Ages. And of course vast swathes of the world's population still don't.
Well, anytime after the water/windmill. Having to keep the process going for days seems prohibitively difficult for musclepower.
"this all looks so simple, but actually you need a modern economy to get it in the same room"
Again, this is both an easy and a hard problem. I just ate a Salade Nicoise. Were the ingredients for this possible to find and put together in 1800? Sure, but it depends a lot on what time of year and where you were. Probably not possible at all -- or prohibitively expensive -- anywhere in the interior USA. So you do need a modern economy to make that available, but it wasn't literally impossible to put together the ingredients without a fully modern commercial economy.
||
From Kotsko
Methane Released from Arctic Seabed ...vastly greater than previously estimated
December 13
|>
Wasn't it impossible to create a solid milk chocolate before the mid-19th century, and wasn't the technology to do it pretty complicated?
By contrast it's utterly trivial to come up with dishes that couldn't have existed pre-Columbus.
From the original story, I learned that basically cheese is impossible before the Industrial Revolution. Intriguing if true.
Well, anytime after the water/windmill. Having to keep the process going for days seems prohibitively difficult for musclepower.
Yeah, you're really supposed to see a physician if you're able to keep it up for more than four hours, as I recall.
Sandwiches occasionally make a guest appearance in the Aubrey-Maturin books (British navy, Napoleonic wars), almost as a novelty...
"Why, sir," said he, looking about him, "what splendour I see: gold lace, breeches, cocked hats. Allow me to recommend a sandwich. And would you be contemplating an attack, at all?"
"It had crossed my mind, I must admit," said Jack. "Indeed, I may go so far as to say, that I am afraid a conflict is now virtually inevitable. Did you notice we have cleared for action?"
― Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command
But like everything else in the original story, totally false. Cheese predates writing for fuck's sake.
Intriguing if true.
I'm pretty sure that's not true. (I'm sorry if you're being facetious.) Here's wikipedia's history of cheese.
241 - A bowl of corn flakes with bananas?
Were the ingredients for this possible to find and put together in 1800?
Sure, but you may have had to go to Nice...
273 is right. Cheese was certainly common in ancient Europe/West Asia. I imagine it was invented about a generation after lactase persistence became common in the population.
Of course it is ancient. The beatitudes refer to the cheesemakers.
272 -- Patrick O'Brian also captures the peculiarly American obsession with autarchy, as reported by Pontet-Canet in The Fortune of War:
I myself was in the Connecticut, in the back grounds of the state, hunting savage turkeys with a veritable American farmer, and he held me the following discourse: "In me, my dear sir, you see a happy man, if such is to be found under the Heaven. Everything you see about you comes from my own land. These stockings--my daughter knitted them. My shoes and clothes come from my herds; and these herds, with my poultry-yard and my garden, provide a solid, simple nourishment. The taxes here are almost nothing, and so long as they are paid we can sleep on both ears." There is Arcadian simplicity, hein?
Though of course Pontet-Canet is the villain, and perhaps not everything he says should be trusted.
276 is a very good try, but I don't think it works.
The Gros Michel banana is over 200 years old. Now the modern banana trade is late 19th century, so I think you're right that you wouldn't be able to get bananas cheaply in the US. But certainly in central america you should be able to get maize without much trouble.
Corn flakes weren't invented until the 1890s, but I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't have made them earlier if you had the recipe.
Like conching, I think they're really an industrial product. You could make something at home, but it'd be closer to tortilla chips than cornflakes.
I think Smores are another solid option. Graham crackers are late inventions (but for no particularly good reason, you just need the recipe), modern marshmallows are very late (but there were earlier versions), and chocolate is complicated (though again there were good earlier versions).
Is there a dish that requires a microwave?
Egg in a plastic cup.
I keep on meaning to try homemade marshmallows. And then I remember that Sally's a vegetarian and it seems insane to make annoying difficult candy that only one of my children can eat.
Nah, they probably had their ways.
Someone who won't eat marshmallows sounds more like a "vegan" than a "vegetarian".
I don't think corn flakes are industrial. Instead what happened was that adventist religious beliefs lead to more experimentation with creating relatively bland grain-based products. So you might not have gotten them without adventism, which is mid 19th century, but you just need the recipe.
DIY corn flakes:
http://ledameredith.net/wordpress/?p=1178
Yeah, corn flakes are an industrial product. (And unlike shipping e.g. coffee, shipping bananas is basically impossible to do before the invention of refrigeration; as late as the 1870s, British readers could be expected to not know what a banana was, although they were technically available in Europe*.)
* Is it obvious that I read Bananas: How Some Relatively Picayune Thing Explains the Whole of Human History?
289 - Those are made with a baked cornmeal dough, not pressed whole grains.
How about soda?
Ginger ale can be made with ginger, sugar, and yeast.
Of course it is ancient. The beatitudes refer to the cheesemakers.
Actually:
And carry these ten cheeses unto the captain of their thousand, and look how thy brethren fare, and take their pledge. (1 Samuel 17:18)
Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? (Job 10:10
287: Marshmallows are gelatin -- a dead-animal product, not eggs or dairy. Avoiding marshmallows is scrupulous vegetarianism, in that I'd think overlooking the meat would be perfectly reasonable for a relaxed vegetarian, but it's not veganism.
292: Ah, the claim is that cornmeal which is sufficiently modern for making corn flakes is industrial age? I'm starting to be won over by this example, even if you could make something resembling corn flakes in central america near bananas, you'd run into the problem that you're probably lactose intolerant since you're living in central america.
I know I am late to this, but tomatoes and lettuce wouldn't overlap on a Sacramento farm. Tomatoes are August through October but lettuce bolts in summer heat. We get lettuce in winter and spring. If we could get lettuce from the coast, as I do at my market, could put the burger together.
I am, btw, appalled that no one has mentioned a thick slice of red onion, but it doesn't add any difficulty to the meal. Onions store well.
273, et al: I'm sorry, I don't read comments here, so your correction is wasted on me.
Actually, I was just trying to succinctly parody the original argument and the credulity with which it was received. If you follow the argument to its logical conclusion, you would have to conclude that cheese is an industrial product.
Around here, you can get lettuce from a garden all summer and into the fall -- you need to sow more at intervals, but that's it.
298 - No, it's that the dish presented in 289 isn't really cornflakes. (Just look at it!) I'm willing to back down slightly after thinking about it some, as you could probably have modified pasta rollers to produce corn flakes had you known the recipe; shaped pasta seems to have been a Renaissance-era invention. But even so, I think there's a reason dry cereal (as opposed to porridge or oatmeal) wasn't invented until the 19th century.
298: There's never exactly a 'cornmeal' stage in the manufacture of cornflakes.
Corn flakes are really just flakes of sweetened corn-bread or corn-cake. They don't qualify as industrial. Corn flakes with bananas are theoretically possible well before the industrial era, but the bananas involved would have been dried or cooked and more similar to plantains until the discovery of a mutant variety of "sweet" banana in the 1830s or thereabouts.
I know I am late to this, but tomatoes and lettuce wouldn't overlap on a Sacramento farm.
Say no more!
305: There weren't sweet bananas before the 1830s? People in Samoa cultivated a whole lot of different kinds of bananas, some sweet, but I have no idea, come to think, when they got there.
I've been having a really hard time finding a good date on breeding of the Gros Michel. It was first brought to the americas in the 1830s, but who knows how long before that it was bred.
What about something that requires a stand mixer?
307 - There were sweet bananas, but they weren't eaten raw; as DS says, they were cooked like plantains.
But I think 304 has renewed my belief that corn flakes are an industrial food. Giant pressure cookers! 40 ton rollers! Huge rotating toasting ovens!
307: I think the "sweet" (as in sweet-right-out-of-the-peel) variety preponderant today is supposed to have originated on a Jamaican plantation in the 1830s. Otherwise bananas were a commonplace food in latitudes where they were grown and a rare delicacy outside them. So your likeliest venue for eating corn flakes with bananas pre-industrially is anywhere in Africa where you have corn, honey, plantains and cattle (which is a lot of places prior to 1800).
The cornflakes and bananas example really only works, though, because both are basically industrial foods (in the case of the gros michel banana, a selectively grown, effectively new fruit) that simply didn't exist circa 1800. It's not really analogous to the cheeseburger story, where all the individual ingredients existed, but putting them together (supposedly) required a modern economy.
The more I think about the original article, the weirder it seems to me. (I'm reading the comments there now -- my desire to procrastinate is total and all-consuming.) The obsession with autarky is really quite striking. It's hard for one guy to make a cheeseburger, though it would be easy for a village to do so. (Though even there Ma from the Little House books could clearly have made one.)
I do have to say that the amount of suck-ups in the comment thread at that other site couldn't exist without modern industrial agriculture.
315: Maybe it's an environmentalist-survivalist thing along the lines of trying to work out what you could make or grow as the sole survivor of some sort of apocalypse.
Marshmallows were originally made of marshmallow -- hollyhocks, I think -- but the only person I know who's done this didn't think it was worth the effort.
My college crew team used to make fancy weekend breakfasts, eggs and cream whipped stiff by hand, port vs startboard. Stand mixers are for the old and weak (I love mine now).
The comments (and particularly the trackbacks) were what got me to post. It's not that he got no pushback -- there certainly was some -- but that it was getting picked up credulously as making a good point about modern transport/food supply chains worried me. Who are these people who don't believe that society existed before the Model T?
317: Here, I'm really mindreading. But I think there's also a bit of "don't interfere with your industrial overlords, you'd be dead in a week" in the credulity with which people picked up the original post.
I mean, that's true, I personally would be dead in a week if TEOTWAWKI happened. But still, people traded goods, both raw materials and manufactures, over long distances before the industrial revolution. They ate food, they wore clothes -- life was nasty, poor, brutish and short, but it wasn't literally impossible.
You want a sweet banana to eat raw, Misi Luki are the best ever. But I have no idea when they originated, or how long people have been eating them raw.
His original constraint would have been interesting as an art project
This. And I agree that it would be a fun art project.
259: Right, the point that "this all looks so simple, but actually you need a modern economy to get it in the same room" looks like a plausible point that should be supportable, but I'm not getting it with a foodstuff.
I think the better point for him to make would've simply have been that the modern Ronald McDonald cheeseburger was and is kind of impossible to make from scratch, since it's an industrial product, and besides that, if you were going to put that much work into food, you'd make something a whole lot tastier. (To wit: I have a recipe from the Balkans that I use wherein I grind up lamb, pork and beef, form it into a thick patty, stuff a chunk of hard cheese in the middle and then bake it. Then I serve it with tomatoes, spring onions and cucumbers. Why would I want to eat Ronald's stuff when I could make that instead?)
I'm late. Whatever. To address the rest of thread:
As above, cheese is *old* and probably would've been the very first thing invented or discovered that would've gone on a cheeseburger. (Except perhaps for beer, but that doesn't count.)
Sausage is old too (given that it's mentioned by Homer that implies a Bronze Age invention), and they did it with knives yes. (And still could, actually, if you make that chunky stuff that I have seen.) But *cheap* (industrial) ground beef created and produced to make use of beef and fat scraps from slaughterhouses and butcher shops, seem to be the sort of that only appears when you have a lot of slaughterhouses processing a lot of cattle. And that would be initially a product of the Old West, since the sale of beef grown mainly for slaughter comes from there. (That is, the raised a lot of cattle in Texas, herded them to Kansas City where the beeves were then railed to Chicago and slaughtered.) But that's not really new, it's just a particular product of the economics.
Jefferson mentions growing tomatoes in one of his letters and wonders if they're poisonous. The tomato didn't wide in Italian cuisine until 1850 (according to Bugialli who says the recipes for the common red sauces just didn't exist before then).
Wikipedia says lettuce was used by Egyptians, which I did not know.
White bread, as in the common hamburger bun, as in the ultralight fluffy stuff is new, since that goes back to bleaching flour. Moreover, the farther back you go, the more breads tend to resemble chewy, really thick chunky bagels.
And once again, according to Wikipedia, pickling (particularly cucumbers) goes back to India, circa 2000 BC (which seems a little early, but OK). They're also telling me that domesticated onion comes from Egypt circa the bronze.
So the only thing you couldn't have had prior to say, the birth of Christ would've tomatoes. OTOH, any hamburger you made would've borne very little resemblance to the industrial product you get at Burger King. That is, a very thick, hefty, chewy bun, a piece of meat (more likely to be lamb or pork than beef) with a very coarse and chewy texture, likely some very soft white cheese, lettuce (no idea what that would look like), no tomato, a likely funny looking pickle (home pickling being what it is), some not very wide onion slices and of course, mustard because anybody who uses ketchup on a hamburger, especially a cheeseburger is probably a willing minion of Satan, as all right-thinking people know.
And I do believe I have just duplicated half the thread while being well on my way to completely rewriting the dude's article so I apologize, but I'm sick, as in a cold.
max
['And late, same reason.']
279: O'Brien was ripping off Samuel Johnson, or at least Boswell's account of his pub banter (rather like O'Brien's whole work rips off CS Forester).
The modes of living in different countries, and the various views with which men travel in quest of new scenes, having been talked of, a learned gentleman who holds a considerable office in the law, expatiated on the happiness of a savage life; and mentioned an instance of an officer who had actually lived for some time in the wilds of America, of whom, when in that state, he quoted this reflection with an air of admiration, as if it had been deeply philosophical: 'Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of Nature, with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun with which I can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for human happiness?' It did not require much sagacity to foresee that such a sentiment would not be permitted to pass without due animadversion. JOHNSON. 'Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim,--Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?'
That was me, or rather most of it was Boswell.
Anyway, max's point sounds quite a bit better than Burger King.
The obsession with autarky is really quite striking.
Eh, I sympathize with it. At least for me it's the result of some vague anxiety that my informal support network is fragile (thanks to my generally poor social skills), and social safety nets will likely evaporate the moment something really calamitous happens (which, my brain assures me, will be any moment now). I don't actually do anything about this, but I do fantasize about having a cabin that I can escape to and live entirely self-sufficiently.
What about something that requires a stand mixer?
I'd bet anything we use a stand mixer for can be easily duplicated with a cook, servant, housewife, or anyone with the wherewithal to spend an amount of time on the task that we'd now consider extreme. (Viz. creaming butter and sugar, which I did for the first time recently, lacking a stand mixer.)
some people enjoy the challenge of a fully from scratch sammich. Ruhlman also did an Egg Benedict From Scratch challenge.
Some things would take real muscle without a mixer. Creaming soft butter isn't bad, although the results wouldn't be as fluffy without a mixer, and meringue and whipped cream are pretty easy. But I just whipped up a batch of royal icing to decorate Buck's fruitcakes with, and I think that would be a brute to do by hand -- the mixer at full speed takes a couple of minutes to get it to the right texture.
So maybe it takes an hour, at most, by hand? If the dish has "royal" in the name, the household probably has labor to spare.
WTF? Creaming sugar and butter was the sort of thing I did by hand when I was 6. In the traditional Scottish ritual of 'making shortbread'.*
* aka scoffing as much butter and sugar as possible before you get stopped, while 'helping' mum.
life was nasty, poor, brutish and short, and devoid of cheeseburgers.
I've never owned a mixer, so always did these things by hand. While I'm not a regular baker, or cake maker, I can't remember anything being especially hard. Some things would be a bastard to do in large quantities without assistance, but for ordinary home baking?
Early 19th Century apostropher likes cheeseburgers. But, there are not cheeseburgers. Discuss.
330: We have labor to spare now. Cuisinart & KitchenAid can, after some training and the fitting of shock collars, rent out little ghetto kids for the more onerous mixing tasks and get tax credits from President Newt.
331: What I said was that creaming butter and sugar, although people talk as if you'd need a mixer, was really pretty easy. The thing I was calling hard is royal icing, which is like meringue with a whole lot more sugar. And I still think that royal icing specifically is something that I might not be able to get done by hand to the correct texture.
re: 336
I was replying to 327 [and hit post before seeing your 329]. I.e. to the idea that the effort [e.g. creaming butter and sugar] might be considered extreme by anyone.
You'd be amazed at how lazy some people are. (Myself included. I will cream butter and sugar by hand but I'm always thinking, 'it's so much easier with a mixer.')
Laziness is a complicated thing. I will do a lot of stuff by hand to avoid getting the mixer out of the cupboard -- it's more effort setting it up than whipping cream by hand. Probably literally less physical effort, but more annoying.
337: Whoops, I missed who you were responding to.
I suspect the original blog post had a mixture of 317 and 320 behind it.
326 -- But if civilization collapses, you won't get autarky. You'll get a return to village life, which still features division of labor. In the Middle Ages, you didn't see completely self-sufficient farms isolated from everything. You saw villages every five feet or so. The isolated farm has got to be either a) a pecularity of the 18th/19th century frontier or b) a literary myth.
Ever since I stopped masturbating regularly I've totally lost the ability to cream butter by hand.
There were fairly isolated, autarkic farms in Ohio, and I thought in Cornwall -- bad roads, good land, and very extended families.
re: 339
Yeah. I've never had a mixer, but I do have a blender [admittedly only acquired recently]. But I'm lazy about cleaning it, or getting it out, so I tend to do everything except liquidising soup by hand.
340.2 gets it exactly right. The people who head off alone into the wilderness in the event of civilization-wide collapse, instead of seeking out other people to pool skills and resources with, are likely to have a pretty short lifespan on the whole.
Argh. My boss's boss currently on telly talking to botneY. Cool books, mind.
342.last: Yeah, there's a point where a really big household does get big enough to be pretty close to internally self-sufficient -- where the household is the village.
340, 344: Honestly, who knows what happens if 'civilization collapses'? Probably village life re-emerges at some point, but there's going to be an intervening 'almost everybody dies' stage which could look like anything. I'm not too worried about it, because I wouldn't have a hope in hell.
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Important, non-cheeseburger related wrongness on the internet:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poor-black-kid/
||>
346.2: I'm pretty much just planning to start a cult. Heck, if my crazy uncle can make it fly in modern industrial South Africa, it's got to at least worth a shot.
347: Ah, someone else I'd like to stab.
348: If it holds off a few more years, I can hope that the kids will protect and feed me. They show promising signs of being large, strong, and vicious in a pinch.
284, 294: During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman made root beer and baked pies to sell to soldiers in order to get her living expenses and fund her various activities.
347 -- Is there any essay theme more likely to go horrendously wrong than "If I was a poor black kid"? I'd love to see a collection of those, just to view the atrocities.
Sometimes I think (in the context of the job search), well what would that city be like after significant global warming? But then I start thinking that modern higher education probably doesn't survive significant global warming so why bother thinking about it. And then I start thinking about how instead of buying a house I should be investing in something that'll be safe in the post-warming apocalypse, but what would that be? Decisions with really long timeframes (odds are reasonably good that I'm picking somewhere to live for 40 years) are totally mysterious.
Laziness is a complicated thing.
Roughly the same complicated process of laziness results in my sometimes handwashing clothes rather than taking them to the laundromat.
If I was a poor black kid
If I were a poor black kid.
||
One of my co-workers, a lovely and kind woman with unerringly unfortunate taste, has put a 5-foot-high Santa in the office. It has a motion detector and starts singing Christmas carols when people walk by. Over and over and over.
I am preserving my sanity by launching into a Network-style rant about Christian hegemony and noise pollution singing alternate lyrics in my head, such as this little ditty from my days defending abortion clinics:
We wish you a safe abortion
We wish you a safe abortion
We wish you a safe abortion
At the clinic today.
Glad tidings we bring for your G-Y-N.
Glad tidings of health care and a happy pap smear!
|>
Sea level rise is predicted to be less than a metre by 2100 (see table SPM.3 from the IPCC 4th assessment report) so the areas to stay clear of should be clear: they are areas that are already threatened by flooding.
On the other hand, the IPCC have so far been consistently too cautious in their predictions due to political pressure...
If I was born a poor black kid.
355:
God is a lesbian,
God is a lesbian,
She is a dyke
Send her Victoria, Mary and Gloria,
She'll lick clit on the floor with ya
God is a dyke
354, 359 -- that's one of the ways the essay theme could go wrong. But hardly the worst one.
337: The recipeweb led me to believe it was ridiculous to do it without a mixer. I plead guilty to a meager cooking repertoire, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.
Eggplant, Sharon Astyk is pretty good on practical things to do if you're generically stressed about TEOTWAWKI. She herself is living on a farm and planning for the end of oil, but is quite good on strengthen-where-you-are. E.g., have some disaster food, find out how to start practicing one skill this month, meet a neighbor.
"Hi Esteban, I'm Natilo. Care for a freeze-dried beet? Say, we're having a small-mammal tanning skill share next week, it'd be great if you wanted to stop on by."
340, 344: I think it's pretty clear that if civilization collapses the Mormons will take over. They have the communal organization down, plus the survivalist caches as a bonus. Everyone else has totally depleted the communal ties and mutual trust necessary to rebuild civilization. (There are other groups that haven't but they are small and poor compared to the Mormons).
365: What about the cohabs? Is it just understood that after the USG collapses, everyone goes right back to polygamy like they never stopped?
We just order cheeseburgers for delivery. I blame this thread.
366: Sure. It's the only way to stop "the lamentations of their women".
OT: Hey, anyone who knows my last name and wants this year's version of Buck's fruitcake recipe, google "[my last name] fruitcake" -- he posted it in his newsletter. (Anyone who doesn't know my last name but still wants it, email me for the link.)
I dunno, LB, there isn't a whole lot of booze in that.
Did you read down to the part with the soaking instructions? I've been watching these things get bathed in rotgut for a month.
Oh, no, just the half cup of wine and half cup of bourbon listed in the ingredients. I take it back.
Rats, I guess I should have applied to BYU... I suppose I could convert and try to move there if it looks like the apocalypse is imminent.
I still think New Zealand will do well in the apocalypse (remote, mostly energy independent, good growing location which will remain good even if things heat up a bit), though several of the cities are very vulnerable to rising sea levels.
All the sheep anyone could possibly want.
more likely to go horrendously wrong than "If I was a poor black kid"?
From the comments at balloon juice, Shorter Gene Marks: "If I were a poor black kid I'd be better than all those other lazy-ass poor black kids."
TNC is tweeting and retweeting a bunch of riffs on the theme.
Only 376 comments? What's wrong with you people?!
Only 376 comments? What's wrong with you people?!
195: you mean half of all white females have used anti-depressants within the last year?? Holy crap!
Given all these drugs, amazing the U.S. has the highest prevalence of mood disorders in the world.
Ever since I stopped masturbating regularly
Now nosflow masturbates exotically.
Now nosflow masturbates exotically.
By all appearances it would seem "exotically" should be "esoterically."
195: you mean half of all white females have used anti-depressants within the last year??
I find that number implausible.
382, 383: I thought he didn't even own a stand-mixer.
385: I should think that with all the attachments using a stand-mixer could be masturbating exhaustively.
284, 294: During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman made root beer and baked pies to sell to soldiers in order to get her living expenses and fund her various activities.
But no cheeseburgers. Hmmm, maybe Krugman and DeLong are on to something here....
I'd bet anything we use a stand mixer for can be easily duplicated with a cook, servant, housewife, or anyone with the wherewithal to spend an amount of time on the task that we'd now consider extreme. (Viz. creaming butter and sugar, which I did for the first time recently, lacking a stand mixer.)
Oh Standpipe Minivet, look at you blog.
(1) Regarding foods that could not have been made two hundred years ago.
Pop Rocks spring to mind. Could they have been made a hundred years ago?
The second obvious candidates that springs to mind are foods that have been deliberately altered for some purpose --- sugar free soda, olestra-fried potato chips, etc. Whether you want to consider those truly different is a matter of choice.
The third obvious candidates are baked alaska (soufflés were mentioned higher) and similar items that, while perhaps in theory possible, would be really tough to make without the support tools. The obvious extension of this is, of course, molecular gastronomy --- but none of those dishes have commonplace names yet. Maybe in twenty years there'll be a chain of fast food molecular gastronomy restaurants?
(2) Regarding anti-depressants --- do we have any figures about how many of these people are taking these drugs for ACTUAL depression? How many are taking them because they're legal recreational drugs; or because they act (or at least are believed by some to act) as weight loss drugs; or for some other reason?
I say this not with an agenda in mind, but simply based on common sense. For all its faults, the US is not a land of abject misery for 50% of the white female population, which suggests that these drugs are being used for some purpose other than their ostensible purpose.
348: go for it, lord castock! I think you've got both the charisma and the cunning, seemingly random explosions of temper that really keep cult members in line. hell, I'd join if you weren't going to set up shop in [shudder] post-apocalyptic canada.
What anti-depressant can be used recreationally?
The real trick is to come up with a future cheesburger-equivalent which mere conceptual problems keep us from enjoying right here in River City 2011.
363: She's also a supercool newly licensed foster parent. I figure being able to care for traumatized kids is a good skill to have for after the apocalypse, not that I'd make it.
Dippin' Dot molecular gastronomic pizza. Some fucking like that.
Glo-fish.
I just bought candy cane-flavored Pop Rocks for the kids' stockings.
390: Post-apocalyptic Canada should be one of the more livable locales, actually. Come north of sixty, admire our thawing permafrost and newly-navigable Northwest Passage and the stunning scale of our blackflies, bask in our cunning and seemingly random explosions of temper... it's all good.
Had buffalo osso buco tonight. The meat was ok, but the marrow was sublime.
yeah, I guess it will be warmer with all the melting permafrost and stuff. the blackflies seem awful but no one raised in a swamp in SC so thick with mosquitoes one fears breathing them in accidentally can have much to complain about there. I'll bring crucial screened-porch technology to the north.
Like Diogenes I'm fit only to be a ruler of men, so after the collapse of civilization I expect to be made king.
I'll bring crucial screened-porch technology to the north.
A welcome development, surely. The most durable buildings in the frozen tundra of Canuckistan were built by stone masons from Scotland, who didn't do porches and porticoes (though their houses, barns, and outbuildings would presumably survive a zombie apocalypse, because those guys, they built to last). Black flies are a merely seasonal nuisance, though their bites, admittedly, can actually hurt. But just think of the abundance of fresh lake water! And with global warming in effect, the James Bay area will probably be a temperate zone, relatively.
I'm assuming the low country of SC/GA will be entirely under water, though it's just possible my dad's house will be on a barrier island, it being the highest point in the county, and higher than the highest in the next county. water is the universal solvent, though, and our house is pretty much built on sand. no bedrock.
Knifecrime Island might be quite pleasant, in our globally-warmed future, if the Gulf Stream doesn't get shut off. If that happens, we'll be more like Svalbard. Less armoured polar bears, though.
yeah, that's a big fear of mine, that the gulf stream will stop. I also think it's ill-advised of us to be eating every single fish in every ocean. I thought after the cod-fishery collapsed people would start being more sensible. it's also a sad side-effect of africa's poor governance that most coastal countries don't have the coast guard/navy to keep european boats from illegally fishing in their waters.
408: but, thanks to recent reintroduction programmes, we will have armoured beavers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8072443.stm
Worse yet, they've been reintroduced into Argyll, so they'll be armoured Campbell beavers.
That cold winter we had 2ya was partly because the Gulf Stream had temporarily switched direction and started going up the west of Greenland instead. I remember seeing the NOAA thermographic reports.
re: 410
Need to make the reintroduced wolves hunt the beavers, then. Arms-race.
Well, of course arms race. That's why they're armoured. See that? That's science.
Before 1772 it would have been impossible to make any recipe that requires an N2O foamer. Ferran Adria would have been shit out of luck.
Further to 394: The overcoming of mere conceptual problems is the kind of a thing that a blog comment section might actually be good for.
Ferran Adria would have been shit out of luckmute, inglorious
I think pop rocks would have been possible to make years ago, since the trick is to form the air pockets under increased air pressure, then let the candy harden before depressurizing. And speaking of depression, SSDIs are notorious for lowering libido, so I've wondered if that little side effect explains anything about modern life.
Might help explain why gay men are having so much more sex than the rest of us. In addition to the obvious.
And to the OP, surely one could have scraped together a cheeseburger in King's Landing, Oldtown or any of the Seven Free Cities. And since that is a very serious, thoughtful, historical reconstruction that has never been made in such detail or with such care it's good enough for me.
my two closest friends here are on anti-depressants, and neither has had sex in over a year (no boyfriend, not the random hookup type generally, or feel they are too old for it.) what the fucking fuck? I was talking about it and my one friend says she remembers sex being enjoyable and all, but doesn't think about it much or really miss it. I find this incredibly weird. maybe I'm some kind of mutant, but I think about sex all the time. I don't think I've ever gone more than 4 weeks without having sex since I started having consensual sex (long-term boyfriend in CA, me at my grandmother's studying for my greek MA exams.) if I had a lack of boyfriend problem I would be out there hitting on random guys in a bar pretty quickly. I think people vary really widely in this respect. and I'm on 3 anti-depressants! I kick it old-school with some tricylics mixed with wellbutrin and the highest dose of lyrica that doesn't give me cthulu/hallucination problems. but half of the women in the country taking anti-depressants would be a huge hit to the national female libido, clearly. they need to invent viagra for the lady-bits. or just maybe stop giving everyone anti-depressants. I clearly need them, but can all those people possibly need them?
420 dudes, let's roll up a big one! oh, wait, I don't do drugs anymore. never mind. apo will have to do it on my behalf.
You know, in a long enough enough dry spell, I think it's fairly common to stop thinking about sex so much. If you go without for a couple of weeks, it feels like a serious deprivation. If you go without for a year, that's life. Or, that's how I remember it from my last long dry spell, in the Peace Corps (damn you, medkit overflowing with unused condoms!) If that's never happened to you, you might not know how you'd react.
422: philly blunt lunch break? naw, you can get me back later.
423: I have heard plenty of people say that after a time, the further away their last sexual encounter, the less they think about it. like it's just sort of been x-ed out of their life. so yes, I don't know how I'd react (and hope never to find out, insh'allah.) I have the problem that I'm genuinely ill or in serious pain a lot of the time; it kind of cramps my style. still, needs must etc.
423: My life would be vastly more pleasant if I reacted this way, rather than with thinking about sex all the not-fucking time. (I swear it's worse than when I was a teenager.)
426: Which Adlai? I'm trying to figure out when you were in order to judge your parenthetical.
