And here I was assuming the palm-oil palms also made coconuts before they were clear cut and burned. Silly me.
I admire the title.
And if the stuff sells at $2 a jar that means your margin is tiny. That's as good a reason to adulterate as on a high-margin product.
I'm hoping they start cutting the oregano with pot.
$2 a jar's a pretty good price for a bunch of leaves.
This kind of thing was practically the norm pre-FDA, of course, so a good benchmark test for the decline of regulatory enforcement.
Sylvia Pankhurst gave as an example of sweated labour in her 1931 book, The Suffragette Movement, the work of women whose job it was to rub minute pieces of wood into seed shapes so they could be added to raspberry jam made without the aid of raspberries. Outraged, she opened a factory making jam from real fruit at affordable prices to create jobs for pacifist women during the first world war.
HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?!
A half century after Pankhurst we were still faking raspberry seeds -- the processing plant I used to work in went to a lot of trouble to filter the seeds from its raspberry puree and replace them with strawberry seeds, which don't get stuck in your teeth in the same way.
6: The cooking fats are now 98% free of dead guys.
On the subject of fish fraud, I just read this Twitter thread where a college bio class did PCR on a bunch of restaurant fish samples - much of it was not legit. https://twitter.com/AwesomeBioTA/status/1114262375446663168
The snack places at my former employer had "salmon sushi," but when you read the label it was really steelhead which is a trout. But I guess it's a type of trout that goes to the ocean and back. So it's an honorary salmon.
Back before I got really good a dropping out of graduate school, I was working in the warehouse for a chain of discount retailers that specialized in selling really old stuff they could buy cheaply from regular retailers. There were so many pallets of really dusty jars of spices.
14: Same company.
https://www.biglots.com/corporate/about-us/our-history
When I worked there, they also owned K-B Toys.
I think the 'where did the new coconut come from' is pretty simple. The price increases slightly. People in developing countries are _much_ more sensitive to an extra few cents for a serving of food, so when the price increase slighly they switch to something else and the rich world buys up a commodity that used to be sold domestically in SE Asia or whereever.
I'd feel sorry for the people in South Asia missing out on their coconuts, but I bet they took all the quinoa from South America.
I wish somebody would take all the squash. It's not very good and yet abundant.
Except for spaghetti squash. It's not actually horrible, but it's horrible if you are expecting spaghetti.
The Aztecs could obtain complete protein from corn, beans, and squash. They tried cannibalism instead.
Tried it and decided it was better.
I think actually they thought the squash was so good they would give the squash gods a neverending torrent of long pig in exchange.
I thought they ate everything but the heart.
Certainly more often than I eat the zucchini people give me.
You might be more appreciative if you captured your own zucchini in ritual combat.
women whose job it was to rub minute pieces of wood into seed shapes so they could be added to raspberry jam made without the aid of raspberries.
I cannot bring myself to believe that this actually happened. It just sounds ludicrous from an economic point of view that you can get enough of a price jump between "fake raspberry jam" and "fake raspberry jam with fake seeds" to make it worth your while to employ artisanal fake-raspberry-seed-makers to make fake raspberry seeds by hand in one of the highest-wage economies in the world.
I mean, this is a period when it stops being cost-effective to have human ticket sellers on the London Underground because machines are cheaper. And yet the women of Norfolk are still supposed to be whittling tiny wooden raspberry seeds by hand? Even at sweatshop wages it's hard to see how that's a workable business plan.
Those London cost-of-living allowances are brutal.
Or you saw up thin rods and run them through a cranked machine.
32 I can't bring myself to believe people wouldn't notice the difference.
Isn't a seed really just a specialized type of wood.
Part of the problem with zucchini is false advertising: it's a fun and exciting name, and then it turns out to be an anemic cucumber.
It occurs to me that I usually only eat zucchini with Parmesan cheese. So maybe it's the cardboard.
That's a relief. I was going to eat cardboard for science.
Also as far as I can tell this
Outraged, she opened a factory making jam from real fruit at affordable prices to create jobs for pacifist women during the first world war.
is not true.
Sylvia Pankhurst opened a factory in the East End in 1914 (the business survived until 1943; there's a plaque on the site today), but it was making toys, not jam. Germany was a major exporter of toys, so the war left a gap in the market.
And it was intended to provide jobs for poor women (and paid them a man's wage, as well as providing a nursery for their children), not pacifist women: why would pacifist women have been in particular need of work? But poor women, especially those whose husbands had enlisted, were in a lot of financial trouble; it wasn't easy until later in the war for soldiers to give their wives access to their pay.
There's no mention of a jam factory in "The Suffragette Movement", her history of the period. There is one mention of the artificial jam seed business; she mentions it in a list of poorly-paid jobs that women do which she had had no idea existed.
But I'd love to see some other account as well as this one, which is a passing reference of something one woman claimed to Pankhurst that she did.
Minivet quoted a 2003 article by Felicity Lawrence in The Guardian:
Sylvia Pankhurst gave as an example of sweated labour in her 1931 book, The Suffragette Movement, the work of women whose job it was to rub minute pieces of wood into seed shapes so they could be added to raspberry jam made without the aid of raspberries. Outraged, she opened a factory making jam from real fruit at affordable prices to create jobs for pacifist women during the first world war.The Suffragette Movement is searchable via Google Books and I could not find any mention of this claim in it (there is a "young girl discharged from a jam factory" for Suffragette activity).
However, I did find an earlier mention of the claim in the short story "Mr Saunders" by Elizabeth Berringe (published in the collection Family Matters, 1980) which says:
To live south of the river, in Battersea or Balham, Tooting or Streatham or Clapham, was to be of inferior calibre to the hardy northerner. South of the river were small and peculiar entertainments, sectarian chapels, dance halls, tram lines ribboning dark streets where men with slicked down hair and too wide trouser legs walked with peroxided fancy pieces on their arms; where there were canal cuts, factories for making wooden pips for fake raspberry jam, stinking pickle warehouses.And that's as far back as I have been able to trace the story.
And it was intended to provide jobs for poor women (and paid them a man's wage, as well as providing a nursery for their children), not pacifist women: why would pacifist women have been in particular need of work?
Without intending to support the factuality of the claim, maybe such women didn't want to work in armaments factories, or textile mills for uniforms, etc.
Pacifists obviously would have strong motivation to work at such a factory, in hopes of averting the terrible days of wrath which would inevitably follow the unveiling of the false jam.
Maybe all the talk of fake jam was just part of a vicious smear campaign.
Pacifists obviously would have strong motivation to work at such a factory, in hopes of averting the terrible days of wrath which would inevitably follow the unveiling of the false jam.
But thankfully such a day will never come. Fake jam tomorrow and fake jam yesterday, but never fake jam today!
Without intending to support the factuality of the claim, maybe such women didn't want to work in armaments factories, or textile mills for uniforms, etc.
This all happened in October 1914, though. There were virtually no women employed anywhere in the military-industrial sector in Britain in 1914; the National Archives reckon 2,000 total in all government arsenals, ammunition works and shipyards at the outbreak of war. The big expansion of arms manufacturing came later on in the war, in 1915, after the "shell crisis". In October 1914 the British economy was a peace economy convulsed by the sudden loss of a lot of its male workers to the army as volunteers, not a war economy.
And it seems very unlikely to me that many of these 2,000 women would be pacifists. Pacifists don't tend to get jobs in armaments factories in peacetime either.
The Suffragette Movement is searchable via Google Books and I could not find any mention of this claim in it (there is a "young girl discharged from a jam factory" for Suffragette activity).
Book VIII Chapter II ("The East End Campaign") of the edition I have includes the line "Women in sweated and unknown trades came to us, telling their hardships: rope-makers, waste rubber cleaners, biscuit packers, women who packed chickens, too often 'high', for canning, and those who made wooden seeds to put in raspberry jam". This chapter is not included in the Google Books version (which is an incomplete preview).
"Def Jam" got its name because Russell Simmons was a discerning eater who wanted to be sure what he had at breakfast was "definitely jam."
High chickens go in the other thread.
I am very impressed by Pankhurst as a result of looking into this story, incidentally. By October, less than two months after the war started, she'd identified a good market to start a factory (toys), recruited an experienced manager, got hold of a building, and got a commercial operation under way, paying equal wages and providing a nursery and evening classes for the workers, and she did it so well that it paid its own way and kept going after the end of the war, right up to the point where the Germans destroyed it in 1943.
What a waste to try to limit a woman like that! In an equal society she'd probably have ended up in the Cabinet or running Vickers-Armstrong.
In an equal society she'd probably have ended up in the Cabinet or running Vickers-Armstrong.
Possibly, or she might still have been a left communist, and still wound up in Ethiopia fighting fascism.
I thought the anti-fascists only got to anti-fascistizing when they could hang with glamorous Spanish people who had wine.
I searched Google Books for "raspberry wooden pips" and found several contemporaneous sources, as well as other more recent sources suggesting it's mythical. I certainly agree they couldn't have been carved by hand, but could imagine a partially mechanized process. The contemporaneous sources too could certainly be elevated hearsay of the day, perhaps elevated to underscore the urgency of regulation. The most interesting, because it doesn't seem like it would have carried that motivation, is from a New Zealand parliamentary debate on immigration, 1908:
Amongst recent immigrants who had come under his notice were two classes of workers for whom we had no need. One was worm-hole borers. In the Old Country they bored holes in furniture to make it appear to belong to the time of Queen Anne or George III. Another class made wooden pips for raspberry jam made out of jelly, and the people engaged in that occupation were known as raspberry-pip makers. Recently we had imported, to his knowledge, one worm-hole borer and one raspberry pip maker. He knew something of the methods.
But yeah, nothing definitive.
I give you Hansard in 1952, in a debate on jam:
Dr. Stross [this guy, a Labour MP and great-uncle of the author Charlie Stross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Stross]: Would the Minister accept that all the evidence we have available is that what is called "Full Fruit Standard," namely, sulphided pulp, mostly imported from abroad, stained brown, which has to be cleared by boiling, and then dyed again by artificial dyes, does not contain much protective substance in the form of vitamin C? Will the Minister see that we cease to use sulphided pulp, forbid it. as we did before the war?
Major Lloyd George [the National Liberal Minister for Food; this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwilym_Lloyd_George: No colouring matter which is injurious to health is allowed to be put into any jam. Sulphur dioxide disappears on boiling, I am told, and so, I regret to say, does a lot of the vitamin C.
Dr. Stross: That is the point.
Mr. Champion [this guy, a Labour MP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Champion,_Baron_Champion]: How much vitamin C is there in the wooden pips?
[no answer recorded]
It's inconclusive, but does imply that "wooden pips in jam" was a well known trope for food adulteration; whether founded in truth or not.
56: being a leftist and wanting to fight fascism wasn't entirely incompatible with being in the British cabinet and overseeing a major nationalised industry, especially not in Pankhurst's lifetime.
Given the time frame, I think we should be glad the pups weren't made of lead.
None of you overeducated assholes is answering my question: Did the bell toll for Lalibela?
63: One of the few that could get only 11/10 from the dog rates account.
61: Does that transcript leave one with the impression that Mr. Champion's remark was understood as a piss-taking interjection? Wondering based on (a) the abrupt switch from Dr. Stross as questioner (b) the lack of any answer.
So this is what Liam Fox was alluding to by saying Britain needed to get back into exporting "innovative jams and marmalades" to France.
Really, Barry? Did that need to happen?
66: yes, very much so. They went straight on to coffee prices.
I read a stunningly boring book featuring Colombian attempts to cartelize coffee! I remember nothing!
70 It was inevitable, don't you think?
According to Wikipedia, this Baron Champion is a "bad title" and "contains unsupported characters". I hope Blair managed to purge that particular peerage.
I was reading The Chemistry of Fragrances, and there is frequently fraud in flavoring and scenting agents. Vanilla, for example, is often synthetic, even when advertised as natural. The major sellers, who have reputations to maintain, require tests of their supplies. Real vanilla is radioactive since it comes from living plants. Synthetic vanilla is not, since it is made from petrochemical hydrocarbons which haven't been part of a living creature for millions of years. That's why carbon-14 dating works. The old test was to use a sensitive Geiger counter. Then, the fraudsters started irradiating their synthetics, so chemists had to check for particular isotopes. Natural synthesis is biased to use heavier isotopes in building certain parts of various products, so a precise NMR analysis is needed to distinguish natural radiation, from the right atoms in the chemical, as opposed to a the more random pattern produced by irradiation. I wish I were making this up.
That last fragrances, fakes and isotopes post was mine. Sorry about hitting the button without filling in a name and email.
How vanilla displaced rosewater as the American favorite.
At a certain point, does the difference between natural and artificial matter?
Matters to me, asshole.
I meant from an ontological point of view. Also, you'll still get buyers who need the bean.
Come here and talk about ontology at $1.26 a day. Asshole.
Can I eat a lemur? I've always wanted to and the people at Duke never let anybody.
The weird thing is I find strawberry seeds stick in my teeth much more than rasberry seeds do.
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I was trying to pick which of thirteen hundred movies to watch on the Criterion Channel for like an hour until my brain broke and I ended up watching Starsky and Hutch instead. God that movie was dumb.
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Dr Henning Winker, a DAFF- Fisheries scientists developed a stock assessment tool, called 'Just Another Bayesian Biomass Assessment', (JABBA)|>
Having just eaten a bunch of raspberries, let me just say it is really hard to find the seed and pull it out to take a good look at it. I bet it would be pretty easy to whittle some kind of small chips that passes muster for your normal breakfast eater.
I hope I didn't eat defective raspberries.
OT: For no particular reason I can remember, I had always pictured Georgia O'Keeffe as a sort of demur woman who painted flowers that looked like vulva because nobody had the nerve to tell her "That kind of looks like a vagina." Anyway, I was very surprised to learn that there were nude pictures of her and that these photos are moderately famous as works of art in their own right.
The raspberries you find in the supermarket, like most modern fruit, have been bred to have very few if any seeds. Older varieties are pretty darned seedy.