No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.
His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.
As someone who smokes a small single digit number of cigars per year, I can attest that the nicotine buzz is incredible on the rare occasions that I do.
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.
I tried smoking multiple times and never had any good reaction. It's weird to me why people smoke. Is my chemistry differs from others? I even used to smoke for two years once, just for "community" because people I hanged out at time were smokers. For me cigarettes are just weird thing producing smoke. I learned to swallow it and not blew out my lungs, but I never found any amusement with this thing and dropped it eventually.
Per their use in MREs, yeah, nicotine is a really good drug to have when you're likely to be in combat in the next four or so hours. It drives blood to the core and away from the periphery, it heightens alertness, it increases testosterone, and there are a lot of other effects.
Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.
it may depend on the cigarette brand. they treat the tobacco differently. some will put it under ammonia fumes heh and that modifies the nicotine, cracks it of sorts, which increases the potency by two or three orders of magnitude, like cracking coke just with nicotine.
Same here. I'm a light-weight, so smoking a cigarette just makes me jittery and uneasy. Not a pleasant high. A feeling that says: "WTF did you smoke that?"
When you have a hard addiction to cigarettes, just being asleep for 8 hours is enough time to give you a wonderful warm body flush of joy when you have that first cigarette in the morning.
I had a friend who loved smoking hookahs years ago. 16 or so years ago now, wow.
We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.
The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.
I had an old coworker that said the same thing, calling it nearly like getting a sort of high. He had been gifted some tobacco plants by a local tribal community he had a good relationship with. So basically the only thing he’d smoke was his homemade cigars that was its own involved process. Seems like a great way to limit intake and actually enjoy things. That said, I hate smoking, and find even campfires noxious most of the time so it’s not for me.
Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.
Talking about nicotine inducing a religious experience. In my 20s I smoked organic pipe tobacco from a bong and holy shit the experience was out of this world, I literally felt like I was flying and had the most insane headrush.
I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.
Many drugs have great effects, nicotine from cigarettes on me ain't one of them. 5 minutes of dizzy, uncomfortable, mentally still in the same place.
The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.
Same. Part of the reason the addiction never quite took hold of me is that I could tell that despite the addictive rush they just made me kinda jittery and nauseous. Obviously this varies an incredible amount person-to-person.
I'd appreciate the perspective of an actual smoker on this, but I suspect those long-preserved cigarettes aren't that special in and of themselves. For Steve, it's a hit of both nostalgia and a chemical he's long been deprived of. It's probably amazing for him, and that shows in the videos, but telling himself that those preserved cigs are special might be a way for him to avoid relapsing. He craves more, but he can tell himself that the modern junk just wouldn't be the same.
If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.
Cigarettes haven't been the same (in the US) for well over a decade now, since all 50 States and DC require them to be "fire safe" cigarettes (FSC).
This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.
Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.
But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.
Interesting. I rarely smoke, but did do a lot of smoking in the mid 00s. I recently indulged and damn, it was nowhere near as tasty as I remember. That probably explains it!
Any tobacco shop. You can buy empty cigarette tubes, which are basically just the paper tube with a cotton filter attached. They don't contain any extra additive. You can then load any tobacco you like with a cigarette loading machine (also known as an "injector"). You can also buy pure, high quality Dutch tobacco that's far higher quality than anything that would have been loaded into a cigarette in the 1970s.
For pipe smokers, there’s a formula called “Doc Watson” which includes cigarette tobacco. It’s excellent. You will get a nicotine biz from it unless you sip it.
The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.
Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.
> Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.
Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:
Tom Scott is still producing podcast and/or gameshow via Lateral and The Technical Difficulties. It's certainly not a British guy in a red t-shirt explaining interesting trivia, but it's still entertaining.
One of the main reasons you see so much advertising for them is because it's very easy to sell and very easy to get a partner account. They hand out those custom promo links to creators like candy.
More like "scareware", maybe not quite to the term, but they generally advertise on 'aren't you scared of the threats on the web?? well here they are so you should be scared! buy product' kind of thing. There are legitimate uses, but they can be so benign and almost irrelevant to whatever security pitch (like...getting around georestrictions)
If you know you're in honey then you act accordingly. If you think you aren't in honey then you're more likely to let your guard down and get into trouble.
For instance, an embassy with clear telephone and telegraph lines knows they're being listened to, and subsequently is very careful about what they transmit. An embassy who has bought Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG ) equipment thinks they are secure and transmits information they would never dream of sending if they knew they were being listened to.
Sure, but that's orders of magnitude more effort, oversight, manpower and political risk involved than your typical "find a thousand people who have a paper trail saying they did X, pick the five hundred of those who you have an airtight case against, pick the hundred of those who juries will find least sympathetic, pick the 50 of those least likely to shoot back" type" operation that the fedcop enforcement agencies run fairly unilaterally every single day.
Basically, yeah. Unless it's your server in your basement and/or colo, you have no way of knowing for sure. Plus reselling that data could be very lucrative, as there are a lot of companies (and governments) that would be quite interested in that data...
Specifically:
* there is a presumption that a VPN, esp. a commercial one used by the average person for non-work related activities, is doing something shady. not entirely unfounded, though "shady" could simply be watching Brazilian Netflix
* the ISP can't see what you're doing, but the VPN can, and they're almost certainly using some sort of specialty firewalls / VPN aggregators / custom devices. Chances are those devices can do some deep packet inspection, and any lag would be perceived as using the VPN. Might even be able to MITM connections, maybe.
* DNS is often just as interesting or damning as actual traffic, and most VPNs will configure you to use their DNS to prevent leaks. but that means they know you're looking up "totally-legit-bitcoin-trade-site.com", or maybe "hardcore-gay-pronz.net" 3 times a day. they don't know what you're looking at while on those websites -- maybe you're ssh-ing to their server to fix apache? -- but they can make assumptions.
Depending on what you need them for. Privacy? Your VPN provider will know your traffic but your ISP won't. Circumvention of georestrictions? Preventing problems when torrenting? Circumventing the GFC? There are many applications.
I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)
I am not sure why my post was downvoted. I have no affiliation with AirVPN.
I am not in China anymore but Astill was always the VPN of Choice. But 2 years are now 300 USD if I remember correctly.
Israel has similar artifacts, both of WW2 under the British Empire and of the subsequent austerity/rationing during the state's first decade.
1. During WW2 the British established a ration of "standard bread" to eliminate wheat imports. This is still the price-controlled bread type, and led to the replacement of some pita consumption.
2. The austerity years coincided with (and were in large part caused by) a rapid doubling of the population by expellees from Arab countries. Lots of them were used to rice, but with food rationing and price controls were in place, rice would have been a strain on government finances. So the state pushed "Ben Gurion Rice", aka Israeli/pearl couscous, a good-enough substitute that could be made from cheap American wheat imports.
I'm sure there's more hiding under the surface, I just don't know all the history.
I'm struggling to imagine what would happen in the modern day if the US government went to war and tried to resort to WWII-style rationing. Limited meat, limited sugar, limited gasoline, a national speed limit of 35 MPH to save on tires... I legitimately think that the country would collapse.
Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
Making people stay home is a more major restriction than rationing non-essential goods. Social interaction is more fundamentally important to humans than being able to eat chocolate etc.
Food and gasoline are essential goods. The people were not overeating having to give up luxuries, they had trouble to get enough calories their bodies needed.
> Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
What I recall in my area was retailers and distributors doing the rationing themselves; "limit 2 per customer" and so on. Masks often didn't make their way to retail shelves because hospitals had purchasing priority.
Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics.
Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.
Stores implemented limits per person/household, but you could easily work around those if you really wanted to. It wasn’t rationing on a federal or even just state level.
Overproduction was the problem at the time, not shortages. There was a shortage of money caused by loans - it was impossible to make money to both buy all the goods and pay all the loans. This is why money lending has to be banned, as it makes the markets stuck like this and causes a depression when the economy improves.
Loans cause a depression when there is plenty.
A farmer takes a loan when the price of wheat is $2 a bushel. But the economy improves, there is plenty of wheat for everybody, so the price of wheat halves. The farmer can't react to it by growing less wheat, he has a loan to pay, he may even need to increase his production to be able to pay even with the reduced prices. This is happening to everybody. Any time money is made, part gets used to pay off debts, and isn't spent on goods that others produced, which further drives the prices down. You will soon reach a point when nobody will buy any more wheat for any price. You go bankrupt, and the bank gets your farm, but the farm is worthless, nobody's going to buy a farm in such an economy from the bank. The bank now has no money to fulfill its obligations. The money it lent you, and which was lost, is still on other people's accounts, so the bank can't give them their money when people demand to withdraw it. Nothing about it can be fixed by giving further loans - loans for consumption only create more debt in the process, and there is no opportunity for bussiness lians, as there is already too much of everything.
you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
> there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away
People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
I think that it is completely unfair to try to pretend that there was good faith political intention beyond these. It was pure cynic "if I spread the bullshit I get more cake for myself and can harm enemies" decision making in the process.
Well I'm someone who thinks the lockdowns were a bad idea because they genuinely made the world worse off, and I'm making that argument in good faith. Certainly not trying to harm anyone. What makes you think there's no good-faith argument to be made?
It wouldn’t have been framed as liberty-quashing if it wasn’t for said propaganda circles. Most people can’t form an opinion better than a stool without simple “[VERB] the [NOUN]” talking points, and these were readily available in low-quality yellow-on-black text JPEGs.
Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
> Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?
---
EDIT to explain further:
Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:
OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.
OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.
In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.
Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.
If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
Incarceration happens because of a willful act. A pandemic, like seasons or natural disasters, are events beyond the control of individuals except for preventative measures that mitigate risk.
You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.
That's kind of the point: There was a pandemic in 2009 that everyone seems to have forgotten about because we didn't have such an extreme response with things like masks and lockdowns, and the world didn't collapse. Neither did it this time in the areas that didn't have such an extreme response. It was unnecessary, and a lot of people realized this early on. Some of the pushback is from that group. Most of the rest is from people who just want to decide the risk for themselves instead of having it forced on them.
I believe there are several important points missing from this discussion.
Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.
Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.
Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.
Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.
All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.
In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.
This is completely unrelated to the point I was making. Come on, going to prison was just an example of something bad that decreases quality of life. Can you please try to engage with the actual argument?
> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers.
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.
> If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
Hindsight being 20/20 and all that. This is clearly something you feel strongly about. I don't like people dying and societally, don't mind doing things that help other people not die.
Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)
Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.
Yes, but. It’s the time in-between that people generally want to maximize…and if they’re the kind of person I want to hang out with, they want to help other people maximize their short time as well.
Maximizing the quality of one's time on earth is not only done by maximizing its duration. Nobody, including the people you want to hang out with, optimizes for 100% longevity without caring about any other variable.
Tone deaf and lacking empathy is a good way to describe people in their 70s who want society shut down, children locked out of schools even, because they're terrified of their own mortality.
There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
It would be a totally different world, but I expect we would adjust. People are surprisingly adaptive, you just don't expect it beforehand and don't notice it after.
We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
How are you under the impression that you saved anyone or that the US had lower rates than other countries? The US is top 10 or close, in deaths per case or deaths per capita of most statistics I can find for COVID-19. It doesn't seem to me like you're basing your thoughts on reality if your pre-existing supposition is "there were less deaths in the US".
Researchers and statisticians will be poring over covid data for decades to come. There are so many variables to control for that at this point that definitive statements are hard.
For example, the "US death rate" is somewhat meaningless because it encompasses multiple communities which adopted multiple strategies, with multiple levels of diligence, and covers both large concentrated populations and small distributed populations.
US deaths were not evenly spread, so there was certainly some variety of outcome with variety of mitigation.
Overall, the US death rate though is high, which suggests that it's very high in some areas. The correlation between strategy, compliance and outcome will feed researchers for a long time.
I know many deaths were wrongly attributed to COVID everywhere, the whole debacle about deaths 'with COVID' or 'from COVID', among others. Question is your point only reinforces my argument, because the data we have shows the US rates were roughly the same up to one of the worst, and the data we don't have we don't know what it says.
So to conclude the complete opposite of what the current data shows, dirty or not, is wrong. To then be upset at it is misguided.
I'm not able to research this in depth right now, but obesity was a pretty strong predictor of outcome. In general, the US population has is very unhealthy and obese.
I'd be curious to see rates by country by BMI and infection date. There were definitely lessons learned from Italy's early surge that helped other countries in the early days.
There's no need to research the why. The only point I'm making is the end result - which they used as the main base of their argument on, is not true. Why it's not true is likely very complex, but it's not true.
Nobody is going to be grateful for something that didn't happen, why would people be grateful for dying less as a population, if they in fact did not die less? Also there were lockdowns all over the world, not just in the US.
Are they still be alive to be grateful? Statistically a big chunk of the people who would have died to COVID have probably died in the intervening period between the lockdowns and now. It has been a couple of years and the 60+ demographic shrinks pretty quickly at the best of times.
I live in a rural area and we were far less affected by COVID lockdown than cities and suburbs. The main impact was (a) my kid went to school online (b) I worked from home and (c) I wore a mask when I went grocery shopping.
Besides that? I live in an extremely low-density area, it was pretty much business as usual. Restaurants were takeout only, when parks weren't mostly deserted, people spaced themselves out. I remember meeting a couple of my wife's friends in a park and we all just sat in a giant circle. Lockdown was more a minor irritation than anything.
> (Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
> Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
That's a huge caveat you just snuck in there. I'm totally with you on the first part about largely having gotten through lockdowns, though it wasn't without some damage and suicide and crime rates did go up for example.
We simply don't have data about how many boomer parents in rural areas were saved from dying. For one thing the virus mortality rate was much less than it could have been. For another we never actually ran randomized control studies testing efficacy against death.
Given that you singled out boomers in rural areas, I also assuming that they either didn't get vaccinated or were somehow saved by those younger people in cities that did choose to get the shots. How do you assume that? The vaccines didn't prove out to be very good at preventing transmission, and preventing transmission between populated cities and rural areas is pretty well handled by geography.
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
It is important to note that people in 1939 often did not have experience with this either. A lot of WWII rationing and planning focused on educating people on how to do these things in the first place.
Also in 1939, people did not have experience self-organizing into bands of likeminded internet-enabled jerks. I posit this helped avoid civil strife immeasurably.
I lived next door to a PhD in plant biology, who would almost foam at the mouth from anger about monoclonal farming. I asked him about alternatives...he said without even a thought: "victory gardens." Time for me to find out exactly why. Turns out the USDA brought all the regional managers and all the researchers to get together on very best practices. It has withstood the test of time. My sister in law planted one exactly out of the book. Plant for plant. Not even full sun and the crops explode. Another friend tried it at a rental unit with 5 galllon buckets. A bit screwed, but he also got great results.
Fundamentally a Victory garden is small scale soil managment at its very best. Thanks Gabe.
One thing I learned after moving to a rural agriculture area is how few farmers produce their own food. It just doesn't happen with anyone farming commercially.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
My grandfather managed a pretty large hog ranch back in the day. They still had a garden on the ranch that helped feed most of the families of the people who worked on the ranch.
You may be interested in the early 90s BBC series The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a series somewhat reenacting the homefront gardening effort in WWII Britain. It’s on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxMUY_E07w
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
> I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
It probably depends... is it a necessary war for the legitimate defense of our country, or is it another bullshit futile war started by bankers or politicians trying to make some sort of twisted legacy for themselves?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
We wouldn’t because there is no reason to. All those restrictions back then were because fertilizer, gunpowder, and rubber were all naturally sourced and in limited supply. We have self-sufficient synthetic or domestic production of all now.
In all out war, all available production or very close to it gets repurposed for the war effort. Those or other new rationing limits would certainly come into play when the US gets into a war that threatens survival instead of the run of the mill "make sure we keep production going in case we need it later" wars that we're used to. Maybe it'd be no new iPhone models due to semiconductor rationing or things like that but there's always limits.
Not the same limits though. Bacon was rationed because animal fat was turned into gunpowder. But the Haber-Bosch process is self-sustaining. There will be no shortage of gunpowder.
Also you have no idea if there will be no shortage of gunpowder. Rationing gets applied where the shortages are, and the shortages are many times difficult to anticipate or predict. I get your point and agree it's more likely to be new items, but that's just a gut feeling. In reality shortages can happen on basic products that are easy to manufacture but which a country doesn't manufacture anymore, for example if it's not very profitable.
The contribution of animal fat to gunpowder (it is surprising that there is a connection!) is the nitrate content. Essentially the compost waste is turned into fertilizer, and from there to high explosives.
Nitrate is NO3. It is produced 100% from the air, by a process which is exothermic. So it’s (almost) free, at the margin, or would be if not for the need of pure input gasses.
A Haber-Bosch plant is a factory the size of a city that produces all the fertilizer or explosives you’d ever want, using nothing but air, water, and electricity as input.
We can confidently say that this particular shortage won’t be an issue anymore.
In an all out war short of nuclear exchange it’s plausible fuel and electronics could be rationed but the USA produces so much food nowadays and even a huge military has pretty hard ceilings on food consumption it’s hard to see the food rationing (which was most impactful to ordinary people) returning.
Food rationing in the USA wasn’t to ensure a supply of calories to troops, but to ensure that industrially useful foods (e.g. high nitrate fats) got recycled into military use.
The development of synthetic gunpowder via the Haber-Bosch process, which fueled Germany through two world wars, but only became available to the allies after WW2, means this particular form of rationing is a thing of the past.
Nitroglycerin was used as a component of smokeless powder -- propellant for bullets, mortar shells, and artillery.
The Haber-Bosch process was used by all belligerents in World War II. Germany was the only operator of the process during World War I, but it rapidly spread throughout the world between the wars.
Thanks for the correction on glycerin. If I remember my history right, the Haber process spread through the world after WW1 for making ammonia, and from there known techniques were available for transforming it into saltpeter. But BASF / IG Farben continued to develop their high pressure chemistry to stay ahead of foreign competition, and the use of Haber-like processes to turn air into all kinds of war munitions was still limited to Germany until after WW2. A lot of the war restrictions would not have been necessary if they had access to IG Farben’s latest tech.
For the USA at least. The UK was a different issue, as they were actively being bombed and therefore experienced direct shortages.
The Government has invested more than $200 million in 10 synthetic ammonia plants, having a combined design capacity of about 800,000 tons of fixed nitrogen per year. These include eight ordnance plants, of which six have been declared surplus, one Defense Plant Corporation plant and one belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Four plants have facilities for producing ammonium nitrate solutions. The nitric acid facilities located in the explosives plants of (2), and the ammonium nitrate graining facilities found in the ammunition loading plants of of (1) have a definite relationship to the ammonia plants.
What? Do you not remember the war on terror or covid? Americans would bend over and ask to lick the boots for the nutritional value if a world war was going on.
If you like stories about historical food, check out tasting history! [0] His recent two episodes on the Titanic survivors are gut wrenching. [1]. He also does WWII content. [2]
This reminds me of the regulation Swiss army cookbook, which has many unchanged recipes. Each meal is designed to be easily prepared with limited ingredients and a simple barracks kitchen. The meals are rated by their digestibility and other factors. I have been looking for an English translation for a while
It must exist but I didn't find anything in a 5 minute search. You may have better luck if you are a native speaker. The cookbook is Swiss Army Regulation 60.6 d.
Several years back I ran across a mention of a british wartime cookbook which was meant for ration book ingredients, and contained a recipe literally titled something like "life sustaining glop". Anyone know which this might have been?
I went to a Quaker summer camp in the mountains of Maryland in my youth. Once a week everyone went out on various overnight camping trips. Dinner was always "glop". It was just a mass of nutritious stuff that could be cooked in a pot over a campfire -- tuna, noodles, cheese, dried whatever, water which would be sterile after boiling. If you'd been hiking all day, it was delicious.
Shiloh alum here (my sister went to Catoctin)! My memory of camp food is pretty poor, but one dish I do remember is couscous with gato gato sauce. Canoeing or rock climbing trips had better food because you could carry more gear.
hmm... I'd guess "glop" arises more from onomatopoeia; the sound it makes when shovelled onto a plate?
(and speaking of trail food: couscous with as much squeeze margarine as it can absorb makes for a quick high calorie life sustaining glop; I was wondering more about the entire cookbook than this particular recipe)
EDIT: in non-trail food, I find it tough to beat rice & corn/hominy & beans for cheap and cheerful.
Though I've never heard of the term it's likely a nutrient-rich substance that contains what is needed to "life sustain". Maybe it was a powder that when mixed with water would turn into something that could be consumed. It definitely doesn't sound delicious but hey, when life is on the line, it should not matter much.
I only had it recently for the first time. Despite being widely seen in the US as a "poor people" food, inflation seems to have hit Spam pretty hard--I'm pretty sure the tin was over $4!
That said, while it looked rather unappetizing in its canned loaf shape, it's mostly pork shoulder, and after I cubed it and pan-fried it for a bit, it tasted like a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful when mixed into fried rice.
I remember being called in to make my screaming little brother (he was 5 to my 9) eat this horrible crap. My brotherly advice - "Eat it or I will kill you". Frankly, it didn't work, and I could hardly eat the stuff myself.
I didn't eat semolina for literally decades after the UK school dinner experience. When I finally had some that was properly prepared it was delicious. Who knew.
And the spam fritters - that is a nightmare I had totally suppressed until it was just mentioned up above.
> that is a nightmare I had totally suppressed until it was just mentioned up above
Sorry! Perhaps I can defuse the situation a little bit by mentioning the hard brown tiles (of shortbread?) with the pink 'custard'. These weren't nauseating, just merely inedible.
About 20 years ago I had a co-worker, transplanted from her native Hawaii to the Seattle area. Her cubicle was very nearly a shrine to Spam: nothing reminded her of home quite as much as Spam ads and such-like.
Me, the occasional fried spam sandwich is a delicious indulgence.
I tried one out of a 7-11 in Hawaii and was terribly disappointed... to be fair, it was exactly as good as one would expect convenience store food to be.
South Korea treats spam as a luxury good - it's a part of gift baskets and it can be found in budae-jigae - army based stew [1] (sometimes along with canned beans in sauce)
This is probably anathema to many, but I will cube spam and let it sit in a bowl of water for a few minutes. Likely leads to a huge reduction in salt and fat.
Why would anyone do such a thing? The poor canned pork shoulder! Fats provide energy and keep the stomach full for a long time, nevermind the flavour in the fat. People should eat more carbohydrates and fat and less protein, to give their liver and kidneys a break.
all carbohydrates are empty calories. if you fully eliminate fat and protein from your diet, you will wither and die. if you fully eliminate carbs, you'll be fine.
For some definition of "fine", at any rate. Outside of groups like the Inuit who eat a lot of organ meat to compensate, we don't have a great idea of what sort of long-term nutrient deficiencies you may accrue by eschewing all fibre and carbohydrate-based foods.
well, yes, you can't eliminate fruits and vegetables if you aren't supplementing micronutrients. I wasn't implying you can. I was just saying that carbohydrates themselves - glucose, fructose, and all the others - are not essential for us to function.
Yes, gluconeogenesis is a metabolic pathway, but it wouldn't be satisfactory to rely on in, just as it wouldn't be fun to live without spices. (Also, how do you manage to have sex with someone on their ketopaleo diet? Send them into the shower just before and eat Viagra because of the weird odour?)
I always suggest people buy the low sodium spam. It's easy to add salt to a recipe if you need it but spam by default includes so much that kind of limits the flexibility of what you do with it.
It's just a substitute for Bologna sausage... just handful of cans over few years with odd and specific recipes can be enjoyable, otherwise real sausages are simply better.
At first I thought you were saying that spam contained dimethylmercury, which prompted me to do a few panicked Google searches before re-reading the thread and grokking the context switch :-P
Processed food has been around in many forms for a long time (pasta and bread are processed food). You're thinking of ultra-processed foods, which came later.
This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
> It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
The entire food pyramid is essentially propaganda from what I understand. Corn subsidies and mandatory corn-derived ethanol in gasoline created a surplus of corn, which led to fructose and high fructose corn syrup being added to everything.
I have no idea what the motive behind the food pyramid was, but high-fat foods being 2.25x calorie dense per gram compared to carbs, can lead to a surplus more easily compared to carbs. Just eating less sugar will not help if you are consuming too much fat .
food marketing used to much more aggressively bash competitors' products. many of the companies funding the yo-yo "X is good/bad for you studies" are basically just stealthier versions of this, if you look at who is funding the studies.
the most prominent example of this is Heinz ketchup, where Heinz lobbied for the FDA and essentially got most of its competitors out of the market as a result; Heinz was the only major ketchup producer not using preservatives. https://archive.ph/1y8f5
---
IIRC the major problem in food science is that most of the people willing to pay for food studies are food makers.
I thought it was past tense, at this point? I'll try and look in my kid's school next chance I get, but I don't think anyone pushes the pyramid anymore.
The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect. The bad science was not a mistake—it was deliberate strategy. The same kind of FUD that "Big Tobacco" participated in. Most people are aware of the later but not the former.
The tobacco companies bought all the food companies in the 80s and 90s and figured out how to make food "hyper-palatable (addictive)," by combining sugar (HFCS), salt (sodium) and fat.
> The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect.
I strongly suggest you don't take the information from a documentary, which is focused on engaging story telling in order to make money, with a balanced and complete view of the situation.
Documentaries are a style of presentation that contain a directed, (usually) information-dense slice of a specific topic. It's an easy way to immediately engage in a topic in a manner that can present layman consumable information and establish context on potentially complicated subjects. It's one of many sources of information that should be supplemented with research based fact checking and information gathering.
There was no effort to dissuade further research yourself or to not engage with other mediums. I also don't believe they were supposing your only source of information should come from their casual suggestion. "I strongly suggest" you go ahead and link the research papers you've personally vetted like the poster above you trying to contribute to the discussion did that covers these topics indepth if you feel passionate about the lacking information.
The issue was beef tallow for fries, which they hadn’t disclosed to the public, and so vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad. They could’ve solved the problem either by introducing an alternate or simple disclosure. But they were hardly “tricked.”
Beef tallow was standard practice for fryers, until it was mostly replaced with “vegetable oil”.
> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.
I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.
Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.
McDonald's was bullied into changing its fryer oil by Phil Sokolof [0], who himself was tricked into believing his 1966 heart attack was caused by saturated fat. This article says Sokolof paid for ads to bully McDonalds in 1988: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-22-op-1193-s...
I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...
The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.
Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).
The definition of "ultra-processed foods" is governed by NOVA and its results are very suspect. Take a look at this boneless, skinless chicken breast [1]. It's considered an Unprocessed or Minimally Processed Food. We know that there's no way chicken breasts just "fall off" chickens like this: animals are killed, skinned, cleaned, butchered, and then packaged to get this product. This firm tofu [2] on the other hand? It's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries. Among many other problems, there's a huge bias in the NOVA system for food that Western diets consider "primitive".
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
There are two kinds of food processing. One kind of food processing separates the edible or more desirable parts of the food from the inedible or less desirable parts of the food.
This kind of processing has been done industrially for thousands of years, e.g. with the production of meal or flour from seeds or the extraction of oil from oily fruits or oily seeds.
As long as care is taken to prevent changes in the parts of the food that are separated (e.g. by using cold pressing or sCO2 extraction instead of hot pressing for oil extraction), such processing methods cannot have any detrimental effects on food, but they can greatly reduce the costs needed for the storage and for the transport of food.
The second class of food processing methods mix various food ingredients and/or transform the food in various ways, by using heating, whipping etc.
When food processing methods of the second class are used industrially, as opposed to being performed at home by the end consumer, they almost always result in unhealthy food, because the interest of the food vendor of obtaining a maximum profit conflicts with the requirements that have to be observed in order to make a healthy food.
Terms like "highly-processed food" or "ultra-processed food" make sense only when applied to food processed with methods of the second class.
Chicken breast separated from bones and skin is not more processed than an apple separated from its tree.
I do not understand your quarrel with a chicken breast being unprocessed.
It is extracted, yes, but the actual thing that you eat has its original consistency, therefore is unprocessed.
Is it a perfect categorisation method? No, such does not exist. Is it immensely more useful than the other categorisation methods that we have, and does it correlate with negative health effects ? For sure.
The idea about ultra processed food cause overconsumption just because of their hyperpalatability is questionable and questioned, as ultra processed food contains a myriad of novel molecules that our digestive system has never encountered. A leading theory is that these molecules circumvent our satiation detection mechanisms, along with their hyperpalatability.
A better argument against chicken breast is that the commercial chickens have been selectively bred, fed, and treated with not-found-in-nature medicines to the point that they don't resemble a "natural" ingredient anymore. This would be in contrast to wild poultry like wild duck, goose, turkey, pheasant, squab, etc.
Let's not go crazy here. There are wild apples, wild plums, wild grapes, and metric tonnes of wild raspberries growing on my property. They all taste more or less like the supermarket variety. The main difference is that they are noticeably smaller.
The black raspberries in particular do taste much better though and are roughly the same size as store-bought. But saying that they have nothing to do with what's commercially available is a cheap shot.
> t's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries.
"Ultra-Processed" and "causes obesity" are two massively different claims. If the claim is that said tofu is ultra-processed, obesity rates in countries where it is eaten are completely unrelated and do not work as argument.
Also, it is perfectly fine to define "non processed" group in a way that wont put every single meat into it. If you say that everything that requires killing or cleaning is ultra processed, then the whole term is meaningless.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.
I find it quite strange that people think home-cooked meals have to be calorie-dense. It's food. Where you cook it doesn't matter. And if you have to keep your food from being delicious to control your portions... the problem isn't the food.
Guidance for most sedentary American adults (ages 31-50 [1]) is to consume 1800 kcal a day. 100 kcal is 5.5% of your daily caloric budget. You just consumed 5.5% of your daily caloric budget with that one extra tablespoon of butter.
Assuming you have 3 meals a day, and assuming you have 600 kcals per meal, and assuming your nutritionist has prescribed a diet with a 50/20/30 carb/fat/protein ratio, and assuming one of those meals (dinner?) has 100 kcals from fat, that means 16% of the meal was fat. If you eat a lean protein (with a tiny amount of incidental fat) and carbs with that meal, that's actually the perfect amount of fat.
You can also mix up your meals so that, say, breakfast has very little fat, and dinner has more fat, or vice versa. It's all about balance.
>You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.
Yeah, but only anorectic are able to keep eating this long term. Until they get to hospital with all kinds of body damage.
British cuisine has some interesting side effects of World War II.
In the UK, today, people specifically desire beans produced by a factory, from a tin, with sugary orange-colored tomato sauce. Even at high end restaurants, people desire and expect tinned beans.
Whereas places outside the UK that share some elements of British culture like Australia, Boston and Ireland expect home made means - crushed tomatoes, borlotti beans, local additions (like feta and mint in Australia).
My best-guess understanding is the British taste for sweet canned beans comes from WW2 rationing.
Hilarious that feta and mint as "Australian" additions. I seem to recall there is or was a sizeable Greek-derived population in some areas of Aussieland - that must be where that comes from.
I don't think I have ever seen home-made beans in Australia, even at fancy cafes. Beans on a breakfast menu means Heinz, or Wattie's if you're in New Zealand.
I do recall my shock at visiting the staff canteen of a large UK corporation and finding out that the most popular menu item by far for lunch was chips (fries) and beans.
> Beans on a breakfast menu means Heinz, or Wattie's if you're in New Zealand.
I don't think you'd ever see beans on a breakfast menu in the US unless it was aimed at working-class Mexican/Central American/Caribbean immigrants. Reminds me of my time in rural Costa Rica and the roadside stands that served a hearty breakfast to the farm workers. And I don't think you'd ever get something to taste that good without cooking it from scratch.
Don't beans make you swollen and fart like a howitzer? Every time I come back to any form of beans because of their price and nutricious values I pay with cannonade of farts.
> During the war, Nestlé companies supplied both the Axis and the Allies. In 2000, the company agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle claims that a German company they purchased used forced labor during the war.
I didn’t think it would be possible for me to loathe Nestlé more.
Not covered in the article are the snack bars which to this day tend to be an oat and chocolate base with added protein and vitamins. This persisted far past the time it was possible to make something better tasting and better for you. I wound up researching this quite heavily while developing mealsquares.
Same as Spam ? The US sent boatloads of it via the Pacific. I've seen it credited with supplying something like 15% of all Soviet wartime calories consumed.
The Soviet and now post-soviet "tushenka" is 100% derived from American WW2 spam. But I think it actually tastes better, try some if you have an Eastern European store around.
What an absolutely exceptional and fascinating article and presentation. From our National Park Service! My heart swells with pride; this is the web I want to return.
It originally used grated cheese according to this article from the Canadian magazine The Walrus (Canada has/had a love affair with Kraft Mac & Cheese or Kraft Dinner as they call it there -- think of the BNL song "If I had a million dollars".)
that makes sense but this very article states: "The powder is a cheese sauce that has been partially defatted and dehydrated" in the section that they discuss happening in 1937.
Such an obvious contradicting makes me question the validity of this article
Measured purely against their original goal of efficiently getting calories into soldiers during deployment in tropical* climates, M&M are quite good at their job.
*: northern chocolate products usually melt if you take them to the tropics. The candy shell is highly effective at addressing this issue.
it's just usual corruption to limit purchases to Mars' products. in theory if you used the sugar for the coating into regular cheap milk chocolate it would hold as well as m&ms. you cannot compare premium chocolate with m&ms.
> When the war ended in 1945, the military had huge stockpiles of food, including powdered cheese. The government liquidated these stockpiles, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, to private industry. Companies like Frito (later Frito-Lay), Kraft, and others found ways to use these wartime products. In 1948, the Frito company coated puffed cornmeal pieces with dehydrated cheese, and Cheetos were born.[26]
It is absolutely wild the butterfly effect of processed terrible food this may have caused and deaths from obesity. All from trying to find something to do with ultra cheap army surplus.
I think your point on nutritious food being widely available for cheap is spot on.
That said going back to entropy to explain how a structure of dozens of trillions of cells harvest energy from foreign structures following a lifetime of heuristics is utterly misleading.
In particular it makes it sound scientific, when we have very little practical knowledge on how it works at scale and can't reliable do falsifiable experiments to prove our theories.
I mean, we're still literally burning stuff[0] as a proxy for the digestion process because we have no other way of coming up with a stable number. Which gives us aberrations like gasoline having higher nutritious value than potatoes (which totally makes sense in thermodynamics, I concur)
People are entirely too preoccupied with the quality of food instead of the quantity. I think it is an intentional or subconscious distraction. It is easy to eat excessive calories when you are consuming sugar coated fats. Doubly so if you are sedentary.
It's wild to think WW2 indirectly killed people a decade later by making them fat. When you hear about surplus materiel killing people, food isn't what comes to mind.
I’m wondering why on earth the military was storing cheese as a powder… the whole point of cheeses is that they are a great way to store milk. Why didn’t they just store cheese wheels? Surely powdering it makes it go off much faster?
Military food is a really fascinating logistics problem - how do you feed people, potentially across a long period while engaging in calorically demanding tasks? Foodstuffs need to last as long as possible because supply lines are targeted or have been destroyed. That shipment you received may be one of your last. Cheese, like any food with significant moisture, can ultimately rot.
Much of our modern processes are to somehow extend the life of the foodstuff over long periods. This boomed the overly processed food economy we currently have, but it was first built to simply make sure we had food for the long haul. Curing meats in salt is roughly the same process.
In turns of cheese, powder has less moisture stored in the individual cheese granule but may also be reconstituted with added moisture. Powdered forms are easier to package for individual soldiers to carry for themselves rather than a large, bulkier wheel that needs its own storage and transportation methods.
It goes further back. Napoleon offered a prize in 1795 for some way to preserve food for soldiers.[1] The result was "canning" - heating, boiling, and sealing in an airtight container. Originally in glass jars. Later metal cans. Finally vacuum-packed plastic.
Current products include MREs for the military, which are actually somewhat hard to buy commercially since Warnock got tired of dealing with preppers. They really want to sell these things by the container load. There are all kinds of knock-offs available. The real military MREs are designed for young soldiers in good condition doing heavy work, so three of them contain almost 4,000 calories. Civilian versions tend to be smaller portions.
There's also the Humanitarian Daily Ration. It's kosher, halal, vegetarian, lactose-free, and nut-free. Also air-droppable without a parachute. It's basically lentils and beans.
It's intended for people on the edge of starvation. The US military used to give out MREs in crises, but that was too much concentrated energy food for someone nearly starving and could sicken them.
There's a really good episode of 99% Invisible that explains how much of the technology used to produce food in grocery stores was developed by the military. One of the most surprising, for me, was chewy chocolate chip cookies.
This. Nescafe was great for the same reason, as it weighed much less than coffee grounds.
It's impossible to overestimate how important this was. The U.S. military in WWII had to support an enormous force overseas, to a degree and extent that no other power had to approach. Everything that the force needed in the field had to first go on a ship to be sent overseas. With the U.S. Twelfth Army Group numbering over a million men alone in Europe, small changes to products were magnified at scale, saving tons of weight in the logistics chain.
It's also worth noting that WW2 by and large predates intermodal shipping containers. Apart from some experiments late in the war, the U.S. military did not use containerized shipping to any significant degree. Everything was shipped "break-bulk" which meant that every individual parcel had to be loaded/unloaded by hand every time it changed transportation mode. Also, the ships that carried these goods were tiny by modern standards. Every bit of extra volume and weight mattered much more than it does today.
There's a probably apocryphal story that a Japanese higher-up realized the war was lost when they found out the US had enough spare capacity to build ice cream ships for in-theater cold treats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge).
Probably apocryphal, but I'm sure there were similar conversations. Though from what I've read, many in the Japanese High Command were fully aware of the disparity in war-making potential between the U.S. and Japan. That Japan decided to go to war anyways despite knowing this is still discussed.
There's a page over on combinedfleet.com (great resource and discussion) that goes into the numbers, and it's truly astonishing. U.S. output could be described as terrifying. http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
First of all I don't think that's the whole point of cheese. Secondly, dehydrating and powdering dramatically extends shelf life and makes shipping cheaper.
It’s not the whole point of cheese in most cultures, but it’s a very effective method of turning summer grass into winter food. Which, especially in Alpine climates, is important.
Native Americans, lacking domesticated ruminants, achieved similar results with pemmican, which is the same principle: protein + fat + dehydration = long-lasting nutritious food for survival. Not apparently very tasty, and they would certainly supplement it with anything else they could find, but it kept you from starving.
Similarly, the use of french oak for aging french wines is largely due to a surplus of oak from from government forests that were originally planted in support of naval ship building.
> During the war, Nestlé companies supplied both the Axis and the Allies. In 2000, the company agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle claims that a German company they purchased used forced labor during the war.
The sole blemish on Nestlé's otherwise impeccable record. /s
Does anyone know the real backstory here? I'm thinking that Nestlé HQ (presumably in Switzerland) might have had rather limited control over (or even visibility into) their on-paper subsidiaries in Nazi-controlled countries.
> Nestle and the former Brown Boveri & Co., now called ABB, earlier admitted slave labor had been used at their German sites and have paid compensation. Novartis, Nestle and Roche contributed to the $1.25 billion settlement in 1998 that banks organized to settle the Holocaust account claims.
Looking here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggi#World_Wars - it sounds like Maggi wasn't acquired by Nestlé until 1947. Details unclear - but that may have been a case of "spoils of war, sold at auction". If so, then blaming Nestlé for Maggi's prior misdeeds sounds pretty dubious.
From the NYT article, I'd say Nestlé itself has at least some dirt on their hands. OTOH, that article makes no mention whatever of Switzerland's location - landlocked and totally surrounded by the seemed-to-be-winning Axis powers for almost all of WWII. Considering how <cough/> nicely the Axis occupation forces were treating most of the countries which they'd already conquered - the Swiss might have felt that making much of a fuss (over Axis misdeeds) could result their own conquest and occupation.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. That said, I parsed this part
> > During the war, Nestlé companies
as referring to companies that are now, or were at the time of WW2, part of Nestlé. I thought that was clear from context when I said
> See Maggi on this list which is now owned by Nestlé
which has the operative word now. (Emphasis added.)
Contrast that with how I followed up:
> Nestlé also participated directly
Emphasis added to indicate that Nestlé also was directly involved at the time, to differentiate from actions taken by a different independent company during WW2 that has since been acquired by Nestlé.
From how you have responded, you seem to believe that we disagree. I am simply clarifying that I was perhaps unclear in my phrasing, but that we are in alignment here.
As for the NYT article, I wanted to find more context but was mostly seeking to find a suitable citation for the claims made by another poster, which I think I have done.
I think that given other actions performed by Nestlé speak to the kind of corporation it has historically been in more recent times in foreign countries is no less problematic:
These practices are especially problematic due to the nature of breastfeeding - by marketing directly to mothers who are about to give birth or just have given birth using bad nutritional claims not supported by science, they rob mothers of crucial nutrients as well as introducing pathogens due to poor sanitation, while actively lowering incidences of breastfeeding from 90% pre-advertising to 10% post-advertising in in Chile, for example.
By the time mothers are able to become better informed, their milk will likely have dried up, and so they are now locked into buying formula that is likely unsafe to use in many cases due to poor sanitation and lack of access to clean water.
Don't worry though, Nestlé also promotes and sells bottled water, so they can sell you a solution for the problems their own products not fit for market create.
The numbers are pretty grim.
I mean, they have a whole article just about their horrible track record:
I think it's probably as bad as you say, and likely worse. If they were really worried about Axis occupation, you would think they would stop selling to the Allies. That they continued to sell to both sides seems to me to be an example of how Nestlé puts profits over law and over human life itself.
I highly recommend MRESteve for content about military rations: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA
No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.
"I quit smoking years ago, but an after-meal cigarette from 1973 might just tempt me..."
Never gets old :')
His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.
As someone who smokes a small single digit number of cigars per year, I can attest that the nicotine buzz is incredible on the rare occasions that I do.
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.
I tried smoking multiple times and never had any good reaction. It's weird to me why people smoke. Is my chemistry differs from others? I even used to smoke for two years once, just for "community" because people I hanged out at time were smokers. For me cigarettes are just weird thing producing smoke. I learned to swallow it and not blew out my lungs, but I never found any amusement with this thing and dropped it eventually.
Per their use in MREs, yeah, nicotine is a really good drug to have when you're likely to be in combat in the next four or so hours. It drives blood to the core and away from the periphery, it heightens alertness, it increases testosterone, and there are a lot of other effects.
Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.
it may depend on the cigarette brand. they treat the tobacco differently. some will put it under ammonia fumes heh and that modifies the nicotine, cracks it of sorts, which increases the potency by two or three orders of magnitude, like cracking coke just with nicotine.
Same here. I'm a light-weight, so smoking a cigarette just makes me jittery and uneasy. Not a pleasant high. A feeling that says: "WTF did you smoke that?"
When you have a hard addiction to cigarettes, just being asleep for 8 hours is enough time to give you a wonderful warm body flush of joy when you have that first cigarette in the morning.
I had a friend who loved smoking hookahs years ago. 16 or so years ago now, wow.
We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.
The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.
I had an old coworker that said the same thing, calling it nearly like getting a sort of high. He had been gifted some tobacco plants by a local tribal community he had a good relationship with. So basically the only thing he’d smoke was his homemade cigars that was its own involved process. Seems like a great way to limit intake and actually enjoy things. That said, I hate smoking, and find even campfires noxious most of the time so it’s not for me.
Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.
Talking about nicotine inducing a religious experience. In my 20s I smoked organic pipe tobacco from a bong and holy shit the experience was out of this world, I literally felt like I was flying and had the most insane headrush.
I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.
Cigarettes only took off when they developed a tobacco with much less nicotine in it. Before it was too intense.
Many drugs have great effects, nicotine from cigarettes on me ain't one of them. 5 minutes of dizzy, uncomfortable, mentally still in the same place.
The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.
Same. Part of the reason the addiction never quite took hold of me is that I could tell that despite the addictive rush they just made me kinda jittery and nauseous. Obviously this varies an incredible amount person-to-person.
I'd appreciate the perspective of an actual smoker on this, but I suspect those long-preserved cigarettes aren't that special in and of themselves. For Steve, it's a hit of both nostalgia and a chemical he's long been deprived of. It's probably amazing for him, and that shows in the videos, but telling himself that those preserved cigs are special might be a way for him to avoid relapsing. He craves more, but he can tell himself that the modern junk just wouldn't be the same.
If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.
Cigarettes haven't been the same (in the US) for well over a decade now, since all 50 States and DC require them to be "fire safe" cigarettes (FSC).
This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.
Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.
But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.
Interesting. I rarely smoke, but did do a lot of smoking in the mid 00s. I recently indulged and damn, it was nowhere near as tasty as I remember. That probably explains it!
Where would one go to purchase specialty cigarettes, without those compounds?
Any tobacco shop. You can buy empty cigarette tubes, which are basically just the paper tube with a cotton filter attached. They don't contain any extra additive. You can then load any tobacco you like with a cigarette loading machine (also known as an "injector"). You can also buy pure, high quality Dutch tobacco that's far higher quality than anything that would have been loaded into a cigarette in the 1970s.
For pipe smokers, there’s a formula called “Doc Watson” which includes cigarette tobacco. It’s excellent. You will get a nicotine biz from it unless you sip it.
Somewhere else in the world that isn't the US, I presume. They aren't here anymore.
(One can make them themselves, just as one can make anything else by oneself, but then one would not be purchasing them as completed items.)
Link?
https://youtu.be/K5OBBzvLnAM?t=831
The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.
Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.
And maybe Ashens if you like your ration documentaries with a British twist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znmo1dMXerc
Nice.
Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.
> Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.
Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
In 2022 he made video with an ad read from a VPN provider with more honest claims about their use cases:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQuTRSmzc
Man do I miss his content.
Tom Scott is still producing podcast and/or gameshow via Lateral and The Technical Difficulties. It's certainly not a British guy in a red t-shirt explaining interesting trivia, but it's still entertaining.
One of the main reasons you see so much advertising for them is because it's very easy to sell and very easy to get a partner account. They hand out those custom promo links to creators like candy.
Nah, just a super high margin business with dozens of minimally differentiated offerings.
So what you are saying is I should start a vpn haha
5 years ago? Absolutely. But I think vendors are getting squeezed hard with all the new entrants.
It'll be great for customers. Prices should continue to come down.
More like "scareware", maybe not quite to the term, but they generally advertise on 'aren't you scared of the threats on the web?? well here they are so you should be scared! buy product' kind of thing. There are legitimate uses, but they can be so benign and almost irrelevant to whatever security pitch (like...getting around georestrictions)
They are a priori a honeypot. Only useful for torrenting where illegal.
But why is vpn a honeypot? Because they essentially have the ability to track all traffic and you basically have to trust them that they don’t?
People making that argument basically assume you are not already stuck in the honey if you go with your default ISP.
If you know you're in honey then you act accordingly. If you think you aren't in honey then you're more likely to let your guard down and get into trouble.
For instance, an embassy with clear telephone and telegraph lines knows they're being listened to, and subsequently is very careful about what they transmit. An embassy who has bought Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG ) equipment thinks they are secure and transmits information they would never dream of sending if they knew they were being listened to.
You might get stuck in one or more foreign governments honey that you were not previously going to be stuck in.
A foreign government doesn't have the political authority or practical means to send armed thugs to kick in my door over petty dragnet crap.
Some jerk in a cube farm in Maryland does.
Who says they won’t be happy to trade it for something else with someone who does have those?
Sure, but that's orders of magnitude more effort, oversight, manpower and political risk involved than your typical "find a thousand people who have a paper trail saying they did X, pick the five hundred of those who you have an airtight case against, pick the hundred of those who juries will find least sympathetic, pick the 50 of those least likely to shoot back" type" operation that the fedcop enforcement agencies run fairly unilaterally every single day.
Yeah I don’t understand the argument because it’s like essentially vpns are bad but what alternative is good?
Basically, yeah. Unless it's your server in your basement and/or colo, you have no way of knowing for sure. Plus reselling that data could be very lucrative, as there are a lot of companies (and governments) that would be quite interested in that data...
Specifically:
* there is a presumption that a VPN, esp. a commercial one used by the average person for non-work related activities, is doing something shady. not entirely unfounded, though "shady" could simply be watching Brazilian Netflix
* the ISP can't see what you're doing, but the VPN can, and they're almost certainly using some sort of specialty firewalls / VPN aggregators / custom devices. Chances are those devices can do some deep packet inspection, and any lag would be perceived as using the VPN. Might even be able to MITM connections, maybe.
* DNS is often just as interesting or damning as actual traffic, and most VPNs will configure you to use their DNS to prevent leaks. but that means they know you're looking up "totally-legit-bitcoin-trade-site.com", or maybe "hardcore-gay-pronz.net" 3 times a day. they don't know what you're looking at while on those websites -- maybe you're ssh-ing to their server to fix apache? -- but they can make assumptions.
I don't think I'd use a VPN for that, but they are great for getting around geoblocks.
Depending on what you need them for. Privacy? Your VPN provider will know your traffic but your ISP won't. Circumvention of georestrictions? Preventing problems when torrenting? Circumventing the GFC? There are many applications.
You may want to consider this Helloween deal: 3 years for 65 Euros: https://airvpn.org/buy/
I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)
How's the situation with VPNs these days in China anyway? I heard that they've been blocking them much more this year.
One of those situations where if you don't get a response you have your answer :P
I am not sure why my post was downvoted. I have no affiliation with AirVPN. I am not in China anymore but Astill was always the VPN of Choice. But 2 years are now 300 USD if I remember correctly.
Israel has similar artifacts, both of WW2 under the British Empire and of the subsequent austerity/rationing during the state's first decade.
1. During WW2 the British established a ration of "standard bread" to eliminate wheat imports. This is still the price-controlled bread type, and led to the replacement of some pita consumption.
2. The austerity years coincided with (and were in large part caused by) a rapid doubling of the population by expellees from Arab countries. Lots of them were used to rice, but with food rationing and price controls were in place, rice would have been a strain on government finances. So the state pushed "Ben Gurion Rice", aka Israeli/pearl couscous, a good-enough substitute that could be made from cheap American wheat imports.
I'm sure there's more hiding under the surface, I just don't know all the history.
I'm struggling to imagine what would happen in the modern day if the US government went to war and tried to resort to WWII-style rationing. Limited meat, limited sugar, limited gasoline, a national speed limit of 35 MPH to save on tires... I legitimately think that the country would collapse.
I don't think they'd need, or want, to ration.
Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
Making people stay home is a more major restriction than rationing non-essential goods. Social interaction is more fundamentally important to humans than being able to eat chocolate etc.
Food and gasoline are essential goods. The people were not overeating having to give up luxuries, they had trouble to get enough calories their bodies needed.
> Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
What I recall in my area was retailers and distributors doing the rationing themselves; "limit 2 per customer" and so on. Masks often didn't make their way to retail shelves because hospitals had purchasing priority.
Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics.
Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.
Stores implemented limits per person/household, but you could easily work around those if you really wanted to. It wasn’t rationing on a federal or even just state level.
Overproduction was the problem at the time, not shortages. There was a shortage of money caused by loans - it was impossible to make money to both buy all the goods and pay all the loans. This is why money lending has to be banned, as it makes the markets stuck like this and causes a depression when the economy improves.
Huh? How is the economy improved in a depression?
Loans cause a depression when there is plenty. A farmer takes a loan when the price of wheat is $2 a bushel. But the economy improves, there is plenty of wheat for everybody, so the price of wheat halves. The farmer can't react to it by growing less wheat, he has a loan to pay, he may even need to increase his production to be able to pay even with the reduced prices. This is happening to everybody. Any time money is made, part gets used to pay off debts, and isn't spent on goods that others produced, which further drives the prices down. You will soon reach a point when nobody will buy any more wheat for any price. You go bankrupt, and the bank gets your farm, but the farm is worthless, nobody's going to buy a farm in such an economy from the bank. The bank now has no money to fulfill its obligations. The money it lent you, and which was lost, is still on other people's accounts, so the bank can't give them their money when people demand to withdraw it. Nothing about it can be fixed by giving further loans - loans for consumption only create more debt in the process, and there is no opportunity for bussiness lians, as there is already too much of everything.
you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
> there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away
People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
I think that it is completely unfair to try to pretend that there was good faith political intention beyond these. It was pure cynic "if I spread the bullshit I get more cake for myself and can harm enemies" decision making in the process.
Well I'm someone who thinks the lockdowns were a bad idea because they genuinely made the world worse off, and I'm making that argument in good faith. Certainly not trying to harm anyone. What makes you think there's no good-faith argument to be made?
It wouldn’t have been framed as liberty-quashing if it wasn’t for said propaganda circles. Most people can’t form an opinion better than a stool without simple “[VERB] the [NOUN]” talking points, and these were readily available in low-quality yellow-on-black text JPEGs.
Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
> Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?
---
EDIT to explain further:
Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:
OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.
OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.
In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.
Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.
If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
Incarceration happens because of a willful act. A pandemic, like seasons or natural disasters, are events beyond the control of individuals except for preventative measures that mitigate risk.
You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.
This Kantian mindset has to go.
That's kind of the point: There was a pandemic in 2009 that everyone seems to have forgotten about because we didn't have such an extreme response with things like masks and lockdowns, and the world didn't collapse. Neither did it this time in the areas that didn't have such an extreme response. It was unnecessary, and a lot of people realized this early on. Some of the pushback is from that group. Most of the rest is from people who just want to decide the risk for themselves instead of having it forced on them.
I believe there are several important points missing from this discussion.
Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.
Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.
Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.
Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.
All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.
In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.
This is completely unrelated to the point I was making. Come on, going to prison was just an example of something bad that decreases quality of life. Can you please try to engage with the actual argument?
>What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?
How much runway do you think the people it employs has?
My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.
I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.
> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
The way people reacted to even small-scale inconveniences in recent years highlights just how much has shifted since the 1940s
The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers.
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.
Oh yes they were. "You're killing grandma!" was the battle cry of the isolationists.
The lockdowns were justified in the name of old people, yes. That doesn't mean old people were the ones calling for them.
Appeals to grandma weren't targetted at baby boomers; their grandmas are long dead already. The baby boomers are the grandmas the rhetoric referenced.
I understand that. Regardless of who the rhetoric referenced, it was not propagated primarily by old people.
Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
> If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
Hindsight being 20/20 and all that. This is clearly something you feel strongly about. I don't like people dying and societally, don't mind doing things that help other people not die.
Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)
Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.
Everyone dies, no matter what you or anyone else does or doesn't do.
Yes, but. It’s the time in-between that people generally want to maximize…and if they’re the kind of person I want to hang out with, they want to help other people maximize their short time as well.
Maximizing the quality of one's time on earth is not only done by maximizing its duration. Nobody, including the people you want to hang out with, optimizes for 100% longevity without caring about any other variable.
Tone deaf and lacking empathy is a good way to describe people in their 70s who want society shut down, children locked out of schools even, because they're terrified of their own mortality.
You’re not up on pandemic math, are you?
There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.
There was a big crisis in the Spring of 43.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
It would be a totally different world, but I expect we would adjust. People are surprisingly adaptive, you just don't expect it beforehand and don't notice it after.
We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
How are you under the impression that you saved anyone or that the US had lower rates than other countries? The US is top 10 or close, in deaths per case or deaths per capita of most statistics I can find for COVID-19. It doesn't seem to me like you're basing your thoughts on reality if your pre-existing supposition is "there were less deaths in the US".
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Researchers and statisticians will be poring over covid data for decades to come. There are so many variables to control for that at this point that definitive statements are hard.
For example, the "US death rate" is somewhat meaningless because it encompasses multiple communities which adopted multiple strategies, with multiple levels of diligence, and covers both large concentrated populations and small distributed populations.
US deaths were not evenly spread, so there was certainly some variety of outcome with variety of mitigation.
Overall, the US death rate though is high, which suggests that it's very high in some areas. The correlation between strategy, compliance and outcome will feed researchers for a long time.
I know many deaths were wrongly attributed to COVID everywhere, the whole debacle about deaths 'with COVID' or 'from COVID', among others. Question is your point only reinforces my argument, because the data we have shows the US rates were roughly the same up to one of the worst, and the data we don't have we don't know what it says.
So to conclude the complete opposite of what the current data shows, dirty or not, is wrong. To then be upset at it is misguided.
I'm not able to research this in depth right now, but obesity was a pretty strong predictor of outcome. In general, the US population has is very unhealthy and obese.
I'd be curious to see rates by country by BMI and infection date. There were definitely lessons learned from Italy's early surge that helped other countries in the early days.
There's no need to research the why. The only point I'm making is the end result - which they used as the main base of their argument on, is not true. Why it's not true is likely very complex, but it's not true.
Nobody is going to be grateful for something that didn't happen, why would people be grateful for dying less as a population, if they in fact did not die less? Also there were lockdowns all over the world, not just in the US.
Are they still be alive to be grateful? Statistically a big chunk of the people who would have died to COVID have probably died in the intervening period between the lockdowns and now. It has been a couple of years and the 60+ demographic shrinks pretty quickly at the best of times.
I live in a rural area and we were far less affected by COVID lockdown than cities and suburbs. The main impact was (a) my kid went to school online (b) I worked from home and (c) I wore a mask when I went grocery shopping.
Besides that? I live in an extremely low-density area, it was pretty much business as usual. Restaurants were takeout only, when parks weren't mostly deserted, people spaced themselves out. I remember meeting a couple of my wife's friends in a park and we all just sat in a giant circle. Lockdown was more a minor irritation than anything.
> (Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
> Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
That's a huge caveat you just snuck in there. I'm totally with you on the first part about largely having gotten through lockdowns, though it wasn't without some damage and suicide and crime rates did go up for example.
We simply don't have data about how many boomer parents in rural areas were saved from dying. For one thing the virus mortality rate was much less than it could have been. For another we never actually ran randomized control studies testing efficacy against death.
Given that you singled out boomers in rural areas, I also assuming that they either didn't get vaccinated or were somehow saved by those younger people in cities that did choose to get the shots. How do you assume that? The vaccines didn't prove out to be very good at preventing transmission, and preventing transmission between populated cities and rural areas is pretty well handled by geography.
Well, the article mentions preserving ham and eggs in tins in an era close to a 100 years ago, so I think that things will be fine.
Totally agree.
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
It is important to note that people in 1939 often did not have experience with this either. A lot of WWII rationing and planning focused on educating people on how to do these things in the first place.
Also in 1939, people did not have experience self-organizing into bands of likeminded internet-enabled jerks. I posit this helped avoid civil strife immeasurably.
If you put three people in a room, two clubs will be formed immediately that leave one of them out. Internet has nothing to do with it.
So the two clubs have a membership of exactly 1 person each, and the remainder of exactly 1 person is unaffiliated?
Why not two clubs with 1 permanent member each, with one person swinging between them? Why not one club with 2 or 3 people? Why not 3 "clubs"?
Why must it be as you describe?
Don’t overthink this
Too late. It remains your move.
I lived next door to a PhD in plant biology, who would almost foam at the mouth from anger about monoclonal farming. I asked him about alternatives...he said without even a thought: "victory gardens." Time for me to find out exactly why. Turns out the USDA brought all the regional managers and all the researchers to get together on very best practices. It has withstood the test of time. My sister in law planted one exactly out of the book. Plant for plant. Not even full sun and the crops explode. Another friend tried it at a rental unit with 5 galllon buckets. A bit screwed, but he also got great results.
Fundamentally a Victory garden is small scale soil managment at its very best. Thanks Gabe.
One thing I learned after moving to a rural agriculture area is how few farmers produce their own food. It just doesn't happen with anyone farming commercially.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
Of course. They're far too tired after dealing with the farm all day.
My grandfather managed a pretty large hog ranch back in the day. They still had a garden on the ranch that helped feed most of the families of the people who worked on the ranch.
You may be interested in the early 90s BBC series The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a series somewhat reenacting the homefront gardening effort in WWII Britain. It’s on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxMUY_E07w
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
(Findable on Dailymotion)
> I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
It probably depends... is it a necessary war for the legitimate defense of our country, or is it another bullshit futile war started by bankers or politicians trying to make some sort of twisted legacy for themselves?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
We wouldn’t because there is no reason to. All those restrictions back then were because fertilizer, gunpowder, and rubber were all naturally sourced and in limited supply. We have self-sufficient synthetic or domestic production of all now.
In all out war, all available production or very close to it gets repurposed for the war effort. Those or other new rationing limits would certainly come into play when the US gets into a war that threatens survival instead of the run of the mill "make sure we keep production going in case we need it later" wars that we're used to. Maybe it'd be no new iPhone models due to semiconductor rationing or things like that but there's always limits.
Not the same limits though. Bacon was rationed because animal fat was turned into gunpowder. But the Haber-Bosch process is self-sustaining. There will be no shortage of gunpowder.
> or other new rationing limits
I did write this!
Also you have no idea if there will be no shortage of gunpowder. Rationing gets applied where the shortages are, and the shortages are many times difficult to anticipate or predict. I get your point and agree it's more likely to be new items, but that's just a gut feeling. In reality shortages can happen on basic products that are easy to manufacture but which a country doesn't manufacture anymore, for example if it's not very profitable.
The contribution of animal fat to gunpowder (it is surprising that there is a connection!) is the nitrate content. Essentially the compost waste is turned into fertilizer, and from there to high explosives.
Nitrate is NO3. It is produced 100% from the air, by a process which is exothermic. So it’s (almost) free, at the margin, or would be if not for the need of pure input gasses.
A Haber-Bosch plant is a factory the size of a city that produces all the fertilizer or explosives you’d ever want, using nothing but air, water, and electricity as input.
We can confidently say that this particular shortage won’t be an issue anymore.
In an all out war short of nuclear exchange it’s plausible fuel and electronics could be rationed but the USA produces so much food nowadays and even a huge military has pretty hard ceilings on food consumption it’s hard to see the food rationing (which was most impactful to ordinary people) returning.
Food rationing in the USA wasn’t to ensure a supply of calories to troops, but to ensure that industrially useful foods (e.g. high nitrate fats) got recycled into military use.
The development of synthetic gunpowder via the Haber-Bosch process, which fueled Germany through two world wars, but only became available to the allies after WW2, means this particular form of rationing is a thing of the past.
The fat was actually used to make glycerin, which could be nitrated to nitroglycerin:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/reluctant...
Nitroglycerin was used as a component of smokeless powder -- propellant for bullets, mortar shells, and artillery.
The Haber-Bosch process was used by all belligerents in World War II. Germany was the only operator of the process during World War I, but it rapidly spread throughout the world between the wars.
Thanks for the correction on glycerin. If I remember my history right, the Haber process spread through the world after WW1 for making ammonia, and from there known techniques were available for transforming it into saltpeter. But BASF / IG Farben continued to develop their high pressure chemistry to stay ahead of foreign competition, and the use of Haber-like processes to turn air into all kinds of war munitions was still limited to Germany until after WW2. A lot of the war restrictions would not have been necessary if they had access to IG Farben’s latest tech.
For the USA at least. The UK was a different issue, as they were actively being bombed and therefore experienced direct shortages.
the use of Haber-like processes to turn air into all kinds of war munitions was still limited to Germany until after WW2
The US and other countries also used synthetic Haber process ammonia to make nitric acid and explosives from it during World War II.
Here's a 1946 report about American chemical plants and facilities built to support the war effort:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001108531
From pages 2 and 3 of the report:
The Government has invested more than $200 million in 10 synthetic ammonia plants, having a combined design capacity of about 800,000 tons of fixed nitrogen per year. These include eight ordnance plants, of which six have been declared surplus, one Defense Plant Corporation plant and one belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Four plants have facilities for producing ammonium nitrate solutions. The nitric acid facilities located in the explosives plants of (2), and the ammonium nitrate graining facilities found in the ammunition loading plants of of (1) have a definite relationship to the ammonia plants.
WW3 is just the excuse they need to keep data caps!
It would be different resources today.
Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.
On top of that, there’s the added complexity of global supply chains and digital consumption. Imagine rationing electronics or internet
What? Do you not remember the war on terror or covid? Americans would bend over and ask to lick the boots for the nutritional value if a world war was going on.
If you like stories about historical food, check out tasting history! [0] His recent two episodes on the Titanic survivors are gut wrenching. [1]. He also does WWII content. [2]
[0] https://m.youtube.com/@TastingHistory [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7kGq4Ieak [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ROieDwLBw
I agree! No one should be eating human remains, no matter how historical!
Is there no point that's too far!? Unbelievable!
This reminds me of the regulation Swiss army cookbook, which has many unchanged recipes. Each meal is designed to be easily prepared with limited ingredients and a simple barracks kitchen. The meals are rated by their digestibility and other factors. I have been looking for an English translation for a while
https://vsmk.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/60_006_d.pdf-Koch...
Neat. Do you know of a French version? (Since it is Switzerland)
Here you go: https://www.protection-civile.ch/documents/telechargement/ar...
This doesn't contain the recipes themselves, it seems to be an update to the previous version, which does: https://www.protection-civile.ch/documents/telechargement/ar...
I dont suppose their is an English version? I know it isn't one of the national languages.
It must exist but I didn't find anything in a 5 minute search. You may have better luck if you are a native speaker. The cookbook is Swiss Army Regulation 60.6 d.
Several years back I ran across a mention of a british wartime cookbook which was meant for ration book ingredients, and contained a recipe literally titled something like "life sustaining glop". Anyone know which this might have been?
I went to a Quaker summer camp in the mountains of Maryland in my youth. Once a week everyone went out on various overnight camping trips. Dinner was always "glop". It was just a mass of nutritious stuff that could be cooked in a pot over a campfire -- tuna, noodles, cheese, dried whatever, water which would be sterile after boiling. If you'd been hiking all day, it was delicious.
Shiloh alum here (my sister went to Catoctin)! My memory of camp food is pretty poor, but one dish I do remember is couscous with gato gato sauce. Canoeing or rock climbing trips had better food because you could carry more gear.
Perhaps it's an acronym, like gorp is? (Good Old Raisins and Peanuts - commonly called "Trail Mix" these days)
hmm... I'd guess "glop" arises more from onomatopoeia; the sound it makes when shovelled onto a plate?
(and speaking of trail food: couscous with as much squeeze margarine as it can absorb makes for a quick high calorie life sustaining glop; I was wondering more about the entire cookbook than this particular recipe)
EDIT: in non-trail food, I find it tough to beat rice & corn/hominy & beans for cheap and cheerful.
Though I've never heard of the term it's likely a nutrient-rich substance that contains what is needed to "life sustain". Maybe it was a powder that when mixed with water would turn into something that could be consumed. It definitely doesn't sound delicious but hey, when life is on the line, it should not matter much.
If only they had the marketing prowess of Soylent.
Not joking, "Life Sustaining Glop" would be a better name than Soylent.
A good read. I'm glad Spam got a little mention. Terribly underrated IMO.
I only had it recently for the first time. Despite being widely seen in the US as a "poor people" food, inflation seems to have hit Spam pretty hard--I'm pretty sure the tin was over $4!
That said, while it looked rather unappetizing in its canned loaf shape, it's mostly pork shoulder, and after I cubed it and pan-fried it for a bit, it tasted like a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful when mixed into fried rice.
> a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful
Counterexample: spam fritters. Those and badly cooked ox liver were the two worst school dinners I ever had to force down (Brit, 1970s)
I remember being called in to make my screaming little brother (he was 5 to my 9) eat this horrible crap. My brotherly advice - "Eat it or I will kill you". Frankly, it didn't work, and I could hardly eat the stuff myself.
Ugh yeah and semolina for pudding. I can barely even say the word semolina without gagging.
And no, Miss, the jam splotch on top only makes it worse.
Semolina porridge is great if prepared perfectly, but if it has clumps the texture is absolutely awful.
I didn't eat semolina for literally decades after the UK school dinner experience. When I finally had some that was properly prepared it was delicious. Who knew.
And the spam fritters - that is a nightmare I had totally suppressed until it was just mentioned up above.
> that is a nightmare I had totally suppressed until it was just mentioned up above
Sorry! Perhaps I can defuse the situation a little bit by mentioning the hard brown tiles (of shortbread?) with the pink 'custard'. These weren't nauseating, just merely inedible.
It's also really good onigiri style with rice: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/49785/spam-musubi/
Oh God. Yes! A deli close to where I work sells them, handmade and wrapped in Saran, but you gotta be in early or they're gone.
About 20 years ago I had a co-worker, transplanted from her native Hawaii to the Seattle area. Her cubicle was very nearly a shrine to Spam: nothing reminded her of home quite as much as Spam ads and such-like.
Me, the occasional fried spam sandwich is a delicious indulgence.
I was recently at a local Asian food store in the Seattle area, and was amused to see some Spam™ plush toys on the shelves.
I assumed it indicated some customer-base with a significant level of nostalgia for the product.
When I went for the first time before COVID I was surprised McDoanlds had spam as an option.
I always hated spam and then I went to a party that was hosted by a Hawaiian. I didn’t even know an appetizer was spam, it was so delicious.
I think if people try a spam musubi first (a Hawaiian staple), they'll be more inclined to try other forms of spam.
I tried one out of a 7-11 in Hawaii and was terribly disappointed... to be fair, it was exactly as good as one would expect convenience store food to be.
South Korea treats spam as a luxury good - it's a part of gift baskets and it can be found in budae-jigae - army based stew [1] (sometimes along with canned beans in sauce)
[1] - https://youtu.be/-aO9pSOpA5Y
Is there an alternative that isn't as salty? Every time I've tried it (which is only a couple of times) I've found it incredibly salty :/
They make a reduced sodium variety. It's also best to think of it more like bacon than ham and use it as an accent.
Now I want to try a pizza accented by Spam :)
This is probably anathema to many, but I will cube spam and let it sit in a bowl of water for a few minutes. Likely leads to a huge reduction in salt and fat.
Salt, yes, but the fat won't dissolve into water.
The fats visibly rise to the surface and are easily poured/skimmed away.
Why would anyone do such a thing? The poor canned pork shoulder! Fats provide energy and keep the stomach full for a long time, nevermind the flavour in the fat. People should eat more carbohydrates and fat and less protein, to give their liver and kidneys a break.
all carbohydrates are empty calories. if you fully eliminate fat and protein from your diet, you will wither and die. if you fully eliminate carbs, you'll be fine.
> if you fully eliminate carbs, you'll be fine.
For some definition of "fine", at any rate. Outside of groups like the Inuit who eat a lot of organ meat to compensate, we don't have a great idea of what sort of long-term nutrient deficiencies you may accrue by eschewing all fibre and carbohydrate-based foods.
well, yes, you can't eliminate fruits and vegetables if you aren't supplementing micronutrients. I wasn't implying you can. I was just saying that carbohydrates themselves - glucose, fructose, and all the others - are not essential for us to function.
Yes, gluconeogenesis is a metabolic pathway, but it wouldn't be satisfactory to rely on in, just as it wouldn't be fun to live without spices. (Also, how do you manage to have sex with someone on their ketopaleo diet? Send them into the shower just before and eat Viagra because of the weird odour?)
I always suggest people buy the low sodium spam. It's easy to add salt to a recipe if you need it but spam by default includes so much that kind of limits the flexibility of what you do with it.
It's just a substitute for Bologna sausage... just handful of cans over few years with odd and specific recipes can be enjoyable, otherwise real sausages are simply better.
Spam kimbap is godlike, one of my favorite Korean dish
It's so fucking salty that it is near unpalatable! And I consume too much salt! How do you eat spam in earnest?
Salty for sure. But, gooood, at least to me! A sinful indulgence.
Underrated? It's objectively terrible for you.
Nothing is terrible for you in moderation. It is, however, objectively delicious and underrated.
Dimethylmercury is terrible for you even in moderation.
What’s a moderate amount of dimethylmercury? A molecule?
I'm not volunteering to find out, heh.
Half of the LD50? Lol
At first I thought you were saying that spam contained dimethylmercury, which prompted me to do a few panicked Google searches before re-reading the thread and grokking the context switch :-P
Is this the real start of processed food and the obesity crisis?
Processed food has been around in many forms for a long time (pasta and bread are processed food). You're thinking of ultra-processed foods, which came later.
This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
> It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
The entire food pyramid is essentially propaganda from what I understand. Corn subsidies and mandatory corn-derived ethanol in gasoline created a surplus of corn, which led to fructose and high fructose corn syrup being added to everything.
I have no idea what the motive behind the food pyramid was, but high-fat foods being 2.25x calorie dense per gram compared to carbs, can lead to a surplus more easily compared to carbs. Just eating less sugar will not help if you are consuming too much fat .
food marketing used to much more aggressively bash competitors' products. many of the companies funding the yo-yo "X is good/bad for you studies" are basically just stealthier versions of this, if you look at who is funding the studies.
the most prominent example of this is Heinz ketchup, where Heinz lobbied for the FDA and essentially got most of its competitors out of the market as a result; Heinz was the only major ketchup producer not using preservatives. https://archive.ph/1y8f5
---
IIRC the major problem in food science is that most of the people willing to pay for food studies are food makers.
I thought it was past tense, at this point? I'll try and look in my kid's school next chance I get, but I don't think anyone pushes the pyramid anymore.
There’s a new one. It has vertical stripes and used to be found at mypyramid.gov.
But they junked that in 2011 and replaced it with a trivial pursuit-looking thing called MyPlate. More details at choosemyplate.gov.
The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect. The bad science was not a mistake—it was deliberate strategy. The same kind of FUD that "Big Tobacco" participated in. Most people are aware of the later but not the former.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esjTpaohQq4
The tobacco companies bought all the food companies in the 80s and 90s and figured out how to make food "hyper-palatable (addictive)," by combining sugar (HFCS), salt (sodium) and fat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
Did not know this. Looks like they were diversifying income. Looked it all up on wikipedia, and appears they've divested it again.
> The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect.
I strongly suggest you don't take the information from a documentary, which is focused on engaging story telling in order to make money, with a balanced and complete view of the situation.
Documentaries are a style of presentation that contain a directed, (usually) information-dense slice of a specific topic. It's an easy way to immediately engage in a topic in a manner that can present layman consumable information and establish context on potentially complicated subjects. It's one of many sources of information that should be supplemented with research based fact checking and information gathering.
There was no effort to dissuade further research yourself or to not engage with other mediums. I also don't believe they were supposing your only source of information should come from their casual suggestion. "I strongly suggest" you go ahead and link the research papers you've personally vetted like the poster above you trying to contribute to the discussion did that covers these topics indepth if you feel passionate about the lacking information.
You’ve invalidated all of journalism with a sweeping statement. Healthy skepticism (which everyone should have), is not this.
Documentaries are not journalism, they are entertainment.
Dumb overstatement. They are both and everything in between.
Not in the least.
Documentaries tell stories. They often leave out facts that run counter, rarely try and provide a balanced view and their intent is to make money.
The issue was beef tallow for fries, which they hadn’t disclosed to the public, and so vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad. They could’ve solved the problem either by introducing an alternate or simple disclosure. But they were hardly “tricked.”
Beef tallow was standard practice for fryers, until it was mostly replaced with “vegetable oil”.
> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.
I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.
https://www.drovers.com/news/vegetarians-lawsuit-over-beef-t...
No, this was much earlier. There was outcry over beef tallow in the 90s and then beef flavorings in the 00s. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/09/us/mcdonald-s-to-settle-s...
Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.
McDonald's was bullied into changing its fryer oil by Phil Sokolof [0], who himself was tricked into believing his 1966 heart attack was caused by saturated fat. This article says Sokolof paid for ads to bully McDonalds in 1988: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-22-op-1193-s...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Sokolof
I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...
The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.
Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).
The definition of "ultra-processed foods" is governed by NOVA and its results are very suspect. Take a look at this boneless, skinless chicken breast [1]. It's considered an Unprocessed or Minimally Processed Food. We know that there's no way chicken breasts just "fall off" chickens like this: animals are killed, skinned, cleaned, butchered, and then packaged to get this product. This firm tofu [2] on the other hand? It's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries. Among many other problems, there's a huge bias in the NOVA system for food that Western diets consider "primitive".
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
[1]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3266980891411/filet-...
[2]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8410789140118/tofu-f...
There are two kinds of food processing. One kind of food processing separates the edible or more desirable parts of the food from the inedible or less desirable parts of the food.
This kind of processing has been done industrially for thousands of years, e.g. with the production of meal or flour from seeds or the extraction of oil from oily fruits or oily seeds.
As long as care is taken to prevent changes in the parts of the food that are separated (e.g. by using cold pressing or sCO2 extraction instead of hot pressing for oil extraction), such processing methods cannot have any detrimental effects on food, but they can greatly reduce the costs needed for the storage and for the transport of food.
The second class of food processing methods mix various food ingredients and/or transform the food in various ways, by using heating, whipping etc.
When food processing methods of the second class are used industrially, as opposed to being performed at home by the end consumer, they almost always result in unhealthy food, because the interest of the food vendor of obtaining a maximum profit conflicts with the requirements that have to be observed in order to make a healthy food.
Terms like "highly-processed food" or "ultra-processed food" make sense only when applied to food processed with methods of the second class.
Chicken breast separated from bones and skin is not more processed than an apple separated from its tree.
I do not understand your quarrel with a chicken breast being unprocessed.
It is extracted, yes, but the actual thing that you eat has its original consistency, therefore is unprocessed.
Is it a perfect categorisation method? No, such does not exist. Is it immensely more useful than the other categorisation methods that we have, and does it correlate with negative health effects ? For sure.
The idea about ultra processed food cause overconsumption just because of their hyperpalatability is questionable and questioned, as ultra processed food contains a myriad of novel molecules that our digestive system has never encountered. A leading theory is that these molecules circumvent our satiation detection mechanisms, along with their hyperpalatability.
A better argument against chicken breast is that the commercial chickens have been selectively bred, fed, and treated with not-found-in-nature medicines to the point that they don't resemble a "natural" ingredient anymore. This would be in contrast to wild poultry like wild duck, goose, turkey, pheasant, squab, etc.
Why would this be the case? What quantifiable difference is there in health outcomes between people who eat one or the other?
The same goes for vegetables and fruits. What we eat has nothing to do with what would you find in the nature.
Let's not go crazy here. There are wild apples, wild plums, wild grapes, and metric tonnes of wild raspberries growing on my property. They all taste more or less like the supermarket variety. The main difference is that they are noticeably smaller. The black raspberries in particular do taste much better though and are roughly the same size as store-bought. But saying that they have nothing to do with what's commercially available is a cheap shot.
> t's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries.
"Ultra-Processed" and "causes obesity" are two massively different claims. If the claim is that said tofu is ultra-processed, obesity rates in countries where it is eaten are completely unrelated and do not work as argument.
Also, it is perfectly fine to define "non processed" group in a way that wont put every single meat into it. If you say that everything that requires killing or cleaning is ultra processed, then the whole term is meaningless.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
You know what really helps suppress appetite?
Cigarettes.
You know what really started getting phased out in the 80’s?
Why do you think eating fats and oils causes obesity?
Maybe because they make your dinner so damn tasty you end up eating more than you should.
You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.
I find it quite strange that people think home-cooked meals have to be calorie-dense. It's food. Where you cook it doesn't matter. And if you have to keep your food from being delicious to control your portions... the problem isn't the food.
Guidance for most sedentary American adults (ages 31-50 [1]) is to consume 1800 kcal a day. 100 kcal is 5.5% of your daily caloric budget. You just consumed 5.5% of your daily caloric budget with that one extra tablespoon of butter.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-many-calories-a-day-s...
Right, like I said, it's nothing...
Assuming you have 3 meals a day, and assuming you have 600 kcals per meal, and assuming your nutritionist has prescribed a diet with a 50/20/30 carb/fat/protein ratio, and assuming one of those meals (dinner?) has 100 kcals from fat, that means 16% of the meal was fat. If you eat a lean protein (with a tiny amount of incidental fat) and carbs with that meal, that's actually the perfect amount of fat.
You can also mix up your meals so that, say, breakfast has very little fat, and dinner has more fat, or vice versa. It's all about balance.
>You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.
Yeah, but only anorectic are able to keep eating this long term. Until they get to hospital with all kinds of body damage.
I know a lot of vegetarians who don't end up in the hospital from eating too many veggies, but I guess they're the lucky ones...
They eat more then just vegetables with little bit of butter. It is possible to survive as vegetarian, just not from the meal you described.
Nuts, sugar, cheese, eggs, actually also fruits ...
When I cook with lard, we all feel satisfied much sooner than usual. And it does taste better.
Because Harvard sold out to big sugar back in the 60s.
British cuisine has some interesting side effects of World War II.
In the UK, today, people specifically desire beans produced by a factory, from a tin, with sugary orange-colored tomato sauce. Even at high end restaurants, people desire and expect tinned beans.
Whereas places outside the UK that share some elements of British culture like Australia, Boston and Ireland expect home made means - crushed tomatoes, borlotti beans, local additions (like feta and mint in Australia).
My best-guess understanding is the British taste for sweet canned beans comes from WW2 rationing.
Hilarious that feta and mint as "Australian" additions. I seem to recall there is or was a sizeable Greek-derived population in some areas of Aussieland - that must be where that comes from.
Yes exactly. Melbourne is the second largest Greek city in the world. The idea of adding those things to freshly baked beans is uniquely Australian.
Feta and mint in beans sounds incredible and why have I never experienced this…
I don't think I have ever seen home-made beans in Australia, even at fancy cafes. Beans on a breakfast menu means Heinz, or Wattie's if you're in New Zealand.
I do recall my shock at visiting the staff canteen of a large UK corporation and finding out that the most popular menu item by far for lunch was chips (fries) and beans.
> Beans on a breakfast menu means Heinz, or Wattie's if you're in New Zealand.
I don't think you'd ever see beans on a breakfast menu in the US unless it was aimed at working-class Mexican/Central American/Caribbean immigrants. Reminds me of my time in rural Costa Rica and the roadside stands that served a hearty breakfast to the farm workers. And I don't think you'd ever get something to taste that good without cooking it from scratch.
A lot of places do their own beans now, at least in Melbourne. It definitely does not mean Heinz everywhere in the country.
We might be going to different cafes. I’m spending most of my time in Melbourne.
Don't beans make you swollen and fart like a howitzer? Every time I come back to any form of beans because of their price and nutricious values I pay with cannonade of farts.
Your gut biome needs to adjust to them, after a few days/weeks of eating them regularly your gas should be normal again
It was one of my grandfather’s (WWII veteran) favourite foods, a taste acquired in his army days.
> During the war, Nestlé companies supplied both the Axis and the Allies. In 2000, the company agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle claims that a German company they purchased used forced labor during the war.
I didn’t think it would be possible for me to loathe Nestlé more.
Not covered in the article are the snack bars which to this day tend to be an oat and chocolate base with added protein and vitamins. This persisted far past the time it was possible to make something better tasting and better for you. I wound up researching this quite heavily while developing mealsquares.
Cool article, but I’m curious why the National Park Service is posting content about WWII history on their website?
The canned meats, "tushenka", also became a USSR thing after the US sent massive amounts of it as lend-lease food.
Same as Spam ? The US sent boatloads of it via the Pacific. I've seen it credited with supplying something like 15% of all Soviet wartime calories consumed.
The Soviet and now post-soviet "tushenka" is 100% derived from American WW2 spam. But I think it actually tastes better, try some if you have an Eastern European store around.
What an absolutely exceptional and fascinating article and presentation. From our National Park Service! My heart swells with pride; this is the web I want to return.
One small correction, WWII rations included instant coffee, but it wasn't freeze-dried, which was invented after the war.
I wonder if there's a similar effect happening now with food technologies developed under today’s pressures
Hold on, how did kraft macaroni and cheese get made in 1937, whereas powdered cheese was invented in 1943 ??!?!!!?!
It originally used grated cheese according to this article from the Canadian magazine The Walrus (Canada has/had a love affair with Kraft Mac & Cheese or Kraft Dinner as they call it there -- think of the BNL song "If I had a million dollars".)
https://archive.ph/20130105114605/http://walrusmagazine.com/...
that makes sense but this very article states: "The powder is a cheese sauce that has been partially defatted and dehydrated" in the section that they discuss happening in 1937.
Such an obvious contradicting makes me question the validity of this article
M&M’s are considered’food’ in the US ?
Measured purely against their original goal of efficiently getting calories into soldiers during deployment in tropical* climates, M&M are quite good at their job.
*: northern chocolate products usually melt if you take them to the tropics. The candy shell is highly effective at addressing this issue.
it's just usual corruption to limit purchases to Mars' products. in theory if you used the sugar for the coating into regular cheap milk chocolate it would hold as well as m&ms. you cannot compare premium chocolate with m&ms.
Cigarettes for breakfast ....
That definitely were different times.
Friends mom said her mother and father in law would wake up at 2am to smoke and go back to sleep. Neither one made it to 65.
Do tater tots count?
thought this was going to be on the Morganthau plan.
> When the war ended in 1945, the military had huge stockpiles of food, including powdered cheese. The government liquidated these stockpiles, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, to private industry. Companies like Frito (later Frito-Lay), Kraft, and others found ways to use these wartime products. In 1948, the Frito company coated puffed cornmeal pieces with dehydrated cheese, and Cheetos were born.[26]
It is absolutely wild the butterfly effect of processed terrible food this may have caused and deaths from obesity. All from trying to find something to do with ultra cheap army surplus.
I always wonder why people belittle cheap food and abundance that helped solve famine and operational logistics.
Obesity exists because food is insanely abundant and cheap because people wanted to solve the problem of people starving to death
Obesity is rampant because we are all descended from the people that survived times of starvation.
Because processed foods are associated with many health complications.
Sources to back your theorem on the cause of obesity?
You get obese since you eat too many calories. Humans obey thermodynamics.
Unfortunately it is a lot easier to eat too many calories on Cheetos and Doritos Locos tacos than less processed foods like salads.
I think your point on nutritious food being widely available for cheap is spot on.
That said going back to entropy to explain how a structure of dozens of trillions of cells harvest energy from foreign structures following a lifetime of heuristics is utterly misleading.
In particular it makes it sound scientific, when we have very little practical knowledge on how it works at scale and can't reliable do falsifiable experiments to prove our theories.
I mean, we're still literally burning stuff[0] as a proxy for the digestion process because we have no other way of coming up with a stable number. Which gives us aberrations like gasoline having higher nutritious value than potatoes (which totally makes sense in thermodynamics, I concur)
[0] https://www.livescience.com/62808-how-calories-are-calculate...
People are entirely too preoccupied with the quality of food instead of the quantity. I think it is an intentional or subconscious distraction. It is easy to eat excessive calories when you are consuming sugar coated fats. Doubly so if you are sedentary.
It's wild to think WW2 indirectly killed people a decade later by making them fat. When you hear about surplus materiel killing people, food isn't what comes to mind.
I believe Zero Mostel is the authority on this.
Please tell us more about this. I'm really hoping there is a related Zero Mostel video that you can share.
https://jhv.blogs.com/eatatjoes/2004/03/folks_lets_eat.html
https://larvatus.livejournal.com/384861.html
I’m wondering why on earth the military was storing cheese as a powder… the whole point of cheeses is that they are a great way to store milk. Why didn’t they just store cheese wheels? Surely powdering it makes it go off much faster?
Military food is a really fascinating logistics problem - how do you feed people, potentially across a long period while engaging in calorically demanding tasks? Foodstuffs need to last as long as possible because supply lines are targeted or have been destroyed. That shipment you received may be one of your last. Cheese, like any food with significant moisture, can ultimately rot.
Much of our modern processes are to somehow extend the life of the foodstuff over long periods. This boomed the overly processed food economy we currently have, but it was first built to simply make sure we had food for the long haul. Curing meats in salt is roughly the same process.
In turns of cheese, powder has less moisture stored in the individual cheese granule but may also be reconstituted with added moisture. Powdered forms are easier to package for individual soldiers to carry for themselves rather than a large, bulkier wheel that needs its own storage and transportation methods.
It goes further back. Napoleon offered a prize in 1795 for some way to preserve food for soldiers.[1] The result was "canning" - heating, boiling, and sealing in an airtight container. Originally in glass jars. Later metal cans. Finally vacuum-packed plastic.
Current products include MREs for the military, which are actually somewhat hard to buy commercially since Warnock got tired of dealing with preppers. They really want to sell these things by the container load. There are all kinds of knock-offs available. The real military MREs are designed for young soldiers in good condition doing heavy work, so three of them contain almost 4,000 calories. Civilian versions tend to be smaller portions.
There's also the Humanitarian Daily Ration. It's kosher, halal, vegetarian, lactose-free, and nut-free. Also air-droppable without a parachute. It's basically lentils and beans. It's intended for people on the edge of starvation. The US military used to give out MREs in crises, but that was too much concentrated energy food for someone nearly starving and could sicken them.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-...
There's a really good episode of 99% Invisible that explains how much of the technology used to produce food in grocery stores was developed by the military. One of the most surprising, for me, was chewy chocolate chip cookies.
It says in the article. Powdering involves further dehydration, reducing weight and size. I’m guessing it also improves shelf life.
This. Nescafe was great for the same reason, as it weighed much less than coffee grounds.
It's impossible to overestimate how important this was. The U.S. military in WWII had to support an enormous force overseas, to a degree and extent that no other power had to approach. Everything that the force needed in the field had to first go on a ship to be sent overseas. With the U.S. Twelfth Army Group numbering over a million men alone in Europe, small changes to products were magnified at scale, saving tons of weight in the logistics chain.
It's also worth noting that WW2 by and large predates intermodal shipping containers. Apart from some experiments late in the war, the U.S. military did not use containerized shipping to any significant degree. Everything was shipped "break-bulk" which meant that every individual parcel had to be loaded/unloaded by hand every time it changed transportation mode. Also, the ships that carried these goods were tiny by modern standards. Every bit of extra volume and weight mattered much more than it does today.
There's a probably apocryphal story that a Japanese higher-up realized the war was lost when they found out the US had enough spare capacity to build ice cream ships for in-theater cold treats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge).
Probably apocryphal, but I'm sure there were similar conversations. Though from what I've read, many in the Japanese High Command were fully aware of the disparity in war-making potential between the U.S. and Japan. That Japan decided to go to war anyways despite knowing this is still discussed.
There's a page over on combinedfleet.com (great resource and discussion) that goes into the numbers, and it's truly astonishing. U.S. output could be described as terrifying. http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
I think there is a real story about a British/Australian general at Hamel arranging for hot meals in the trenches
e: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Monash
First of all I don't think that's the whole point of cheese. Secondly, dehydrating and powdering dramatically extends shelf life and makes shipping cheaper.
It’s not the whole point of cheese in most cultures, but it’s a very effective method of turning summer grass into winter food. Which, especially in Alpine climates, is important.
Native Americans, lacking domesticated ruminants, achieved similar results with pemmican, which is the same principle: protein + fat + dehydration = long-lasting nutritious food for survival. Not apparently very tasty, and they would certainly supplement it with anything else they could find, but it kept you from starving.
Why do you think herders would go through all the effort?
‘Not starving to death’ seems like a good reason, eh?
What? What would make you think that dehydrating a food would make it go bad quicker?
Similarly, the use of french oak for aging french wines is largely due to a surplus of oak from from government forests that were originally planted in support of naval ship building.
Cheetos popcorn is probably less bad overall, being a whole grain.
Perhaps, other than the "ruining perfectly good popcorn" part.
I love the spicy Cheetos popcorn. Tasty, but filled with all of the Red #40 dye.
> During the war, Nestlé companies supplied both the Axis and the Allies. In 2000, the company agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle claims that a German company they purchased used forced labor during the war.
The sole blemish on Nestlé's otherwise impeccable record. /s
Does anyone know the real backstory here? I'm thinking that Nestlé HQ (presumably in Switzerland) might have had rather limited control over (or even visibility into) their on-paper subsidiaries in Nazi-controlled countries.
See Maggi on this list which is now owned by Nestlé:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
Nestlé also participated directly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/31/news/new-studies-detail-s...
https://archive.is/4ZLSN
> Nestle and the former Brown Boveri & Co., now called ABB, earlier admitted slave labor had been used at their German sites and have paid compensation. Novartis, Nestle and Roche contributed to the $1.25 billion settlement in 1998 that banks organized to settle the Holocaust account claims.
Looking here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggi#World_Wars - it sounds like Maggi wasn't acquired by Nestlé until 1947. Details unclear - but that may have been a case of "spoils of war, sold at auction". If so, then blaming Nestlé for Maggi's prior misdeeds sounds pretty dubious.
From the NYT article, I'd say Nestlé itself has at least some dirt on their hands. OTOH, that article makes no mention whatever of Switzerland's location - landlocked and totally surrounded by the seemed-to-be-winning Axis powers for almost all of WWII. Considering how <cough/> nicely the Axis occupation forces were treating most of the countries which they'd already conquered - the Swiss might have felt that making much of a fuss (over Axis misdeeds) could result their own conquest and occupation.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. That said, I parsed this part
> > During the war, Nestlé companies
as referring to companies that are now, or were at the time of WW2, part of Nestlé. I thought that was clear from context when I said
> See Maggi on this list which is now owned by Nestlé
which has the operative word now. (Emphasis added.)
Contrast that with how I followed up:
> Nestlé also participated directly
Emphasis added to indicate that Nestlé also was directly involved at the time, to differentiate from actions taken by a different independent company during WW2 that has since been acquired by Nestlé.
From how you have responded, you seem to believe that we disagree. I am simply clarifying that I was perhaps unclear in my phrasing, but that we are in alignment here.
As for the NYT article, I wanted to find more context but was mostly seeking to find a suitable citation for the claims made by another poster, which I think I have done.
I think that given other actions performed by Nestlé speak to the kind of corporation it has historically been in more recent times in foreign countries is no less problematic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-06-...
These practices are especially problematic due to the nature of breastfeeding - by marketing directly to mothers who are about to give birth or just have given birth using bad nutritional claims not supported by science, they rob mothers of crucial nutrients as well as introducing pathogens due to poor sanitation, while actively lowering incidences of breastfeeding from 90% pre-advertising to 10% post-advertising in in Chile, for example.
By the time mothers are able to become better informed, their milk will likely have dried up, and so they are now locked into buying formula that is likely unsafe to use in many cases due to poor sanitation and lack of access to clean water.
Don't worry though, Nestlé also promotes and sells bottled water, so they can sell you a solution for the problems their own products not fit for market create.
The numbers are pretty grim.
I mean, they have a whole article just about their horrible track record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9
I think it's probably as bad as you say, and likely worse. If they were really worried about Axis occupation, you would think they would stop selling to the Allies. That they continued to sell to both sides seems to me to be an example of how Nestlé puts profits over law and over human life itself.