I was reading the article and I was thinking over and over how enjoyable was reading it. I even continued reading it after having a pause because I got distracted by something else (something that almost never happens).
Then I remember how "monetized" (meaning ad-ridden) articles are full of filler to artificially keep you on the page. And reloaded the page without ad-blockers. And there it was, the page has no ads. And that's why the content is good, and engaging, and a pleasure to read.
So not only ads are a source of malware, but also of badly written articles. I want the person writing the article be focused on the quality of what they write, not on the amount of words they can cram. I would very much prefer an internet with less content than an internet with shitty content sponsored by shitty ads. And I would really pay for a search engine which allowed me to filter out ad-ridden websites.
> So not only ads are a source of malware, but also of badly written articles.
It's the other way around. Most people who plaster their site with ads want to make easy money. Since the goal is to make money rather than share information, the content doesn't matter. You lure visitors and hopefully generate a click using a purposefully cluttered design encouraging accidental ad clicks while navigating.
That's why I like Twitter. It challenges you to communicate what you need to say in as few words as possible. That is if you don't cheat by chaining posts.
I can't stand "normal" milk from the US... the stuff you buy in the plastic cartons. It taste horrid.
Milk from Germany? I love it. Milk from Darigold in the paper cartons? I love it. Milk from Darigold in the plastic? Tastes like garbage. Organic milk in a paper carton? Some is good, some taste like garbage.
I didn't realize how different milk tastes until I spent some time in Germany. Prior to that I just thought I didn't like milk. Once I realized I like German milk, upon returning to the US I started trying different brands to see if I could find one that I liked. I finally found Darigold's paper carton milk.
For what it's worth, I have no affiliation with Darigold aside from being a customer. I'm sure there are other good brands too.
There are a lot of factors that go into milk and its taste. There's: pasteurized (most American milk), homogenized, ultra-pasteurized or UHT (which most German milk probably is), raw milk, how quickly it was cooled-down, cream content, and then there's the variance between dairies based on things such as breed, feed, time of year, quality of life, etc. We can't accurately make blanket statements about one country's milk one way or the other.
There are two dairies near me that I purchase from, but the characteristics of each's milk varies quite noticeably. Dairy A tastes just okay and goes bad after about 5 days. Dairy B tastes excellent and keeps well for at least 8 days. They're both pasteurized, unhomogenized, and packaged in glass jugs. Dairy A milks holsteins (less cream). Dairy B milks jerseys (more cream). Dairy A's is whiter in appearance (less silage/forage, more grain). Dairy B's is yellower (more silage/forage, less grain). No two dairies are alike.
And better than both of them, there's a raw milk dairy that I sometimes buy from whose milk tastes best to me. Plus, it doesn't spoil like pasteurized milk. Rather, it goes sour, and when it sours, I can still use it for cooking and baking.
> [...] ultra-pasteurized or UHT (which most German milk probably is) [...]
In Germany there's a difference between fresh milk (pasteurized & homogenized) which is sold refrigerated and "H-Milch" which is UHT and sold unrefrigerated.
Most people buying milk to drink get the fresh stuff. It also tastes much much better IMO than the UHT milk.
I believe some locales allow for water to be added to the milk, typically a very small percentage upto the volume of the lost cream. Not sure if that's true or not.
Believe it or not, the best major milk I've had is Walmart's great value brand organic. It's not as good as many of the independent dairies, but definitely the best major I've had. It comes in plastic and I believe it's UHT. I don't like to buy stuff in the paper cartons because it's usually not actual wax but PTFE/PFOA based coatings.
Just a note: the taste difference you're picking up on is not due to the simple presence or absence of plastic. Paper cartons are lined with LDPE film and milk jugs are usually composed of HDPE. Both options are, in effect, polyethylene plastic containers.
In Germany the milk in plastic tastes fine, although the plastic is more like a ziplock bag with some rigidity to it so it stands up straight and pours well.
I wasn't trying to say the plastic is the cause of the taste difference. I emphasized the plastic in the US because thats been my observation. However if you check the expiration dates in the US, milk in plastic tends to expire much more quickly than the milk in paper cartons. So there is more going on than it simply being different containers.
> However if you check the expiration dates in the US, milk in plastic tends to expire much more quickly than the milk in paper cartons. So there is more going on than it simply being different containers.
Without further details, I'm guessing that "milk in paper cartons" has been UHT-treated, which means it could last even longer than the published expiry date.
It'll still go bad in a few days or weeks once it has been opened, depending on how it has been stored.
UHT milk is just not common in the US. It's not rare, but you won't see it in very many homes. The milk in paper cartons that we in the US speak of is almost always pasteurized whole or skim (2% or 1%) refrigerated milk that is good for about a week max after opening, and not a whole lot longer if refrigerated unopened. I kind of like the convenience of UHT milk (the kind you can store at room temp for a good while if unopened) and to me, it tastes less "cowy". I don't like a "cowy" taste, but then I'm not a milk drinker. Milk in plastic cartons is most common, but there's plenty milk in paper cartons alongside those plastic containers in the refrigerated section most US markets.
Google cone-shaped milk cartons. Interesting bit of historical trivia.
Yeah, I was going to comment the same thing. There should be little difference between the taste from LDPE lining in paper cartons vs. HDPE plastic containers.
Plastic jugs let in lots of light, while paper cartons are opaque, which could have an effect.
FWIW, I do have a preference, I think milk is best drunk straight from a paper carton (in single servings, milk from the plastic "milk chugs" has always tasted worse to me).
Some store fluorescent bulbs produce enough UV, 24/7, to make printed boxes fade away, and turn plastics brittle and yellow. It's not as strong as full sunlight, but it's still there nonetheless.
Even visible wavelengths, especially from fluorescent/LED lighting, can skunk beer. So it's not impossible that this could happen to milk, for whatever that's worth.
Impact of modern packaging on the taste itself has been proven to be neglible in double blind studies. However, the taste of milk varies wildly based on the animal (food, location, roaming, season etc.) and also of course the process applied to sterilize the milk (pasteurization/UHT, skimming, filtering). Same milk from from same cow will taste very different when raw vs UHT. I am very much a UHT person, but for some weird reason my country (UK) considers UHT second grade so it's not always easy to find them - or they are shunned to "baking" aisles.
But the packaging itself matters, eg soda in a Al can and a glass bottle is perceived quite differently.
If the milk came in a plastic bottle I have no problem drinking directly from the bottle, if it came in TetraPak... If I bothered to cut it with scissors I would probably be fine drinking milk directly, but if I just ripped the corner by the perforation then I would definitely drink from the mug, because I hate the feeling of the paper fibers on my lips.
Also there is a thing with Americans, they just buy milk. I can't buy "just" milk. I can buy 1%, 1.5%, 3.5% and (my preferred) ~3.5-4% fat milk. I don't like 1%, it is just a water with a bit of milk taste for me. Even reading Wikipedia article on skimmed milk makes me wonder how it even can be called a milk. I read many stories of Americans who didn't like milk since their childhood, only to discover in their adult life what what they drunk back then wasn't even a milk per se and sometimes their parents not only gave them skimmed milk but further diluted it with water. Urgh!
> Also there is a thing with Americans, they just buy milk. I can't buy "just" milk. I can buy 1%, 1.5%, 3.5% and (my preferred) ~3.5-4% fat milk.
Huh? A pretty typical US grocery store has skim, 1%, 2%, and whole (3.5%), each conventional or organic, and in a fancier grocery there’s generally a higher-fat organic option as well.
Of course it has a wide selection, but my point is what some part of Americans (who as beforementioned "didn't like milk", not every one, of course) don't even understand what milk comes in a different fat content selection.
If that was a just a random encounter on my own I wouldn't even bother with making any conclusions, but I've seen it many times, incidentally some of them was after tasting milk in some other country, like in th GP comment.
It is interesting thing on its own, why there is a such phenomen and as I understand part of it is attributed to the plain old povetry (hence skimmed milk diluted with water) but tgere was an overall change in the mindset about how and how many milk should be consumed somewere around the middle of 20
th c. in the USA.
I could made the part about "some Americans" clearer, as evident by downvotes, but ehat is done...
Huh? There are no Americans like this that I know of. You become acquainted with it in elementary school because you get your selection of milks in the lunch line and you will rue the day you choose skim milk over whole if you aren't familiar with the terms.
Have you been to Iceland? When I visited a few years back, the grocer had a massive wall of “milk”. All the usually skim, low-fat, whole, etc. And also a massive selection of sour milks and milk-yogurt-cream things.
As I don’t speak Icelandic, I grabbed a sour milk by mistake. It was horrific. Into the trash it went. And back to the store I went.
Well, my native cuisine has a lot of milk products of... different sourness. I couldn't make such mistake because I know the difference of the viscosity and how the bottle handles by the guts. *smile*
> But the packaging itself matters, eg soda in a Al can and a glass bottle is perceived quite differently.
I agree with that. When container-touches-mouth I think there surely must be some electrochemistry involved that makes the drink from the aluminum can taste ... metallic.
Or it's all in my head. (But that too is important.)
With carbonated beverages, canned seems the most strongly-carbonated to me, followed closely by plastic bottles, then glass which seems much milder. Maybe the caps on glass leak more CO2.
Most German milk is either "long life" or UHT, both of which taste better to me than "normal" pasteurized milk, which is the most common in England, for example. The three different pasteurization techniques result in different tasting milk.
I do notice a difference between foil lined carton, plastic jug and carton milk, the latter usually tastes the worst probably because the carton is more permeable?
But I do love fresh raw milk whenever I can get it.
Interesting, I've never heard anyone say anything than 'ugh, it's UHT' (e.g. in hotels) before!
I wonder if it's at least partly the temperature, since UHT milk is shelf stable (for a good while anyway) you might be drinking it significantly warmer than milk from the fridge?
> I wonder if it's at least partly the temperature, since UHT milk is shelf stable (for a good while anyway) you might be drinking it significantly warmer than milk from the fridge?
Hardly. When I was younger I used to have UHT milk at my grandma, and she stored it in the fridge (after opening), so it was same temperature of what I drank home. Still a very noticeable difference with "normal" milk.
I dont drink milk any more due to lactose intolerance, but only one time I noticed a real difference in milk taste, and that was when the milk very super-clearly to me tasted of almonds.
UHT to my taste also adds slightly bitter flavor. I grew up drinking fresh milk but my parents at some point switched to UHT and so did most people I know. I'm not sure if the middle ground longer-shelf-life type is actually more popular than UHT in Germany as someone here claims. UHT tasted bad to me (slightly off) back then, but now being used to it I have the opposite reaction and think something's wrong when I drink fresh milk. The difference in taste seems negligible when used as a cooking ingredient.
UHT (and longer-shelf life) milk became pretty popular in Germany during the late 90s I think. I'd speculate it's because it's much more convenient due to smaller fridges, as well as discounters (which are very popular) selling it for very cheap.
I will also agree with the other commenter that the type of heat treatment is the most obvious factor in how milk tastes, and that I've heard people from abroad comment on this. Though I've never had US milk so IDK.
The prevalent milk in Germany (originally promoted as “hält länger frisch” et al) is Extended Shelf Life (ESL). It's treated hotter than traditional (HTST) pasteurisation of the type dominant in the UK, but not as brutally treated as traditional UHT.
Personally I'm not a fan of ESL and would seek out the remaining HTST brands, but it's eminently preferable to UHT.
Even milk from the same dairy tastes radically different in plastic than paper.
I always hated plastic milk as a kid. Nobody else seemed to notice the difference though. I sometimes wonder if there’s only a small subset of the population that can notice it.
Are you sure the difference is not in your head? Try to do a blind experiment. Ask someone to pour a glass of milk from plastic container and a another glass from paper container and see if you can tell which is which.
It’s entirely possible, most artificial sweeteners have a chemical taste to me and if I consume them it unsettles my stomach for a couple hours. My mother is the only other person I’ve encountered with the same condition. My father and brothers can’t tell the difference. I can ingest real sugar and corn syrup without issue, but they taste very different to me. I discovered sodas made with real sugar about ten years ago - wow - those mexican cokes are amazing, but costs twice as much.
When the "Mexican" coke started making a splash as "better than American", Coke tested it blind with taste testers and came to the conclusion that there was no perceptible difference, and that the glass bottle makes more difference than the cane sugar vs HFCS (The whole point of HFCS is to be formulated to contain the same amount of glucose and fructose as cane sugar). Many other folks then performed tests (of better or worse quality) and they tend to show the same results, either there was no difference or people somewhat randomly preferred the cane sugar or the HFCS. But Coke is still happy to sell people a product made with cane sugar at a big premium, because why not?
(I put "Mexican" in quotes above, because standard Coke sold in Mexico in the past 10 years or so is made with HFCS just like in the US. The bottled cane sugar Coke is only made as a specialty product.)
Come Passover, all Coke in the stores is cane sugar (so I'm told). I don't drink much Coke, and if you put two glasses in front of me, I'm pretty confident that I could tell you whether they're the same sweetener or different. I'll notice the switch at the beginning and end of Passover. Since I'm not Jewish, and since Passover moves around, I'll claim this is close enough to a blind test.
For my money the elusive perfect Coke comes from a soda fountain that's adjusted just so. Couldn't tell you what's different, but some just nail the perfect carbonation level and syrup ratio. When I find one, I usually have three or four in rapturous joy, because it'll be months before I find one again.
The opposite for me. I would drink the paper milk, but....
Dixie was a beer sold and made in Louisiana. Part of the process had them storing the beer in fresh barrels. It made the canned beer taste like it had been in milk cartons. Very unpleasant.
Why would milk containers have phthalates in them? All ours here in Australia are made with HDPE which doesn't need plasticisers.
Although I have read that apparently a fair proportion of milk in the US is made with equipment that uses PVC piping that leeches phthalates before it's even packaged...
It's similar in the US. I'd note that even the crystal clear (highly recyclable) plastic you see does not contain the phthalates you're looking for. There was a fad in the early 00s for using polycarbonate water bottles that probably contained BPA, but those were then (rightfully) banned. You can't even use BPA or ortho-phthalates in children's toys since they very likely put them in their tiny mouths.
I don't know about PolyCarobonate, but for LDPE and HDPE (and PET) that sounds incorrect. Certainly, chemists are worried about much smaller amounts of contamination (ppb) than humans and they would definitely know (and measure) how much plasticizer was leaching from their bottles.
I know there's wide variety in plastics. Be careful about cherry picking studies that show no harm, you can do it with lead if you really want. The situation isn't as dire, but I think the actual impact on animals is more up in the air than a brief survey of the literature suggests.
My family has been getting milk from a brand called Straus family creamery which is available in glass bottles in northern California. Best tasting I've found around here.
Grew up on the same street as a Straus dairy. Kinda interesting how the dairies for different milk labels in that area (Straus, Clover, Lucerne) all basically have the same land and cows - but the milk will taste quite different across the labels.
I’ve always preferred plastic jug to paper carton myself. Wish Straus came in bigger bottles..
I've haven't had much milk or tried different brands...between your recommendation and the apparent milk cult:
"Who are the peoples who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous people, who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades in the world, who have an appreciation for art and literature and music, who are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect? They are the people who have patronized the dairy industry."
The secret to the Darigold plastic/paper dichotomy may be in the expiration dates. At least for the 1% product, the half-gallon cardboard cartons tend to expire at least one month, sometimes two, later than the plastic jugs sitting next to them. Not hard to imagine how milk that's been sitting around in a plastic jug for an extra month or two will taste worse.
Milk with a multi-month shelf live can't be fresh, I believe. The fresh (mildly processed) milk I know turns bad within about a week, the "extended shelf life" stuff that was introduced a couple of years ago (in Germany) lasts for a few weeks. There is also "H Milch" which tastes very differend and can be stored at room temperature for several months.
Well, it can be fresh if you buy it soon after production, obviously. I assume the cow-to-cereal bowl pipeline is just a lot shorter for the cardboard cartons for whatever reason. Makes no sense, but the date discrepancy has existed for years.
That sounds like confirmation bias. I've bought a lot of milk in a variety of containers from plastic to paper to glass, from a variety of sources. There is a wide variety of flavors, it has much more to do with what dairy it came from than the container it is packed in.
I grew up drinking mostly milk from our cow, which was usually a Guernsey or a Jersey -- fed on a combination of pasture and commercial grains. Pasteurized in the early years, but raw later on. Never really liked drinking milk. But man, my cousins loved visiting because they could have all the cold milk they wanted. Milk doesn't disgust me the way tomatoes do, or act as a near emetic the way olives do, but I just don't particularly like drinking milk of any variety, well, except for chocolate milk. But I love most of the products derived from it -- cheese, ice cream, butter, etc. With a family cow you really get used to how the cow's diet affects milk flavor -- the lush green grass in the spring was quite noticeable. And of course, I like milk with cold cereal but not with hot cereals. And our beef came from a calf raised to a yearling each year. Eggs came from the chickens, although they were the first to disappear in response to the convenience of the supermarket.
I was born in the early 50s and my folks were Californians from small-town Minnesota, so I'm used to the idea of very sweet dishes being considered okay at all meals. An example, my mom picked up from her Dutch-immigrant mother, a breakfast dish made from thoroughly dried out bread scraps, simmered in milk with cinnamon and liberal amounts of sugar. They called it (I don't know the Dutch spelling) stoot-uh-bray (phonetic) which I suspect meant something like stewed bread. Loved it and the many other fattening 30s concepts of what constituted a proper meal. A slightly less chocolatey version of homemade pudding over graham crackers was considered a perfectly acceptable lunch, Grandma called it cocoa-dope. And though no one pushed my mom to cook all our meals, it was clear she felt it a failure if any of us in our family of six found it necessary to prepare their own meal. Dad was a railroad conductor on 24-hr call. When he got called, she got up and prepared him a meal and/or lunch, regardless of time of day or night. He simply could not break her of this habit. But yeah, my folks and their folks definitely grew up on a diet resembling at least some of what the article referenced, and held similarly strong attitudes about the kitchen being the center of home culture. Sit down meals for the whole family were mandatory until such time as we left home. No TV or radio during meals, just conversation. Not such a bad deal, really -- three mandatory whole-family conversations a day -- two if school was in session. Occasionally I used to quickly walk the 600-yards home (from elementary school) for lunch. Some days I'd trade my homemade-bread sandwich for one of my schoolmates Wonder Bread sandwiches at the outdoor lunch tables of elementary school, both parties usually felt they got the better of the deal. Different times, different attitudes.
The taste is also highly effected by what the animal is fed. Cows fed on fresh gras will produce the most wonderful flavors in the resulting butters and milk vs those fed with dried gras or feed.
I live and the US and have noticed the milk from the "nicer" grocers like Whole Foods and Farm Fresh tastes absolutely awful but the stuff from Food Lion etc in the HDPE jugs with the minimal labeling tastes way better. I don't know why that is.
This is because for some reason the organic milks are almost always UHT (ultra-high-temperature processing) where the milk is heated to a higher temperature for a shorter time.
Some people notice a significant taste difference between UHT milk and non-UHT milk.
> We’re sure bananas would be fine served as a vegetable, or with bacon, but this is certainly not the role we would assign to them today.
At least in Melbourne, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand it's not unusual at all to find pancakes or waffles with banana + maple syrup and bacon together.
Not uncommon in the US to have bananas on pancakes, but the bacon -usually- is served as a side (unless you're getting an "Elvis", which would have peanut butter, bacon, and banana, which I have seen as a waffle or pancake option).
But to the article, bacon wrapped bananas, standalone, aren't things any more.
The only good donut Voodoo ever made, and even then they generally did a crappy job of it. I'd rather just get a maple bar from the grocery store bakery and add bacon myself.
Prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe is standard Italian fare (prosciutto e melone), I can't see bacon-wrapped banana unreasonably far from that. Going to try it tomorrow morning.
Also, Bacon-Wrapped Dates. But I suppose the question is not so much if it'd be any good, but whether it's common. And I've never seen bacon wrapped banana, either.
Bacon-wrapped dates are AFAIK a relatively recent thing in the US. Bacon-wrapped scallops--which are actually a bit hard to get right (i.e. both the bacon and the scallops baked reasonably)--were the more traditional cocktail party item.
Bacon-wrapped dates, under the name of "devils on horseback", are documented (by the OED, no less) in an American magazine of 1885. So... not that recent. They certainly were a thing by the 1970s, then faded, then came back.
European mediterranian countries.
Bacon wrapped dates were pretty common at parties in Spain. Then they were considered bad for your health because of the fat, and now they are considered bad for your health because of the sugar.
Cooked green bananas (both actual plantains, and just unripe regular bananas) are used as starchy sides in a lot of cultures (mostly South America, Africa and the Caribbean afaik).
Reading this, I feel like I’m seeing the past through the eyes of a US-based zoomer. This person should spend 6 months living with the locals in any 3rd-world country.
But why? Speaking as someone from a '3rd world country' [1], the traditional food preparation has been unchanged since the 1920s. The last great change in diet occurred when tomatoes and corn arrived from the America's to W. Africa, then later again when rice became a staple.
The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian. Adding to that, the US food culture always changes to wars, new immigrants, boycott, and government subsidies. Most countries aren't like that, and are significantly more conservative with dietary changes.
[1] We do not love that phrasing. The Cold War is over. Just say which continent you mean specifically.
>> The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian. Adding to that, the US food culture always changes to wars, new immigrants, boycott, and government subsidies. Most countries aren't like that, and are significantly more conservative with dietary changes.
With all these advantages in the US's favor, why is it that Europe is held as a standard of food done right? Discourse on the American diet is almost always concerned with obesity and diet-related diseases and induced by a villain-of-the-year ingredient (e.g. transfats, sodium, cholesterol, oxidants, monosodium-glutamate, corn syrup, etc). Where as, say, the Dutch breakfast and Italian wine culture are respectively associated with growing heights and increased longevity.
>With all these advantages in the US's favor, why is it that Europe is held as a standard of food done right?
Because filter bubbles and liking Europe[1] is very fashionable in filter bubbles that are demographically similar to HN and most of HN has a social circle full of similar demographics that they get their food opinions from.
There are plenty of people who hold middle America in high culinary regard. The rest of the things those people tend to have to say are generally not welcome around here so those people don't hang out here and don't hang out with the kind of people who hang out here so there's little discussion going on between these groups of people.
[1] For a very specific definition of "Europe" that is a far smaller than the actual continent.
> Because filter bubbles and liking Europe[1] is very fashionable in filter bubbles that are demographically similar to HN and most of HN has a social circle full of similar demographics that they get their food opinions from.
I don't think that's the case. Demographics for cooking and pop nutritionist shows are not comparable to the demographics of HN. The audience of the former is dominated by married, middle-aged women in metro-suburban areas across the United States while the audience of the latter is dominated by unmarried, late-20s, bicoastal, urban-dwelling men. Outside of family relations or significant others, I see little overlap between the two at the individual or social level.
> There are plenty of people who hold middle America in high culinary regard. The rest of the things those people tend to have to say are generally not welcome around here so those people don't hang out here and don't hang out with the kind of people who hang out here so there's little discussion going on between these groups of people.
My complaint is not about a lack of high regard, but lack of objective assessment. Sure, association or lack thereof might have something to do with a lack of commentary on American diets. But it has nothing to do with unqualified undermining of those diets. Such an opinion must have first come out of someone's mouth before becoming an oft-repeated factoid.
If you know of any, what middle American diets are associated with height, longevity, increased musculature, or better overall health and by what standard is this proven?
The US is, as usual, large and diverse enough that you can find data for either point.
I think many "people" (aka the ones comparing food cultures and rating restaurants) would say that big US grocery stores are incredible, and our best restaurants are as interesting as any on earth.
It's also fair to say that our average person is extremely out of shape, and eats a comparatively huge amount of processed garbage. Food culture in a lot of suburban places is a mix of fantastic (fresh affordable food available year round) and dismal (32oz Monsters and Applebees).
My diet (a city dweller who pays some attention to food, but likes some junk), my neighbor the vegan (who is great cook are rarely eats out), my buddy's from our small city back in Missouri, and a poor child in southeast DC are all totally different.
I know what fantastical means. The context of the comment I was replying to was that the sheer variety of crops and associated diets in the US is atypical and relatively unique to this country due to the list factors. The mainstream (or I should say armchair nutritionist) opinion suggest such food production is generally excessive and disease-inducing. I would think it should be an advantage and what I wanted addressed is why this isn't the case.
> [1] We do not love that phrasing. The Cold War is over. Just say which continent you mean specifically.
I wonder how many people are thinking of a particular place when they say 'third world country.' In my experience they're just using it as a slightly less offensive way to mean 'shithole'. Which of course we also see when Europeans want to talk shit about America, so they call it a third world country.
Would you spare the author 6 months of his life and share what that would accomplish? I mean sure, take a plane ride and turn your clock back xy years but that's not relevant once you arrive back. We want trendlines with a fixed country. You can do meta analysis across countries after.
oh yeah just take off and leave your job and family behind for 6 months so you can write a better article about food, this is definitely something normal people can do
As a child, I remember noticing that milk would taste different sometimes. My father explained that this was because the cows had been put out to pasture. I can't explain the difference, but it was quite noticeable.
This was local milk from a few km away. It came in glass bottles, brought to our house by a milkman. I can still remember listening for his steps on the front porch, when I got old enough to be able to run to the door to get the milk.
This was the '60s and '70s, not the '20s and '30s, but it still seemed like another world, compared to today. Most food was local and full of taste, having been on a farm just hours before it appeared in the store. People knew what was in season, and took delight in what was available.
> This was the '60s and '70s, not the '20s and '30s, but it still seemed like another world, compared to today. Most food was local and full of taste, having been on a farm just hours before it appeared in the store. People knew what was in season, and took delight in what was available.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember there still being a lot of seasonal variation in produce availability in supermarkets, up to at least the mid nineties. Now there's hardly any. Fresh cranberries have limited availability. Gourds of various kinds are a little bit seasonal. That's about it.
But I've also noticed produce is cheaper and the resulting food is better (probably the produce tends to be fresher) if you go with the seasonal flow. Helpfully, most cuisines are built around seasonality, so it's unusual to find a traditional dish from most cuisines that will call for, say, Summer and Winter produce in the same dish.
Effectively it’s pickled pork and can last for a few months. To eat it, you soak it to get as much of the salt out as you can. Good for stews, gravy, etc.
My grandmother made something like this without salt: cooked meat (usually duck or pork) and lots of fat, poured hot in jars. It kept for a year at least.
The meat was edible straight from the jar, the fat was used for cooking or as spread (but tasted quite disgusting to me heh).
The lard or (even better) duck fat used to preserve the meat can indeed be used like butter. But, by far, the best use of the fat is roast potatoes.
Parboil peeled (preferably floury) potatoes. Whole or cut works. Àdd fat. Jiggle around in a pot to rough up the outside of the spuds. There is no such thing as too much fat, use it all. Roast until crispy and golden brown... 30 to 90 minutes depending on heat and specifics of the potato.
Serve with butter, gravy, onions, sour yogurt, etc.
This is a baby step into charcuterie, congratulations. It's a fabulous world. It is actually quite straightforward to make hams, bacon, pastrami, corned beef, cured salmon, and a thousand more delicious things. Main ingredient and technique is salt and time. There is no possibility of comparing the results of those recipes and the US commercial products with the same names. In fact, a lot of US corporate product disgusts me now, which I suppose is a downside of eating the real thing. Especially ham.
If you're curious to learn more (and you should be!) I recommend "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing", by Ruhlman and Polcyn.
I have about worn out that book. Even has fabulous non-meat recipes. I use the smoked ham recipe in the book to convert industrial $2/lb bone-in pork butts into a glorious thing.
Fantastic trove of information. It really shows how the modern diet with its emphasis on grains & vegetables is wildly different from how we were eating only a mere 100 years ago.
I downloaded the dairy sheet out of curiosity. A few things I noticed:
- Today, people drink as much milk per capita today as they did in the 30's.
- Milk consumption per capita peaked in the 50's, when people were drinking roughly twice as much as today.
- Milk consumption has been more or less linearly declining since the 50's.
> Even bladders were put to good use—though it wasn’t culinary. Rather, they were given to the children, who inflated them, filled them with beans, and used them as rattles.
Bladders and intestines also used to be used as condoms [0]!
My mother told me she recalls seeing her grandfather's intestine-condoms hanging outside on the washing line to dry after being washed!
This was a delightful read. Modern eating really feels like an exercise in alienation by contrast: I try to be mindful of the things I purchase, and even still I barely understand how the ingredients are formed into the final product.
I don't understand. Just cook stuff from scratch? This isn't difficult. Just modestly time consuming it you want a varied meal plan.
Unless you're saying that even for raw ingredients like eggs and potatoes, it's hard to know what's in them, in the sense that modern agriculture is a complex affair.
I didn't word this well -- I do cook most of my meals from scratch (and have my entire life; I can count on one hand the number of times I've eaten McDonald's or most other chains).
What I meant was most prepared foods, even ones that are ingredients themselves: our entire food supply chain is built around uniformity, shelf stability, etc. constraints in ways that have fundamentally changed how things combine into final edible products. Tomatoes that are all the same size, for example, or the fact that I can leave peanut butter in a humid cabinet for months without worrying about it going rancid.
It’s fascinating how much this can change if you find a good source for local stuff. Tomatoes go from uniformly-sized red food pellets to a huge variety of sizes and colors with a lot more flavor to them. I miss having a farmer’s market two blocks from my place with a heirloom tomato specialist showing up regularly.
As a European, food at the farmer’s market is usually cheaper in Europe because we cut the middleman and go straight to the producer. Somehow in the US, it’s more expensive instead because “artisanal”, “organic” and so on.
As such, in the US, farmer markets always feel like a scam to me.
Food at US farmer markets are cheaper if two conditions are met: firstly, going to an actual farmers market which tends to be far out of town, secondly, only buying in season produce without hydroponics.
In the US, I live about 100km outside of a major city, so the farms are next door and the food is tasty.
That said, it's really difficult to convince someone to drive 100km to get a normal ordinary head of lettuce with dirt attached to it so they set up stalls inside the city for top selling 'organic artisanal' items that come in nice display cases.
In both the US and (at least parts of) Europe you have two types of "Farmers markets". One where actual farmers sell in season produce from their actual farm, and one where middlemen buy/import stuff from all over the place and resell it in a market like setting. In both cases the first one is cheap and the second one is expensive.
Didn't realize until reading the child comment that there were middlemen. I live in a rural area in the US: the people selling at farmer's markets around here are almost always the people who grew the food.
A lot of farms have stands set up on the road unattended, with a price list: you buy eggs, veggies, etc. on the honor system.
For example when I buy milk, I can find versions that are from cows not treated with rBST, and those that are. Is there much of a difference for consumers? The government doesn't think so, but certainly some producers do.
Same thing with meat. You can buy meat from animals fed with ractopamine, and those that aren't. Some governments (such as the European Union) believe it's harmful and they ban it; others (U.S. in particular) don't. What do you choose?
Ractiopamine was new to me recently, but my dad grew up on a farm and always refused to buy milk from cows treated with rBST- the effects on the animals was cruel. rBST free milk around this part of the country seems to be the standard; the only place I remember even seeing milk thatb didn't advertise it was Walmart.
My dad's family didn't raise cows for meat, which might explain the (in)difference to ractiopamine, but fortunately it seems like major producers in the US are trying to get away from it so they can continue to access foreign markets (Tyson pork at least). I imagine it'll take time, but fingers crossed it'll get phased out entirely.
Cows treated with rBST are probably not producing milk that is distinguishable from untreated milk but I oppose it for two reasons.
1. The cattle have visibly lower welfare. They carry heavier bags, they have more frequent infections.
2. The farmers are already in a situation of low bulk milk price and high cost. Margins in dairy farming are frequently negative. This increases cost to try to produce more output per cow, which is a beggar-thy-neighbor approach. If everyone does it, milk prices go down even further.
I don't know enough about ractopamine to have an opinion.
My wife cooks home cooked meals everyday from fresh ingredients. She watches the salt, only uses olive oil, is light on the carbs and we always have a large salad. I think that’s all that’s needed for a healthy diet.
I recently discovered that flickr has book illustrations gong back to the early 1500s. Turns out walking skeletons were pretty common back then. This feisty one likes to tug on peoples clothes for some reason.
Not sure if diet, or constant presence of death. I've considered how well people ate back then. On the one hand there were far fewer people and more wild animals, and food was organic, and everyone drank wine an cooked on a fire. On average probably pretty well. Except for winter/early spring, and on a bad year when crops failed.
I’ve seem 2 or 3 comments citing “no perceptible difference” in double blind studies on the topic of taste.
For such flavorful a subject, I find that there are so many N=1 cases such that you often need to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt.
Furthermore, processed and packaged food providers are not exactly good faith actors. If they happened to the be the ones funding the study, thrn sure—there would be no perceptiple difference because that is what they want to find. Citing the actual study and the background of the scientisits / reviewer is also important because to me, these entities need to prove trustworthiness.
Given how soldiers then (and still, largely, now) were young men in their late teens and early 20s... this doesn't sound unreasonable at all. I could sit on the couch and burn that off. Add in setting up camp, digging trenches, hauling heavy equipment through mud and snow? Totally realistic.
It's an intriguing question! People of the early 20th century ate too much fat, too much sugar, too many carbs, too many calories, and yet did not grow obese. There is an interesting paper [1] making a strong case that the cause of the 21st century obesity epidemic is an unidentified environmental contaminant which (1) causes obesity in both humans and other mammals; (2) accumulates in major river valleys; (3) started noticeably affecting the US around 1980, and by now has spread worldwide.
Some possible candidates proposed for such a contaminant include animal antibiotics, PFAS, and lithium (e.g. in industrial lubricants).
a lazy person in the 20s would probably seem fairly active by today's standards... outside of reading books you would have been hard pressed to find an abundance of things to do while sitting around
all of these sweet confections were considered perfectly acceptable as a main course for lunch
The part that's going unsaid here is that these things were acceptable main courses because Americans at the time were not obsessed with putting things in their mouth every hour of every day. It wasn't nearly as common to eat breakfast, lunch, and then shove a thousand-calorie snack in between lunch and supper.
There is an interesting column in a Dutch newspaper were they interview 100 year old people about their life. It opens up a window to a time when the country wasn't obscenely wealthy. Hard work and poverty ruled the day.
Wasn't until the 1970s when living standards had finally caught up to the US.
> Women were left with the impression that one false move on their part meant their children would grow up with night blindness and bowed knees.
What is night blindness? People might masturbate more at night. Could this night blindness be the reason for the tales about masturbation making you go blind?
I remember reading an account by a German soldier in WWI who had just taken an American trench and in it he found a fresh Apple Pie from Boston, and he immediately knew the war was hopeless.
Likewise for German forces in the second war. When they encountered the sheer richness and quantity of U.S provisions after the D Day landings, for many of them it really brought home how hopeless their situation was in ways that abstract ideas of military and economic balances couldn't. Of course this shouldn't necessarily be used to draw absolute conclusions. Soviet forces were basically pushed into battling the Germans while subsisting on what could basically be called starvation rations, but they managed to crush the Wehrmacht piece by piece.
Incidentally, the U.S also fed much of the Soviet Army from 1943 onward, to the point where Soviet food provisioning became highly dependent on U.S supplies (only from 1943 onwards).
>Soviet forces were basically pushed into battling the Germans while subsisting on what could basically be called starvation rations, but they managed to crush the Wehrmacht piece by piece.
But the Soviets lost more solders than the Germans.
Not sure about specific German soldiers asking that specific question, but I've heard the anecdote from a couple books about the post-D Day U.S military operations towards Germany. It's plausible though; the U.S Army was by far the most mechanized of the war in Europe. Germany's massive "mobile army" during Barbarossa and during the Polish and French campaigns before that was something like 80% literal cavalry and only 15 or 20% mechanized (taking aside marching infantry). These percentages never changed much during the war for the Germans.
For a lot of the soldiers who were fighting on D-Day would not have a lot of experience fighting british units, especially well supplied british units. The defeat in France was pretty swift and not a great place to observe superior logistics.
Meanwhile Nazis were heavily dependant on horses in their logistics - things like the Red Ball Express were pretty much inconceivable.
I found that difficult to believe. There were refrigerated ships [2] but I don't think flash freezing methods had been invented. The pie would be mushy, and how would it be transported from the port to the front line?
The New York Tribune (18 May 1918, page 3 [1]) has an article describing a much more likely process: send the ingredients to the front line, and send cooks. Apples, flour, butter and sugar transport very easily. Eggs are fragile, but maybe they used dried egg, or maybe that wasn't a problem.
> "When we got our affairs in tip top shape two American girls could cook 3,000 doughnuts a day and 150 pies."
If German troops are malnourished within their own borders and Americans are eating freaking Apple Pie from thousands of miles away, it's hard not to draw conclusions.
If the Germans are struggling to supply beans and bullets, and Americans are so flush they can "waste" a tremendous amount of logistical overhead on transporting pie just to make the soldiers feel better, then it says a lot about how things are going.
Maybe did the US only supply a few (hundreds...) pies, for some brass to drop it down before abandoning a location, for the Germans to find it and become discouraged.
It seems that in ancient times some town besieged for quite a long time was starving but did throw away munificent food, simulating neglect, in order for it to fall on the attackers, who (not eager to maintain camp for long) promptly packed up and leaved.
I think the US making ice cream in their airplanes were the best example of this.
Not sure of which model of craft, but they were essentially able to fly milk to a high enough altitude it turned into ice cream. The ability to have been able to spare aircraft for the sole purpose of doing that said a lot.
I would guess because success in war is partly determined by soldier morale and delicious food, particularly ones that bring up happy memories, is one of the best morale boosters out there.
If you're eating 2000 calories a day of bread and a bit of sausage filled with sawdust (not a lot of food for a soldier), it means that your logistics systems are probably almost at their breaking point.
If you're eating 5000 calories a day of beef, potatoes, bread, and apple pie shipped from Boston, there's probably a lot that could be reworked to supply even more calories of bread instead - or the same calories to more people.
My midwestern farmer grandparents ate a diet not very dissimilar from the farm-diet described here - right up until my grandfather's fatal heart attack in the 90's.
After reading part 1 and 2 of this lengthy review (more of a precis or distillation than a review IMO) and yet the book's authors are never credited even once.
I don't think you can easily separate the two. Things might start as a marketing campaign but then catch on in general culture. In modern culture, this would be true of bacon. Bacon was falling out of favor in the US in the 1980s as people were beginning to become heart and weight conscious. But then there was a massive marketing push and now bacon is everywhere even on things like donuts. People think bacon is the most wondrous food/flavor and probably don't associate their obsession with a marketing campaign.
People in the 80s were specifically told that animal fats were bad, and so everyone got fatter as the adjunct for fats in foods was sugar. All those years of having to put up with oat bran muffins because it was "heart healthy"... yuck.
Don't get me wrong, I love bran flakes as a cereal. But that's where they belong.
you see this in a lot of food trends through the years... a lot of marketing-pushed popularity people aren't even aware of
almonds and avocados are incredibly popular at the moment despite being particularly bad for the environment, they have their own lobbying groups and political action committees
I don't think it's because of the milk lobby (which didn't exist until early 1900s according to other posts) because I once browsed a cookbook from the 1800s and noticed that many of the recipes called for an amazing quantity of butter. The recipe for bread, which made two loaves at once, called for 1 pound of butter. Pound Cake also uses a pound of butter.
I'm pretty sure "milk" and "culture shock" are lighthearted. Food might raise an eye, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly unusual content warning from someone more attuned to disordered eating discourse (which I am not particularly).
I think average height is more strongly correlated with nutritional profile and overall caloric intake than the proportion of the diet dedicated to animal products. The article makes a point of emphasizing that (and less scientific approaches to nutrition that spun out of it).
Similarly: obesity is strongly correlated with sedentary behavior and overconsumption of processed foods, which tend to include lots of animal products.
Processed foods are mostly plant based seed oil fried grains. Read the ingredients labels in the center aisles of your grocery or convenience store. Very little animal products in there. Canola, sunflower, soybeans, corn, wheat, enriched flour, high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, lecithin, etc etc.
Per capita meat consumption is at more than 150% of the levels back then. By your own argument, we should cut back on meat, particularly chicken and beef.
Their argument is that height has increased as a result of the meaty and fatty diet. It's definitely a factor. If you look at height differences between South Koreans and North Koreans, for example, you will see the effect that nutrition can have on height.
South Korea's meat consumption per capita has also increased consistently since the Korean War.
The counter argument is that it's simply better nutrition increasing height and you can have better nutrition even without a lot of animal product (especially in 2022). It's not intrinsic to meat and animal fat.
This has been borne out in the data: access to high quality animal fat and amino acids is absolutely critical to achieve maximum height. You can even observe it in fossils from the early Holocene, as agriculture expanded (hunter-gatherer diet was overwhelmingly meat dominant), human stature shrank: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-heights-over-the-lo...
Only in late 19th/early 20th did European stature begin to return to natural levels from the Mesolithic.
This effect was seen in American Indians, too. When early Europeans arrived in America, the Great Plains tribes were the tallest people in the world, due to game animal (bison, elk, deer, etc)-centric diet:
This is correct, you don't need animal products specifically to get the height increase it's more about just getting a decent amount of protein along with associated vitamins and minerals for the mother during pregnancy and through the childs early life up to early adulthood.
With animal products it's basically just easier to reach this nutritional point at least when compared with more traditional plant based diets. Of course with modern plant based supplements and nutritional knowledge and food availability etc. you can more or less narrow the gap these days at least in a technical sense, but sometimes in the real world the problem can be getting the kids to actually eat enough protein if they are fussy eaters who decide they don't like a particular protein source (whether animal or plant based) or are filling up on nutritionally sparse junk food first.
My parents grew up in depression-era rural and small-town USA, and us siblings were really into milk as well, a lot of cold, cold milk. In Latin America where we mostly grew up we stood out, neighborhood friends thought it strange we'd buy four one-liter bags of milk every couple of days for four people (only two kids still at home at that time).
It did read more like an abridged version of the book than an actual review. It definitely felt like it would be in the wrong side of "fair use" laws if challenged.
Is it possible that was meant as satire? I wouldn't believe that food would be a valid content warning. The author may have been trying to humorous, or maybe there are people that have issues with food that cause them problems when they read about it. I think it may be worth it to try to think about why they put that there instead of just reacting.
Then I remember how "monetized" (meaning ad-ridden) articles are full of filler to artificially keep you on the page. And reloaded the page without ad-blockers. And there it was, the page has no ads. And that's why the content is good, and engaging, and a pleasure to read.
So not only ads are a source of malware, but also of badly written articles. I want the person writing the article be focused on the quality of what they write, not on the amount of words they can cram. I would very much prefer an internet with less content than an internet with shitty content sponsored by shitty ads. And I would really pay for a search engine which allowed me to filter out ad-ridden websites.