Post World War II Food
322 comments
·October 24, 2024donkdonk
talldayo
"I quit smoking years ago, but an after-meal cigarette from 1973 might just tempt me..."
Never gets old :')
wahern
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.
mauvehaus
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.
beloch
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.
esaym
Link?
swarnie
And maybe Ashens if you like your ration documentaries with a British twist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znmo1dMXerc
lupusreal
Nice.
mnky9800n
Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.
throw0101a
> 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:
Damogran6
Man do I miss his content.
Workaccount2
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.
refurb
Nah, just a super high margin business with dozens of minimally differentiated offerings.
mnky9800n
So what you are saying is I should start a vpn haha
pxoe
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)
4gotunameagain
They are a priori a honeypot. Only useful for torrenting where illegal.
mnky9800n
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?
sebzim4500
I don't think I'd use a VPN for that, but they are great for getting around geoblocks.
Beijinger
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)
donki
How's the situation with VPNs these days in China anyway? I heard that they've been blocking them much more this year.
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aaron695
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azernik
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.
zioterror
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cornercasechase
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jamroom
I had not seen this claim before, but upon checking it out it appears to be true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
I'm guessing that is what they are talking about.
cornercasechase
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azernik
It is true in every particular.
The population of Israel approximately doubled from 1949 to 1965. It did so because of immigrants from places like Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen.
The overwhelming majority of those immigrants were not voluntary, but were forced to leave by formal expulsion (Egypt, semi-formal in Iraq); revocation of citizenship (Algeria, Libya); massive official discrimination (eg Syria); or simple mob violence (Libya again, Tunisia, Morocco). In Egypt there was a wonderful trick of forcing expellees to sign papers saying their departure was "voluntary".
In countries where only mob violence was involved (Morocco, Tunisia), some Jewish communities remained. Then there's the interesting Lebanese case, where the Jewish community thrived until targeted during the civil war.
But yeah, don't pretend that the complete nonexistence of Jewish communities in Yemen or Iraq or Egypt happened by chance.
cornercasechase
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rythmshifter
dont even start
drc500free
Sadly, it's becoming apparent that the only reason people believe in The Holocaust is the massive effort that went into documenting and preserving the direct evidence. The exodus of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries doesn't have museums and isn't part of school curricula, so it's easier to deny.
Hundreds of thousands of people, whether Palestinian, Jewish, Desi, or German, don't tend to move en masse without violence.
People who hold a mental model of Israel as a White European Colonizer seem to simply reject the idea that it absorbed more than a half million fleeing Black & Brown Jews in its first decades of existence. If they even accept that 90% of the Jews in Arab countries suddenly left without their property and money, they insist that it was a voluntary move due to inherent Jewish disloyalty to their broader societies.
cornercasechase
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bbqfog
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bbqfog
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kibwen
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.
bruce511
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.
umanwizard
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.
watwut
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.
m463
> 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?
mitthrowaway2
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.
justsid
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.
Anotheroneagain
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.
lazide
Huh? How is the economy improved in a depression?
SalmonSnarker
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.
Cthulhu_
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.
umanwizard
> 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”.
crossroadsguy
> 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”!
veunes
The way people reacted to even small-scale inconveniences in recent years highlights just how much has shifted since the 1940s
lupusreal
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.
umanwizard
Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.
chasd00
> 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.
Damogran6
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.
pyuser583
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.
_heimdall
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.
rgmerk
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…).
vasco
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".
roenxi
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.
HeyLaughingBoy
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.
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_heimdall
> (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.
rajnathani
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.
susiecambria
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.
bobthepanda
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.
singleshot_
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.
ForOldHack
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.
_heimdall
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.
HeyLaughingBoy
Of course. They're far too tired after dealing with the farm all day.
ttepasse
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)
krisoft
> 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?
lupusreal
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.)
adastra22
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.
vasco
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.
adastra22
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.
liveoneggs
WW3 is just the excuse they need to keep data caps!
hammock
It would be different resources today.
Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.
rPlayer6554
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
s1artibartfast
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...
graeme
Neat. Do you know of a French version? (Since it is Switzerland)
aorist
draven
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...
s1artibartfast
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.
082349872349872
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?
DFHippie
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.
doom2
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.
DFHippie
Yeah, I went to Catoctin, as I'm sure you inferred.
chiph
Perhaps it's an acronym, like gorp is? (Good Old Raisins and Peanuts - commonly called "Trail Mix" these days)
082349872349872
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.
tartoran
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.
beezlebroxxxxxx
If only they had the marketing prowess of Soylent.
kibwen
Not joking, "Life Sustaining Glop" would be a better name than Soylent.
kayo_20211030
A good read. I'm glad Spam got a little mention. Terribly underrated IMO.
AdmiralAsshat
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.
KineticLensman
> 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)
zabzonk
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.
jamiek88
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.
FroshKiller
It's also really good onigiri style with rice: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/49785/spam-musubi/
kayo_20211030
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.
themadturk
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.
Terr_
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.
pests
When I went for the first time before COVID I was surprised McDoanlds had spam as an option.
cobbzilla
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.
meowster
I think if people try a spam musubi first (a Hawaiian staple), they'll be more inclined to try other forms of spam.
colechristensen
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.
pndy
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)
bloopernova
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 :/
ksymph
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.
bloopernova
Now I want to try a pizza accented by Spam :)
0cf8612b2e1e
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.
pfdietz
Salt, yes, but the fat won't dissolve into water.
potato3732842
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.
numpad0
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.
haunter
Spam kimbap is godlike, one of my favorite Korean dish
airstrike
Underrated? It's objectively terrible for you.
stronglikedan
Nothing is terrible for you in moderation. It is, however, objectively delicious and underrated.
ceejayoz
Dimethylmercury is terrible for you even in moderation.
mrguyorama
It's so fucking salty that it is near unpalatable! And I consume too much salt! How do you eat spam in earnest?
kayo_20211030
Salty for sure. But, gooood, at least to me! A sinful indulgence.
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uxhacker
Is this the real start of processed food and the obesity crisis?
0xbadcafebee
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.
teslabox
> 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...
aspenmayer
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.
mixmastamyk
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.
bobthepanda
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.”
Karrot_Kream
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...
adrian_b
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.
4gotunameagain
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.
watwut
> 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.
paulpauper
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.
lazide
You know what really helps suppress appetite?
Cigarettes.
You know what really started getting phased out in the 80’s?
nailer
Why do you think eating fats and oils causes obesity?
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nailer
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.
QuercusMax
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.
nailer
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.
wileydragonfly
Feta and mint in beans sounds incredible and why have I never experienced this…
teractiveodular
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.
Kon-Peki
> 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.
strken
A lot of places do their own beans now, at least in Melbourne. It definitely does not mean Heinz everywhere in the country.
nailer
We might be going to different cafes. I’m spending most of my time in Melbourne.
lifestyleguru
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.
HideousKojima
Your gut biome needs to adjust to them, after a few days/weeks of eating them regularly your gas should be normal again
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chris1993
It was one of my grandfather’s (WWII veteran) favourite foods, a taste acquired in his army days.
nazgulnarsil
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.
kleton
The canned meats, "tushenka", also became a USSR thing after the US sent massive amounts of it as lend-lease food.
euroderf
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.
dron57
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.
jameslk
Cool article, but I’m curious why the National Park Service is posting content about WWII history on their website?
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.