Post World War II Food

They are a priori a honeypot. Only useful for torrenting where illegal.

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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.

> 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?

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.

> 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”!

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…).

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.

It would be different resources today.

Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.

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.

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.

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)

If only they had the marketing prowess of Soylent.

> 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)

When I went for the first time before COVID I was surprised McDoanlds had spam as an option.

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.

I think if people try a spam musubi first (a Hawaiian staple), they'll be more inclined to try other forms of spam.

South Korea treats spam as a luxury good - it's a part of gift baskets and it can be found in budae-jigae - army based stew [1] (sometimes along with canned beans in sauce)

[1] - https://youtu.be/-aO9pSOpA5Y

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is terrible for you in moderation. It is, however, objectively delicious and underrated.

Here you go: https://www.protection-civile.ch/documents/telechargement/ar...

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.

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...

> 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...

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.

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.