17 ms·
A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
- lesgobrandon 5y ago[dead]
- webmaven 5y agoThe second part of this review digs into the part of the book that deals with the state of public assistance at the time. Pretty grim stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30939704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30939704
- irrational 5y ago> 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?
- asguy 5y agoReading 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.
- mrmuagi 5y agoWould 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.
- dieselgate 5y agoThis comment made me think of the food show called Hyper Hardboiled Gourmet Report
- dismantlethesun 5y agoBut 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.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago>> 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.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>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.
- micromacrofoot 5y agooh 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
- elktea 5y agoFantastic 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.
- morsch 5y agoIt's a fun article, but hardly a scientific analysis of the diet back then. It's all anecdotes and no numbers. Though such numbers do seem to exist for 20th century USA (Android won't render the xls, though): https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per-capita-data-system/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per...
- MichaelDickens 5y agoI 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.
- woodruffw 5y agoThis 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.
- morsch 5y agoI 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.
- woodruffw 5y agoI 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.
- egypturnash 5y agoIt’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.
- fosk 5y agoAs 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.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoInteresting article, but why is there a content warning about milk, food, and culture shock? Have we become that sensitive?!
- eyelidlessness 5y agoHave you? It’s just words you read
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoDo you need a content warning for content warnings? Half joking.
- woodruffw 5y agoI'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).
- eixiepia 5y ago
- Rodeoclash 5y ago> 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. https://lastappetite.com/pancakes-at-fandango/amp/ https://lastappetite.com/pancakes-at-fandango/amp/
- lostcolony 5y agoNot 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.
- irrational 5y agoUsually I see bacon on donuts. Now I’m craving a maple bacon donut.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nwatson 5y agoProsciutto-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.
- morsch 5y agoAlso, 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.
- idontwantthis 5y agoI 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.
- jthrowsitaway 5y agoBecause the US troops were supported by super logistics? That's a lot to infer from a pie!
- paxys 5y agoIf 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.
- idontwantthis 5y agoIf 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.
- natmaka 5y agoMaybe 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.
- s5300 5y agoI 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.
- eixiepia 5y ago
- throwawaycities 5y ago> Meat, milk and fat. No wonder the average height started To increase… These were staple foods in the US well before the 1920s.
- asdfasdfjkhasdf 5y ago
- eixiepia 5y ago
- drawfloat 5y agoI mean, they're not.
- marklubi 5y ago> Hmm seems like you you have 5 comments in total and 3 out of those 5 are bashing vegans. With all due respect, it's not like you've contributed much, if anything, to this community with your comment from your 49 minute old account. Perhaps you could spend some time formulating a coherent argument as to why their comments are wrong instead of simply attacking them.
- InCityDreams 5y agoEveryone has to start somewhere.
- nwatson 5y agoMy 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).
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI 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. https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/tags/bookidlessimulachreshi1538holb https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/tags... 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.
- selimthegrim 5y agoYou might like Public Domain Review, then.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThanks, I checked it out. Awesome! So many mind disturbing images.
- distances 5y agoMaybe due to the increase of dance macabre themes in visual arts after Black Death? https://worldhistory.us/european-history/the-plague-and-the-dance-of-black-death-in-the-renaissance.php https://worldhistory.us/european-history/the-plague-and-the-...
- paxys 5y agoWas this a review or a reproduction of the book?
- scoot 5y agoIt 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.
- lettergram 5y agoFor those curious, I wanted to start making my own salt pork — https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg 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. It’s what was done pre-refrigeration for meat.
- jotm 5y agoMy 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). I reckon salted it would last even longer.
- dalbasal 5y agoSounds like confit. The meat is often salted a little before cooking. Stored in cellar/refrigerator, it keeps a long time. You can also buy canned confit duck. Can be eaten straight from the jar, buy delicious and crispy when (re)cooked.
- jotm 5y agoOh yeah, so it is! Finally learned the word for that mystery food :D
- dalbasal 5y ago:) Final tip. 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.
- camhart 5y agoI 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.
- MrDresden 4y agoThe 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.
- chucknthem 5y agoMy 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.
- fosk 5y ago$7, but yeah it’s good.
- dieselgate 5y agoGrew 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..
- jasonkester 5y agoEven 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.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago> This is sort of like how squid ice cream seems normal in Japan. I regret to inform you that squid ice cream is actually pretty darn weird even in Japan. Red bean (azuki), sweet corn or roasted tea ice cream, on the other hand, would be quite normal.
- wahnfrieden 5y agosquid ink soft serve is common and not weird
- faichai 5y agoNever had these ice creams, but Green Tea KitKats from Japan are quite delicious!
- skhr0680 5y agoSquid ink ice cream is (was?) a fixture at service area-type places so I think most people have at least heard of it
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cpach 5y agoSo that’s why it’s called spanish rice!
- helpfulmandrill 5y agoReading some of the stuff people used to eat, I have a really hard time understanding how obesity is worse today than back then.
- dhc02 5y agoSeed oils.
- Wohlf 5y agoLarger portion sizes, more snacking, much less manual labor. Only the wealthy were obese back then.
- helpfulmandrill 5y agoBut it says that soldiers were fed 4000 to 5000 calories. Sounds pretty hard to exercise enough to burn that off.
- op00to 5y agoWWI soldiers marched literally for days straight with 85 pounds of equipment on their backs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Symbiote 5y agoAccording to [1] (which cites [2], page 9), British infantry etc have an average 4,600 calorie intake. [1] https://militarymuscle.co/blogs/studies/nutrition-for-military-personnel https://militarymuscle.co/blogs/studies/nutrition-for-milita... [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/583321/SACN_military_DRVs_for_energy_position_statement.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- kaesar14 5y agoCan’t imagine fighting a war of annihilation being as hard of work as being a high school athlete?
- vintermann 5y agoBananas wrapped in bacon, I've tried that! It's good, although it feels alarmingly unhealthy.
- tejohnso 5y agoA review on a book called "A Square Meal" with no comment about why a meal would be considered square?
- ufo 5y agoIs milk being on every relief menu a sign that people had a derranged love for milk? Or just the strength of the milk lobby?
- jhbadger 5y agoI 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.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoyou 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
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoPeople 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.
- orthoxerox 5y agoPeople ate less meat/poultry back then. Dairy and eggs were the most common sources of animal fats and protein.
- thatguy0900 5y agoI mean it is cheap while being nutrient and calorie dense. It makes sense to put on a relief menu lobby or no
- mucholove 5y agoI’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.
- shaky-carrousel 5y agoI 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.
- bobajeff 5y agoThat'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.
- skrtskrt 5y agoI still like chained posts on twitter a lot of the time, I think when used well they still really focus the writing.
- MisterTea 5y ago> 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.
- bearbearbear 5y ago
- ghostly_s 5y agoMy 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.
- giantg2 5y agoMmm chow chow and onion relish. That stuff is good. I might have a jar of chow chow left. Might be a good time to break it out.
- causi 5y agoWhole onions were baked in tomato sauce and then eaten for lunch. This tastes much better than you would expect. Same for a baked onion with salt.
- causi 5y agoall 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.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoSorry but I'm not reading an article that has a "food" content warning at the top, get the fuck out of here
- soared 5y agoThose are satire.
- Cipater 5y agoI am concerned that you're actually serious and didn't get that it was a joke. Surely not, right?
- melissalobos 5y agoIs 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.
- bluenose69 5y agoAs 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.
- brimble 5y ago> 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bearbearbear 4y ago
- GordonS 5y ago> 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! [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_condoms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_condoms
- anjel 5y agoAfter 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.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoThere 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.
- iostream24 4y agoWell, that was a lovely read, I’m off to the soda fountain for a salad then, I guess.