Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2024

Salt – mundane, boring … and utterly essential

Filed under: Books, Economics, Food, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at the importance of salt in history:

There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwent dramatic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming an obsession for many inventors and industrialists, while seemingly not featuring in many estimates of historical economic output or growth at all.

The product is salt.

Making salt does not seem, at first glance, all that interesting as an industry. Even ninety years ago, when salt was proportionately a much larger industry in terms of employment, consumption, and economic output, the author of a book on the history salt-making noted how a friend had advised keeping the word salt out of the title, “for people won’t believe it can ever have been important”.1 The bestselling Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, published over twenty years ago, actively leaned into the idea that salt was boring, becoming so popular because it created such a surprisingly compelling narrative around an article that most people consider commonplace. (Kurlansky, it turns out, is behind essentially all of those one-word titles on the seemingly prosaic: cod, milk, paper, and even oysters).

But salt used to be important in a way that’s almost impossible to fully appreciate today.

Try to consider what life was like just a few hundred years ago, when food and drink alone accounted for 75-85% of the typical household’s spending — compared to just 10-15%, in much of the developed world today, and under 50% in all but a handful of even the very poorest countries. Anything that improved food and drink, even a little bit, was thus a very big deal. This might be said for all sorts of things — sugar, spices, herbs, new cooking methods — but salt was more like a general-purpose technology: something that enhances the natural flavours of all and any foods. Using salt, and using it well, is what makes all the difference to cooking, whether that’s judging the perfect amount for pasta water, or remembering to massage it into the turkey the night before Christmas. As chef Samin Nosrat puts it, “salt has a greater impact on flavour than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good”. Or to quote the anonymous 1612 author of A Theological and Philosophical Treatise of the Nature and Goodness of Salt, salt is that which “gives all things their own true taste and perfect relish”. Salt is not just salty, like sugar is sweet or lemon is sour. Salt is the universal flavour enhancer, or as our 1612 author put it, “the seasoner of all things”.

Making food taste better was thus an especially big deal for people’s living standards, but I’ve never seen any attempt to chart salt’s historical effects on them. To put it in unsentimental economic terms, better access to salt effectively increased the productivity of agriculture — adding salt improved the eventual value of farmers’ and fishers’ produce — at a time when agriculture made up the vast majority of economic activity and employment. Before 1600, agriculture alone employed about two thirds of the English workforce, not to mention the millers, butchers, bakers, brewers and assorted others who transformed seeds into sustenance. Any improvements to the treatment or processing of food and drink would have been hugely significant — something difficult to fathom when agriculture accounts for barely 1% of economic activity in most developed economies today. (Where are all the innovative bakers in our history books?! They existed, but have been largely forgotten.)

And so far we’ve only mentioned salt’s direct effects on the tongue. It also increased the efficiency of agriculture by making food last longer. Properly salted flesh and fish could last for many months, sometimes even years. Salting reduced food waste — again consider just how much bigger a deal this used to be — and extended the range at which food could be transported, providing a whole host of other advantages. Salted provisions allowed sailors to cross oceans, cities to outlast sieges, and armies to go on longer campaigns. Salt’s preservative properties bordered on the necromantic: “it delivers dead bodies from corruption, and as a second soul enters into them and preserves them … from putrefaction, as the soul did when they were alive”.2

Because of salt’s preservative properties, many believed that salt had a crucial connection with life itself. The fluids associated with life — blood, sweat and tears — are all salty. And nowhere seemed to be more teeming with life as the open ocean. At a time when many believed in the spontaneous generation of many animals from inanimate matter, like mice from wheat or maggots from meat, this seemed a more convincing point. No house was said to generate as many rats as a ship passing over the salty sea, while no ship was said to have more rats than one whose cargo was salt.3 Salt seemed to have a kind of multiplying effect on life: something that could be applied not only to seasoning and preserving food, but to growing it.

Livestock, for example, were often fed salt: in Poland, thanks to the Wieliczka salt mines, great stones of salt lay all through the streets of Krakow and the surrounding villages so that “the cattle, passing to and fro, lick of those salt-stones”.4 Cheshire in north-west England, with salt springs at Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich, has been known for at least half a millennium for its cheese: salt was an essential dietary supplement for the milch cows, also making it (less famously) one of the major production centres for England’s butter, too. In 1790s Bengal, where the East India Company monopolised salt and thereby suppressed its supply, one of the company’s own officials commented on the major effect this had on the region’s agricultural output: “I know nothing in which the rural economy of this country appears more defective than in the care and breed of cattle destined for tillage. Were the people able to give them a proper quantity of salt, they would … probably acquire greater strength and a larger size.”5 And to anyone keeping pigeons, great lumps of baked salt were placed in dovecotes to attract them and keep them coming back, while the dung of salt-eating pigeons, chickens, and other kept birds were considered excellent fertilisers.6

    1. Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance 1558 – 1825, with Special Reference to the History of Salt Taxation in England (Manchester University Press, 1934), p.2

    2. Anon., Theological and philosophical treatise of the nature and goodness of salt (1612), p.12

    3. Blaise de Vigenère (trans. Edward Stephens), A Discovrse of Fire and Salt, discovering many secret mysteries, as well philosophical, as theological (1649), p.161

    4. “A relation, concerning the Sal-Gemme-Mines in Poland”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 5, 61 (July 1670), p.2001

    5. Quoted in H. R. C. Wright, “Reforms in the Bengal Salt Monopoly, 1786-95”, Studies in Romanticism 1, no. 3 (1962), p.151

    6. Gervase Markam, Markhams farwell to husbandry or, The inriching of all sorts of barren and sterill grounds in our kingdome (1620), p.22

March 2, 2024

The Hindenburg Disaster – Dining on the Zeppelin

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 28, 2023

Decadent vanilla rice pudding with poached pears, chocolate sauce, and candied fruit

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1903

Everything about this dish exudes fanciness, and it comes as no surprise. A ride across the Atlantic on the Hindenburg cost around $9,000 in today’s money, and the whole experience was meant to be luxurious. The head chef on the Hindenburg, Xaver Maier, had worked at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which was still cooking from the recipes of Auguste Escoffier.

The Escoffier recipe for pears condé seems simple enough, until you realize he references about 5 other recipes in total in order to make the dish. It’s a lot of work, but it’s so good. The rice pudding has such an intense vanilla flavor that really elevates it and is the perfect base for the poached pears. Don’t get too much of the rich chocolate sauce or it will overwhelm the other flavors.

Really you could make just the rice pudding and have that be a fancy dessert all on its own if you don’t want to go to all the fuss.

    Poires Condé:
    Very small pears which are carefully peeled and shaped are most suitable for this preparation. Those of medium size should be cut in half. Cook them in vanilla-flavored syrup then proceed as for Abricots Condé, recipe 4510.
    Abricots Condé:
    On a round dish prepare a border of vanilla-flavored Prepared Rice for sweet dishes (recipe 4470)

    — Auguste Escoffier, 1903

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February 26, 2024

The Freedom Convoy’s European echoes

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo on the widespread protests against the EU and various national governments’ intrusive and anti-human attempts to restrict or destroy European farmers in pursuit of their climate change agenda:

I wish there was a way to measure the gulf between ruling elites and the people that they lord over. Don’t Political Scientists have such a methodology already on hand? I don’t know.

What I do know is that this gulf is very palpable on both sides of The Pond, and that this gulf shows no signs of narrowing any time soon. Whether the issue is migration, crime, COVID-19, etc., it seems that the views of the people are simply ignored by those who can and do ignore them, and proceed to make policy that suits their own interests and the interests of their allies and class.

Judging by American media reporting, you would most likely not be aware that massive farmers’ protests are rocking the European continent as we speak. From Portugal to Poland, farmers are protesting the EU’s drive to push policies like “Net Zero” in order to “combat Climate Change” … policies that would severely impact the livelihoods of our food producers. These proposed changes are entirely top-down, indicative of just how divorced the Brussels elites are from the daily lives of the people whose lives they wish to upend with a stroke the pen. “Oppose us? You must be far right … probably a Nazi too.”

    The “far-right” political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.

    The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.

    There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.

    As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas”.

    This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets”.

Pitchfork Populism. The fact that the elites in Brussels have invited this in a year when elections for the EU’s Parliament are scheduled to occur indicates just how out of touch they really are.

    These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.

    Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.

If you can’t shut them up, call them “far right”:

    Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right”.

    Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.

    The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by “far-right” agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.

“A Silent War on Farming”:

    As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.

    For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.

    Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.

    For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.

All Brussels seems to be able to do these days is pass laws to micromanage the lives of Europeans, while increasing the contempt that these same people have for them.

February 24, 2024

Feeding Napoleon – Chicken Marengo

Filed under: Europe, Food, France, History, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 21, 2023
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February 23, 2024

QotD: Eating roti

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I used chicken because I was tired of looking unsuccessfully for goat. You can get goat if you go where people from the islands live, but that would be a lot like work.

You roll the roti up and eat the curry like a bear eating a Cub Scout in a sleeping bag.

Steve H., “Roti Stuffed With Curry: Green and Mean”, Hog on Ice, 2005-01-01.

February 18, 2024

QotD: British meals – sauces

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here also we may mention the special sauces which are so regularly served with each kind of roast meat as to be almost an integral part of the dish. Hot roast beef is almost invariably served with horseradish sauce, a very hot, rather sweet sauce made of grated horseradish, sugar, vinegar and cream. With roast pork goes apple sauce, which is made of apples stewed with sugar and beaten up into a froth. With mutton or lamb there usually goes mint sauce, which is made of chopped mint, sugar and vinegar. Mutton is frequently eaten with redcurrant jelly, which is also served with hare and with venison. A roast fowl is always accompanied by bread sauce, which is made of the crumb of white bread and milk flavoured with onions, and is always served hot. It will be seen that British sauces have the tendency to be sweet, and some of the pickles that are eaten with cold meat are almost as sweet as jam. The British are great eaters of pickles, partly because the predilection for large joints means that in a British household there is a good deal of cold meat to finish up. In using up scraps of food they are not so imaginative as the peoples of some other countries, and British stews and “made-up dishes” – rissoles and the like – are not particularly distinguished. There are, however, two or three kinds of pie or meat-pudding which are peculiar to Britain and are good enough to be worth mentioning. One is steak-and-kidney pudding, which is made of chopped beef-steak and sheep’s kidney, encased in suet crust and steamed in a basin. Another is toad-in-the-hole, which is made of sausage embedded in a batter of milk, flour and eggs basked in the oven. There is also the humble cottage pie, which is simply minced beef or mutton, flavoured with onions, covered with a layer of mashed potatoes and baked until the potatoes are a nice brown. And finally there is the famous Scottish haggis, in which liver, oatmeal, onions and other ingredients are minced up and cooked inside the stomach of a sheep.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

February 17, 2024

Apparently Confucius “had a based libertarian streak”

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons points out some very helpful advice from Confucius that pretty much every western government would benefit from heeding:

I was watching a bit of recent footage of some peasants in revolt, as they are at the moment basically everywhere across the West, and was suddenly struck by the recollection that I’d definitely read a wise saying about the general situation somewhere on a fortune cookie. No, wait, I realized, this time it must actually have been from Master Confucius himself! So I went digging through my copy of the Analects …

Lo and behold, right there in Book 12, Chapter 7, is this straightforward lesson:

    A disciple asks Confucius what, fundamentally, it takes to govern a state without it collapsing.

    Confucius says: “Simply make sure there is enough armaments, enough food, and that you have the trust of the common people.” (足食，足兵，民信之矣.)

    “If sacrificing one of these three things becomes unavoidable, which would you give up first?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯三者何先?)

    “The weapons,” Confucius replies. (去兵.)

    “If two things?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯二者何先?)

    “The food,” Confucius says, because while even death is a part of life “without the trust of the people, a state cannot stand.” (去食. 自古皆有死，民無信不立.)

What is most notable to me from this little dialogue from almost 2,500 years ago is how much, in comparison, our political leaders, in their hubris and absorption in grand projects (and graft), seem to have forgotten the very basics.

Indeed it strikes me that they already failed on maintaining enough armaments (at least in Europe, though even America now seems to be struggling to produce the most basic munitions). More broadly speaking, they can no long provide security for citizens or defend their own borders.

And now they’ve suddenly got the wise idea of going after the food too, which is a plan that will surely work out great.

February 12, 2024

A mustard lover’s journey

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every week, Substack helpfully sends along a collection of new-to-me Substacks to entice me to subscribe to yet another — in Substack’s ideal world, I’d be a paid subscriber to many, but I don’t live in that world, I’m afraid. Saturday’s mailing included Chloe List’s paean to the condiment mustard, in all its many guises:

A Mustard Deep Dive

I have so many feelings about mustard I don’t even know where to start. It’s my favorite color (marigold, mustard yellow, same difference). I’m from Chicago. I love hot dogs. If you don’t understand, google “chicago ketchup”. I blow through jars of dijon like it’s nobody’s business because can you even make a good salad dressing without it? Just last week, I went to a German restaurant and ordered a plate-sized chicken schnitzel that was more or less a vessel for eating their incredible mustards (one sweet, one spicy). All to say, it’s a perfect condiment and it doesn’t get the love and respect it deserves. And let me tell you, the Mustard Rabbit Hole did not disappoint. The packaging is so inspiring and sincere, and I’m this close to booking a flight to Europe so I can buy some mustard in a tube (more on that below). Anyways, please enjoy this deep dive into a product category that is seemingly untouched by trendy packaging design in the best way. But first …

1. Mustard for the person who has the palate of a 277-year-old

Grey Poupon was founded in 1866. Colman’s was founded in 1814. Maille was founded in 1747! I didn’t know just how old these legacy brands were until I started researching this letter, but after digging further it’s not all that surprising. Mustard as a spice is one of the earliest on record, appearing in Sanskrit manuscripts around 3000 BCE, and mustard as a condiment dates back to the early Romans. I’d love to see how they were storing this colorful condiment back then, but I’m quite pleased with how these brands are jarring it today. Per usual, this is one of my favorite categories in this deep dive because of that whole “timeless cool” thing that always wins for me when it comes to packaging design. Side note, I’m now obsessed with vintage mustard pots.

2. Mustard for the person who longs for the days of “Harvest Gold”

What’s “harvest gold”, you may be asking? Picture the “before” photo of a fixer-upper kitchen remodel in Domino. Or any number of recent brands that have been bringing back that avocado green and orange/yellow palette. All to say, these bottles and jars look like they could be set pieces on The Brady Bunch or That ’70s Show. And because apparently mustard brands can do no wrong, these are all working. They don’t feel try-hard or overly designed, but rather truly feel like they time traveled 50 years to the future. I especially love that top left bottle of Finnish mustard and the type on Mister Mustard. Also, Mustard Girl would be a great Halloween costume.

February 7, 2024

“China is a food-obsessed society”

Filed under: Books, China, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If your initial reaction to the headline is to assume this is because of the amazingly unsettled history of mainland China over the last several hundred years and the totally understandable fear of famines, I’m with you, but we’d both be wrong, as John Psmith explains:

One sunny December morning years ago, Jane and I were on holiday in the South of China. Far from the city, a little temple had been hewn out of a seaside grotto so that it partially flooded when the tide came in. We stood inside and gazed up at a statue of 觀音, “Guan Yin”, the lady to whom the temple was dedicated. Her legend originated in India, where she was known as the bodhisattva Avalokitasvara, but she’d been absorbed and appropriated by Chinese folk religion many centuries ago, and in this statue there was no trace to be found of her South Asian origins. A minute or two into our reverie, a local came over to us and, seeing that we looked out of place, helpfully explained in unaccented English, “This is one of the most important Christian goddesses.”

The Chinese are almost as bad as the Romans were about pilfering the deities of their neighbors, so you really can’t blame them when they occasionally get confused about who they stole them from. As with goddesses, so with food: earlier that day a different helpful local had steered us towards a restaurant specializing in “Western cuisine”. The menu listed steaks “French style”, “German style”, and “Barbecue style”. Soup options included minestrone and borscht, both of them with the surprise addition of prawns. Their pride and joy, however, was their breakfast menu which included roughly seventy different varieties of toast. The chef told me that there were restaurants in Europe and America that did not have so many kinds of toast, and beamed with pride when I nodded gravely. One of the diners, delighted to see real living and breathing Westerners in her local Western restaurant, told me: “The thing I love about this place is that it’s so authentic.”

This “Western” restaurant may sound ridiculous to you, but it’s only as ridiculous as most of the “Chinese” restaurants you’ve encountered in the West. First of all, there’s no such thing as “Chinese” food. China is a country, but it’s the size of a continent, and it boasts a culinary diversity which exceeds that of many actual continents. Second, the dishes you encounter in the average Chinese restaurant over here bear about as much resemblance to real Chinese food as the seventy varieties of toast and the barbecue steaks do to French cuisine. “American Chinese food” is an interesting topic in its own right, and there are some good books about it, but now that I’m through the mandatory throat-clearing you have to do when writing about Chinese cuisine for a Western audience, I’m never going to mention it again.

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be.1 We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow,2 but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is … The Meat-Shaped Stone.3 A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

    1. Ferran Adrià, the legendary chef of El Bulli, once said that Mao was the most consequential figure in the history of cooking because: “[Spain, France, Italy and California] are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the pre-eminence of Chinese cooking by sending China’s chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn’t done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.”

    2. I once tried searching Google to find out whether Eskimos really have a lot of words for snow. The top results were all places like BuzzFeed and the Atlantic denouncing this as an outmoded racist stereotype … followed by a Wikipedia article patiently explaining that no it’s actually true.

    3. The Meat-Shaped Stone is not some weird aberration. The runner-up most valuable items in the museum are a piece of jadeite carved to look like a cabbage and a very fancy cooking vessel.

February 5, 2024

“Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the war in Ukraine has gone on, western media seem to have completely lost track of what ordinary Russians think about their government, replacing reality with a westernized imaginarium of Russia somehow being little more than a mirror of western progressive opinion:

For the average western normie, Russians are suffering under a brutal and vicious dictatorship, and cannot wait for the day that Putin loses power and western liberal democracy becomes the law of the land.

None of you reading this are normies, and all of you know full well that the overwhelming majority of Russians are not buying what western media and think tanks are selling. They have a unique (and foreign) history and culture that has at times moved towards Europe, but they have always managed to stand apart. This informs how Russians view their country and how they deal with the rulers that rule over them.

Many had hoped that the War in Ukraine would finally see Russians rise up against their own government and remove it from power. Those hopes were always misplaced and naive. Western journalists have long been blinded by their own false assumptions regarding the “superiority of western liberal democracy” and Russian sentiment. “Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”, is the generalized refrain. Harper’s Magazine sent two journalists to explore Russia along the Volga River, and what they found was a culture far removed from the West, and very proud of its own. It’s a long piece, so here are some highlights:

    Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”

On renewed trade with Asia:

    Sergeeva took me to see the Jewish, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods of Astrakhan. An exhibition of photographs highlighting the civilian volunteers supporting the military was being set up outside of a park. At sunset, the elegant riverfront was swarmed with families and groups of young people talking and laughing in hushed tones. Couples sat on railings eating watermelon while food stalls projected multicolored lights on the Volga. There was a fin de siècle quality to the atmosphere, curls of smoke emanating from shashlik grills, a warm breeze delivering the lament of a distant violin. No military uniforms in sight.

    The café façades and the wrought-iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. Sergeeva pointed out the renovations along the canal that runs through the old town, indicating the nineteenth-century wooden villas that will soon become hotels and luxury homes. “They seemed destined to crumble,” she said. “But now that money is going around, Astrakhan is once again the gateway to European Russia, Central Asia, and India. This is how it is for now. Later, we’ll see.“

and

    In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.

The general opinion in February of 2022 was that the Russians would easily seize much of Ukraine, but that they would pay a very large economic price, possibly the destruction of their entire economy. This was a safe bet, and it was totally wrong.

Import substitution:

    “The Russians are reacting to the sanctions in an extraordinary way, even with a weak ruble and the inevitable inflation. The prices of essential goods have held steady. And now we’re consuming better and healthier products than before the war, even exceptional cheeses.”

    I had never imagined that the rise of hyperlocal food would be one of the recurring themes of this trip. But it appears that the Western sanctions and war economy have intensified a traditional Russian gastronomy movement. Western products had piqued the palates of average urban Russians, and local producers were trying to fill their vacuum, proudly offering Russian-made Camembert and prosciutto, as if to provide some material evidence of Russkiy Mir, Putin’s ideology of Russian supremacy. As I dined along the Volga, menus often specified the farms from which ingredients had been sourced. Restaurants served svekolnik and okroshka, simple cold summer soups, exalting the quality of local radishes grown without Western fertilizers.

An ethnic Tatar foodstuffs producer from Kazan, Tatarstan on the sanctions regime leveled against Russia:

    Since then, the company’s net worth has become the stuff of legend. But Kazankov, too, is a great supporter of Western sanctions: “They’re an incredible developmental tool for Russia,” he told me. “The West should have imposed them back in the Nineties. We’d be the engine of the world by now. Too bad.” For him, the sanctions are pure adrenaline, and to prove it he added that his company has copied Italian, German, and Israeli “production means” to the letter: “We doubled processing in one year and we supply almost a thousand supermarkets in all of Russia.” Ivan believes that his “full-circle communist company” is the ideal model for “rebuilding a new Soviet Union with healthy local food from our lands.”

On the loss of vacationing in Europe:

    Was this fatalism? Indifference? Or arrogance, as Piotrovsky had implied back at the Hermitage? I struggled to find room in hotels or on ferries, all of which were overflowing with tourists forced to give up on the Mediterranean and make do with the Volga. Take Tatiana, the middle-aged manager of a supermarket chain. When I met her on a ferry in Yaroslavl, she wore a Panama hat, Gucci sunglasses, and capri sandals; she was heading downstream, to the same dacha where she had spent her summers as a girl. “I’ve had a boat docked in Mykonos for three years — who knows when I’ll see it again,” she told me. “I’m getting to know my river again. I’m running into friends I haven’t seen in thirty years. An interesting vacation.” I told her she looked a bit sad and resigned. “Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?“

January 31, 2024

QotD: The inner-most “zones” outside a typical pre-modern city

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Diagram of von Thünen’s model from The Isolated State, after Morley (1996), 62. The agriculture ring is subdivided by intensity (intensive, long-lay and three-field), but here I have merged them for simplicity. The agriculture zone is wider because it did, in fact, tend to cover a larger area. The fade in the pastoralism zone is meant to indicate shifts from ranching to transhumance.

We’ll start at the inside, right next to the city and move outward. Imagine each “zone” as a wider concentric circle, moving outward from the city (see the image to the right). Because transportation costs (especially overland) are so high, distance from the city plays a dominant role in how the land is used and thus consequently what the countryside around the city looks like. As you move further and further away, transportation costs interact with the structure of agriculture to make different activities make more sense, creating somewhat predictable patterns.

Land very close to the city is valuable because its produce can reach the market with much lower transportation costs (and pretty much always in a single day’s walk). As a result, if the land can support any kind of productive use, it will not be left empty. Instead, the land is going to be put to the most productive use possible. Improvements that – because of cost or labor – might not be attempted on less valuable land further out will likely be done in close proximity to the city. Stepping out of our ideal model for a moment: this is especially true of irrigation, since cities tend to be on waterways (especially rivers) anyway, making irrigation both more valuable due to low transport costs and easier to accomplish.

Thus land in this innermost zone is likely to be heavily improved (irrigation, terracing to get maximum space out of hills, etc). Labor use will also be intensive, both because it is readily available (you are right next to the major population center) and because labor costs are small compared to the high value of the land. If you have managed to get some farmland right outside the city gates, it is very much worth your time to hire whatever labor you need to get the most out of it, so as to recoup the cost of buying or holding such valuable land.

The other improvement one is likely to do in this zone, at least for growing crops, is make extensive use of fertilizer, which in this case generally means manure. The good news is that this zone is directly next to the city, with its intense concentration of animals and people producing manure, making manure cheaper (yes, people did pay for it). Extensive use of manure lets the fields stay under cultivation more often – being fallowed less frequently. At greater distance, the cost of the manure for this begins to outweigh the value of the extra crops, but so close to the city, land this valuable ought to be kept producing as much as possible.

So what kinds of land use does this lead to? The two key activities that von Thünen identifies are horticulture and dairying, to which I’ll add trough-fed animals like pigs (not quite dairy, but as we’ll see, similar from an economic perspective). Why? Horticulture – the intensive growing of fruits and vegetables, often in small “market gardens” – is labor intensive and offers a high economic yield for the space. Land used for horticulture can be kept under almost continual cultivation (if manured, but see above), but gardens can be fussy and demand quite a lot of labor, compared to hardier plants (like maize corn or wheat). Likewise, dairy animals (which, up close to a large city, will be stall-fed rather than grazed or else transported in “on the hoof” and grazed much further out) and pigs (fed by trough) don’t require much space and offer a high economic yield. Both also produce manure which is in demand near the city for the reasons described above.

The other reason to keep these activities so close to the city is access to the market, for two related reasons. First, fresh dairy products, meats and vegetables spoil rapidly, so they must be gotten to market quickly. Remember that this is a world without refrigeration, so as soon as the plant is picked, the cow is milked or the pig is killed, the clock is ticking on spoilage (yes, there are ways to preserve meat, of course – but we’re talking fresh animal products). Precisely because these foods don’t travel or keep well, they tend to be luxury products as well – something produced for the market and bought by rich non-farmers who live in the city.

So what kind of terrain should we see here? Not open grassland or nice wide open fields. Instead, expect small plots, with clustered buildings, typically clinging to the roads leading into the city. Now – especially in the post-gunpowder age – there might be laws forbidding certain kinds of structures close to the city walls (if the city is walled), which might create some open space (but typically not vast). Likewise, when looking at historical city maps, also be wary: this innermost land-use zone was often contained within the city walls of smaller cities.

The next zone – also quite close to the city in von Thünen’s model is – perhaps somewhat surprisingly – a forest zone. That’s not to say that this is generally wild, uncontrolled forest. The reason for a forest zone at such close distance to the city is to provide wood, particularly firewood for heating. Trees might be arranged intentionally along field separations or on spots of agriculturally marginal land close to the city. Forests like these in the Middle Ages would often have been coppiced or pollarded – that is, the trees would have been intentionally cut to produce lots of long, thin straight branches which can be easily harvested to produce nice, evenly sized bits of wood.

Wood is obviously at no risk of spoiling, but it is heavy and bulky, making a close supply valuable. Moreover, the city will need quite a lot of it, for cooking and heating. That said, trees can often be grown either on very marginal (for agriculture) land or else between fields and farms outside of the city, so these patches of forest might often go on land that is a touch too rough or poor for intensive agriculture, or otherwise be squeezed in between land used for other purposes. Still, it is quite common to find spots of forest next to cities and villages alike.

(To answer a quibble in advance: of course this assumes wood is a key heating element. Societies in more arid climates often lack sufficient wood and might use dung, while wet enough areas may use peat. Historically, London shifted over to using mineral coal earlier than most places. All of these choices will impact the role and importance of forest near the city.)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.

January 29, 2024

Ancient Roman Garum Revisited

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 7, 2023
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January 28, 2024

Food That Time Forgot: Pemmican, The Ultimate Survival Food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published Oct 29, 2023

Pemmican is and has always been the ultimate survival food. Pemmican revolutionized trade in the 18th century by giving travelers a new compact source for energy. Originally used as a food to help Native Americans make it though harsh winters, pemmican turned into an entire industry by the late 1700s.
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January 25, 2024

Finnish Jews, Polish Special Forces, and MREs – WW2 – OOTF 32

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, Germany, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Jan 2024

How did Finland treat its Jews, and what did Finnish people know about the Holocaust? Who were the mysterious Polish Silent Unseen? And, what sort of rations did soldiers carry? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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January 24, 2024

The father of the “Green Revolution”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Food, History, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Jane Psmith reviews The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann:

Norman Borlaug is generally estimated to have saved the lives of about a billion people who would otherwise have starved to death.

Yet despite all this — and Borlaug’s is a great story, which Charles Mann tells better and in far more detail than I do above — his book isn’t really a biography of Borlaug or of its other framing figure, early environmentalist William Vogt.1 Rather, it’s a compellingly-written and frankly fascinating overview of various environmental issues facing humanity, and of two different sorts of approaches one can take to addressing them. Mann opens by introducing the two men, but as soon as he’s done that they function mostly as symbols, examples and stand-ins, for these two schools of thought about the world and its problems.

Borlaug is the Wizard of the title, the avatar of techno-optimism: with hard work and clever application of scientific knowledge, we can innovate our way out of our problems. Vogt is the Prophet, the advocate of caution: he points to our limitations, all the things we don’t know and the complex systems we shouldn’t disturb, warning that our constraints are inescapable — but also, quietly, that they are in some sense good.

It’s not hard to identify the Wizards all around us. Inventors and innovators, transhumanists and e/acc, self-driving cars and self-healing concrete … every new device or technique for solving some human problem — insulin pumps! heck, synthetic insulin at all! — is a Wizardly project.

It’s a little more difficult to pin down what exactly the Prophets believe, in part because they spend so much time criticizing Wizardly schemes as dangerous or impractical that it’s easy to take them for small-souled enemies of human achievement.2 That isn’t fair, though — there’s a there there, a holistic vision of the world as an integral organic unity that we disturb at our peril, because the constraints are inextricably linked to the good stuff.

If that seems too abstract, here’s an example. Imagine for a moment (or maybe you don’t have to imagine) that you have a friend who subsists entirely on Soylent. It’s faster and easier than cooking, he says, and cheaper than eating out. He’s getting all his caloric needs met. And he’s freed up so much time for everything else! Now, anyone might express concern for his physical health: does Soylent actually have the right balance of macronutrients to nourish him? Is he missing some important vitamins or other micronutrients that a normal diet might provide? Is the lack of chewing going to make his jaw muscles atrophy? And those are all reasonable concerns about your friend’s plan, but they all have possible Wizardly solutions. (A multivitamin and some gum would be a start.)

If you’re a Prophet sort, on the other hand, you’re probably going to start talking about everything else your friend is missing out on. There’s the taste of food, for one, but also the pleasures of color and texture and scent, the connection to the natural world, the role of community and tradition in shared meals, the way cooking focuses thought and attention on incarnate reality. You might throw around words like “lame” and “artificial” and “sterile” and “inhuman”. Your friend’s Soylent-only plan assumes that the whole point of food is to consume an appropriate number of calories as quickly and easily as possible, hopefully in a way that doesn’t meaningfully degrade his health, but a Prophet rejects his premise entirely. Instead, a Prophet argues that your friend’s food “problem” is actually part of the richly textured beauty of Creation. Yes, feeding yourself and your loved ones delicious, healthful, and economical meals takes time and effort, but that’s simply part of being human.5 You should consider that a challenge to be met rather than a threat to be avoided.

Unfortunately, Mann does the Prophets a disservice by choosing William Vogt as their exemplar. Yes, he was an important figure in the history of the modern environmental movement. Yes, he wrote a very influential book.4 And yes, his careful attention to the integrity of the ecosystems he studied was quintessentially Prophet. But he saw human beings mostly as disruptions to the integrity of those ecosystems, and pretty much every one of his specific predictions — not to mention the predictions of his many followers, most famously Paul Erlich in The Population Bomb5 — have simply failed to come true. Compared to Borlaug’s obvious successes, Vogt’s dire warnings that humanity will soon exhaust the Earth’s capacity and doom ourselves to extinction (unless we abort and contracept our way there first; his second act was as director of Planned Parenthood) seem laughable. Reading about his life can leave you with the impression that Prophets are just people who are more worried about a spotted owl than a starving child, and frankly who cares what those people think?

    1. They were roughly contemporaries, but this is emphatically not the story of a pair of rivals; they encountered each other in person only once, in passing, after which Vogt wrote an angry letter to the Rockefeller Foundation demanding they cease Borlaug’s Mexican project at once.

    2. And, to be fair, a lot of the language and arguments pioneered by Prophets does get employed by a sclerotic managerial class opposed to anything they can’t fit neatly into their systems and processes and domain-agnostic expertise. But more on that later.

    3. Incidentally, this is more or less the argument between the Wizards and the Prophets when it comes to soil. Wizards are delighted with the Haber-Bosch process and artificial fertilizers; Prophets decry the “NPK mentality” that sees the soil as a passive reservoir of chemicals and instead laud composting, manure, and other techniques that encourage the complex interactions between soil organisms, plant roots, and the physical characteristics of humus. This is the origin of the fad for “organic”, a label that doesn’t mean much when applied to industrial-scale food production and is often more trouble than it’s worth for small-time farmers and ranchers. Still, Mann’s story of the movement’s birth is interesting.

    4. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it was influential!

    5. Apparently out of print! Good.

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