British Pathé
Published on 13 Sep 2016BON APPETIT – FOOD MONTH ON BRITISH PATHÉ (SEPTEMBER 2016): On the Ration.
A selection of films looking at food rationing during the Second World War.
(Film Ids: 1027.21, 1290.19, 1564.15, 1247.03)
Music:
The Show Must Be Go (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…A NEW THEME EVERY MONTH!
Each month, a range of new uploads and playlists tell the story of a particular topic through archive footage. Let us know what themes you’d like to see by leaving us a comment or connecting with us on social media.BRITISH PATHÉ’S STORY
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect. Over the course of a century, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and seismic political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people. If it happened, British Pathé filmed it.Now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivalled in their historical and cultural significance.
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British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 120,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1979. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website.
https://www.britishpathe.com/
May 4, 2019
On the Ration | British Pathé
QotD: Calorie-dense modern snack food
So what does cause this fattening effect? I think the book’s answer is “no single factor, but that doesn’t matter, because capitalism is an optimization process that designs foods to be as rewarding as possible, so however many different factors there are, every single one of them will be present in your bag of Doritos”. But to be more scientific about it, the specific things involved are some combination of sweet/salty/umami tastes, certain ratios of fat and sugar, and reinforced preferences for certain flavors.
Modern food isn’t just unusually rewarding, it’s also unusually bad at making us full. The brain has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to determine when we’ve eaten enough; these usually involve estimating food’s calorie load from its mass and fiber level. But modern food is calorically dense – it contains many more calories than predicted per unit mass – and fiber-poor. This fools the brain into thinking that we’re eating less than we really are, and shuts down the system that would normally make us feel full once we’ve had enough. Simultaneously, the extremely high level of food reward tricks the brain into thinking that this food is especially nutritionally valuable and that it should relax its normal constraints.
Adding to all of this is the so-called “buffet effect”, where people will eat more calories from a variety of foods presented together than they would from any single food alone. My mother likes to talk about her “extra dessert stomach”, ie the thing where you can gorge yourself on a burger and fries until you’re totally full and couldn’t eat another bite – but then mysteriously find room for an ice cream sundae afterwards. This is apparently a real thing that’s been confirmed in scientific experiments, and a major difference between us and our ancestors. The !Kung Bushmen, everyone’s go-to example of an all-natural hunter-gatherer tribe, apparently get 50% of their calories from a single food, the mongongo nut, and another 40% from meat. Meanwhile, we design our meals to include as many unlike foods as possible – for example, a burger with fries, soda, and a milkshake for dessert. This once again causes the brain to relax its usual strict constraints on appetite and let us eat more than we should.
The book sums all of these things up into the idea of “food reward” making some foods “hyperpalatable” and “seducing” the reward mechanism in order to produce a sort of “food addiction” that leads to “cravings”, the “obesity epidemic”, and a profusion of “scare quotes”.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
May 2, 2019
Chicken Tikka Masala | Basics with Babish
Binging with Babish
Published on 28 Mar 2019Enter offer code “Babish” at Squarespace.com for 10% off your first purchase, or visit: http://smarturl.it/BWBsquarespace
One of my favorite curries is the beloved chicken tikka masala. You can make this dish at home by making your own curry powder and tikka masala sauce.
Shopping List:
+ For the curry powder:
1 stick cinnamon
1 whole nutmeg
2 dried bay leaves
1 Tbsp whole cloves
2 Tbsp cumin seeds
3 Tbsp coriander seeds
1 Tbsp cardamom
1 tsp red pepper flakes+ For the chicken tikka masala marinade:
1 cup full fat yogurt
2 inches ginger, grated
2 garlic cloves, grated
1 Tbsp of the homemade curry powder (above)
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
Drizzle of olive oil
3 boneless, skinless, chicken breasts (cut into 1-inch cubes)+ For the tikka masala sauce
2 inches ginger, grated
1/2 small yellow onion, finely minced
2 cloves garlic, grated
1 small bird’s eye chili, finely minced
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1 heaping Tbsp homemade curry powder (above)
1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
Pinch of white sugar
3/4 cup heavy creamOptional: serve with long grain basmati rice and cilantro garnish
Special Equipment:
Spice grinder or coffee grinder
H/T to Victor for the link.
April 26, 2019
The ill-founded notion that rural peasants had a better life than the city-dwelling poor
Historical illiteracy — encouraged by totally unrealistic historical fiction and highly selective memories — places the lifestyle of farm workers, herders, and other rural people before the industrial era in almost a Disneyfied state of Arcadian paradise. This misunderstanding of reality fed many of the complaints about the terrible living conditions of the poor in industrial towns and cities up to almost living memory — which, to be fair, were terrible, by the standards of the upper and middle classes of the day. Marian L. Tupy provides a bit of evidence for the horrible poverty and miserable living conditions of the majority of Europeans living outside the major towns and cities:
In my last two pieces for CapX, I sketched out the miserable existence of our ancestors in the pre-industrial era. My focus was on life in the city, a task made easier by the fact that urban folk, thanks to higher literacy rates, have left us more detailed accounts of their lives.
This week I want to look at rural life, for that is where most people lived. At least theoretically, country folk could have enjoyed a better standard of living due to their “access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity,” which the anthropologist Jason Hickel praised in a recent article in The Guardian. In fact, the life of a peasant was, in some important aspects, worse than that of a city dweller.
[…]
An account of rural life in 16th century Lombardy found that “the peasants live on wheat … and it seems to us that we can disregard their other expenses because it is the shortage of wheat that induces the labourers to raise their claims; their expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent”. In 15th century England, 80 per cent of private expenditure went on food. Of that amount, 20 per cent was spent on bread alone.
By comparison, by 2013 only 10 per cent of private expenditure in the United States was spent on food, a figure which is itself inflated by the amount Americans spend in restaurants. For health reasons, many Americans today eschew eating bread altogether.
What about food derived from water, forests and livestock? “In pre-industrial England,” Cipolla notes, “people were convinced that vegetables ‘ingender ylle humours and be oftetymes the cause of putrid fevers,’ melancholy and flatulence. As a consequence of these ideas there was little demand for fruit and vegetables and the population lived in a prescorbutic state”. For cultural reasons, most people also avoided fresh cow’s milk, which is an excellent source of protein. Instead, the well-off preferred to pay wet nurses to suckle milk directly from their breasts.
The diet on the continent was somewhat more varied, though peasants’ standard of living was, if anything, lower than that in England. According to a 17th century account of rural living in France: “As for the poore paisant, he fareth very hardly and feedeth most upon bread and fruits, but yet he may comfort himselfe with this, and though his fare be nothing so good as the ploughmans and poore artificers in England, yet it is much better than that of the villano [peasant] in Italy.”
The pursuit of sufficient calories to survive preoccupied the crushing majority of our ancestors, including, of course, women and children. In addition to employment as domestic servants, women produced marketable commodities, such as bread, pasta, woollen garments and socks. Miniatures going back to the 14th century show women employed in agriculture as well. As late as the 18th century, an Austrian physician wrote, “In many villages [of the Austrian Empire] the dung has to be carried on human backs up high mountains and the soil has to be scraped in a crouching position; this is the reason why most of the young people [men and women] are deformed and misshapen.”
April 25, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 8: Conclusions (with Karl)
InRangeTV
Published on 27 Jan 2018At the end of British Ration Week, Karl joins Ian for a hearty slice of Woolton Pie and a discussion of everything learned through the project!
Want to know more about rationing and Lord Woolton? We strong recommend William Sitwell’s Eggs or Anarchy: The remarkable story of the man tasked with the impossible: to feed a nation at war: http://amzn.to/2Dpjxph
InRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 24, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 7: Black Markets and Luxuries
InRangeTV
Published on 26 Jan 2018One would expect a strict rationing program like the British instituted to create a massive black market – as indeed happened in France and Germany at the same time. Remarkably, this did not happen. There were of course violations of the rationing and people who either cheated or exploited the system, but no organized substantial black market ever developed. This can be seen as a credit to the British population’s sincere willingness to sacrifice for the war effort, but it is also deeply rooted in the several key decisions and successes by Lord Woolton and his Ministry.
The rationing was enforced across class lines (even the King and Queen legitimately participated), and being seen as truly egalitarian reinforced public willingness to obey the rules. In addition, the Ministry of Food was able to successfully ensure that the rations promised were always available. One did not have to rush to get a share of a shipment of bacon or eggs or sugar – there was always enough to meet the needs of the ration, and the significance of this cannot be underestimated.
Day 7 Menu:
Breakfast: Skillet Biscuits with cheese, tea
Lunch: Fried Vegetable Fritters with leftover gray
Tea: Tea, leftover skillet biscuits
Dinner: Pheasant, sweet potatoesInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 23, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 6: Cafeterias & Restaurants
InRangeTV
Published on 25 Jan 2018One of the Food Ministry’s programs during the war was the creation of the British Restaurants – cafeteria like establishments which offered a hot 3-course meals for just a few pence and without the use of any ration coupons. More than 2000 would be established by the end of the war, and eating out exploded in popularity among the British population because of them. The food was often not exciting, but it was hot, cheap, and readily available.
Private restaurants were able to remain open and in business through the war, but were restricted in several key ways to ensure that they did not become a loophole in rationing for the wealthy. A restaurant could serve only 3 courses, only one could include meat, and a limit was put on what could be charged for a meal.
Day 6 Menu:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with jam, tea
Lunch: Liver, onions and kale
Tea: Leftover Peach Clafouti, tea
Dinner: Lamb Pasties with GravyInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 22, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 5: Woolton Pie
InRangeTV
Published on 24 Jan 2018The Minister of Food who was really the heart of the rationing program was Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton. A prominent businessman who entered government as a political novice when the war began, Woolton took his responsibility as a charge not simply to ensure that Britain survived the war, but as a mission to use the opportunity to improve public health, particularly among the lower classes. He was a refreshing example of a political figure who eschewed personal power and political strife in favor of the betterment of his society.
The head chef of the Savoy Hotel created a wartime dish which they named Woolton Pie after the Minister of Food, and which has become an excellent example of the whole rationing program in microcosm.
Woolton Pie (makes 1 pie):
½ lb potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled and cut into chunks
½ lb carrots, washed and sliced
½ lb cauliflower, broken into chunks
½ lb swedes (rutabagas), peeled and cut into chunks
3-4 green onions (we used a quarter leek, both white and green), sliced
1 tsp vegetable extract*
1 tsp oatmeal **Preheat oven to 350. Add all vegetables to a saucepan and just cover with water. Simmer until tender, approximately 10-15 minutes. Drain, reserving liquid. Put vegetables in a pie plate and add half the reserved liquid. Cover with a pastry or potato crust and bake until crust is golden brown.
Use the remaining liquid to make a gravy for serving: in a saucepan, bring liquid to a boil; in a separate cup, mix about 2 T flour with ½ c water and slowly add mixture to boiling liquid whisking constantly. Season liberally with salt and pepper.
* I don’t know what vegetable extract is, but I’m assuming something similar to bouillon cubes. We didn’t have those, so I just used turkey stock instead of water to cook the vegetables.
** This is supposed to thicken the liquid into a gravy. It doesn’t.Day 5 Menu:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with raisins, tea
Lunch: Beans with Bacon, Skillet Biscuits
Tea: Bread Pudding, tea
Dinner: Woolton Pie, aleInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 21, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 4: The National Loaf
InRangeTV
Published on 23 Jan 2018One of the major initiatives of the Ministry of Food was ensuring the availability of bread and the supply of wheat to the British Isles. To help stretch the use of wheat, a national bread recipe was instituted, using minimally processed brown flour. This was not a particularly appealing item to most of the British populace, used to highly refined fluffy white bread – but they accepted it as a necessity of war. Interestingly, the National Loaf was not that unlike today’s whole wheat breads which are so popular for their better nutritional value than WonderBread.
Day 4 Menu:
Breakfast: Cheese toast, tea
Lunch: Cheese and Tomato Sandwich, pickle, leftover split pea soup
Tea: Beetroot pudding, tea
Dinner: Leek and Hamburger Gravy over toastInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 20, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 3: Creative Cooking
InRangeTV
Published on 22 Jan 2018Much of the popular media about wartime rationing spends a lot of time looking at the crazy examples of weird and frightening recipes that appeared during this time – because that’s what attracts audience attention. In reality, the strange recipes are not attempts to make terrible foods palatable, but rather attempts to make repetitive ingredients more interesting. Today’s Welsh Eggs, for instance, are a way to use powdered eggs in a way that hides their lack of texture.
Day 3 Menu:
Breakfast: Potato, Bacon and Green Onion hash, tea
Lunch: Split Pea Soup (made with Spam instead of bacon)
Tea: Peach Clafouti, tea
Dinner: Welsh Eggs on toast, sauteed kaleInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 19, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 2: Food for the Week
InRangeTV
Published on 21 Jan 2018What does a week’s worth of food for two people in World War Two London look like? We bought the whole week’s groceries and we will explain what the rations entailed and what we have to work with (this episode was actually filmed the day before the experiment began).
Of course, the typical British family during the war did not have a refrigerator, and the wife would have been shopping for groceries on a daily basis.
Day 2 Menu:
Breakfast: Whole Grain Pancakes, tea
Lunch: Split Pea Soup, bread
Tea: Pumpkin Spice Cookies, tea
Dinner: Spam, Vegetable Mash, aleInRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 18, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 1: Introduction
InRangeTV
Published on 20 Jan 2018Did you know that under World War II rationing, the health of the British public improved by virtually every objective measure? Caloric intake increased, lifespan increased, and infant mortality decreased. Despite being an island nation under severe submarine blockade, the United Kingdom managed to not just provide food for its millions of inhabitants, but actually build and maintain the public trust in government rationing. How did this happen? We will explore the question all week, while Ian eats a diet of only what a typical British family would have eaten during the dark days of the Blitz.
Day 1 Menu:
Breakfast: Oatmeal Porridge, tea
Lunch: Leek & Potato Soup, bread & margarine, water
Tea: Vanilla Depression Cake, tea
Dinner: Cottage Pie, aleFor the recipes for today’s dishes – and lots of other details about the experiment – please see our data page at InRange.tv:
http://www.inrange.tv/british-rationi…
InRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV
April 17, 2019
QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”
… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.
April 16, 2019
‘Tis Eastertide, and so the professional miserablists are going after Easter Eggs, of course
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall tells the worried environmentalists that no, it does not make sense to ban Easter eggs — for their “wasteful” packaging — on environmental grounds:
One of the more silly of the current environmental concerns is the worrying about the quantity of packaging that goes into – or around – Easter eggs. There’s an underlying mistake being made here, one which none of the proponents of action have bothered to recognise, let alone think about. Which is, well, what’s the purpose? The point of all this human activity we call an economy?
As any economist could and would tell you we’re after the maximisation of human utility. Given the constraints placed upon us by reality – the availability of stuff with which to do things, technologies we know about to do things to stuff with – we want humans to be as happy as they can be. We want, in short to maximise the amount of joy in the world.
At which point, packaging. Sure, no doubt there’s a certain harm that befalls us all from the creation of packaging and its disposal. Why not? There are costs and benefits to everything of course. But that’s the point, while there may be costs there are also benefits. So, yes, OK, there are costs to packaging.
[…]
At no point is even consideration given to the idea that the packaged egg might produce that joy. Which, given that we do indeed go buy these things each year to give to each other, is odd, isn’t it? Why are we giving each other expensive – as opposed to cheap – chocolate? Because, obviously enough, the dressing of the chocolate is something that produces that joy.
We can even have a stab at quantifying matters.
The cost is 3,000 tonnes of packaging. We know what that costs us, the value of the landfill tax. Around £80 a tonne. So, call it quarter of a million pounds. Spending upon Easter eggs is some £400 million a year. The joy produced must be of greater value than that £400 million otherwise we’d not be spending it in the first place. And yes, £400 million is more than £250,000.
We thus have our answer to the prodnoses worrying about the cost of Easter egg packaging. Piss off matey, you’ve missed the point entirely.
April 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on obesity
His latest in the New English Review:
It hardly requires me to point out that obesity has become a greater threat to the health of the human population in most parts of the world than famine. There was a wonderful cartoon recently in the British magazine, The Oldie, which captured this perfectly. A mother is taking a plate of food away from her child, who is protesting. “Think of the obese millions!” she says to him. When I was young, of course, we were told to finish what was on our plate and to think of the starving millions. Being a precocious little brat, I used to ask how eating what I did not want would help them. Let us just say that the reply was seldom well-reasoned, either in form or content.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself: that is to say, it does not merely have medical consequences, but — even without those consequences — is a disease. To be fat is, ipso facto, to be ill, in the same sense as to have Parkinson’s disease is to be ill.
Nor, according to the modern orthodoxy, is obesity to be considered the natural consequence of bad or foolish individual choices, a lack of self-control. That would be to blame the victim. The fat person is in effect the vector of forces that play upon him or her, without any contribution on his or her part.
This is an idea of long gestation. Reading an old text on obesity, published in 1975, and edited by one of my medical mentors, I came across the following quote from a paper written in 1962:
I wish to propose that obesity is an inherited disorder and due to a genetically determined defect in an enzyme: in other words that people who are fat are born fat, and nothing much can be done about it.
This is like saying that addicted people are born to be addicted, and until doctors discover a technical means of stopping their addiction, they might as well make no efforts on their own behalf. No doubt the people who adhere to this view – that obesity and addiction are illnesses simpliciter – think they are being generous but in fact they are forging psychological manacles. No doubt the fat woman in the bakery was at some level trying to prove to herself that obesity was a fatality and not under any possible individual control.
But is the theory in accord with the scene I have described above? In fact, the scene might lead us to a more nuanced or less categorical view of the problem of obesity (and, by extension, of other social problems) than we might at first adopt.
