Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jun 2023
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June 10, 2023
Feeding a Greek Hoplite – Ancient Rations
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June 8, 2023
1954: The END of RATIONING
BBC Archive
Published 5 Mar 2023“The ration book has done its job. It’s been a long job. Indeed, children up to school-leaving age have never known life without the ration book.”
On the fourth of July, the rationing of meat in Britain came to an end, the final step in dismantling Britain’s whole wartime system of food distribution. After fourteen long years, Britons can at last tear up their ration books.
Richard Baker looks back at some of the key moments in the story of rationing and de-rationing.
Originally broadcast 5 July, 1954.
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June 3, 2023
Kids, obesity, and the woke agenda
Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a fan of the “healthy at any size” mantra, especially when it comes to kids:
If I were a kid today I’d be out scouting the neighborhood for a home school or church to take me in as long and teach me latin and math and give me a reading list as long as I didn’t have to have someone’s jiggly bits pushed in my face or be shown diagrams of sexual positions, and asked ceaselessly about my food intake, my BMI measured (25 states mandate this) and no doubt entirely invasive questions about my family and father and weird uncles and so on. It would be like living in a perpetual inquisition, danger everywhere, with no privacy in any area of one’s life, with every sentence and expression evaluated on whether I am being a good member of the inclusive collective and will step aside so someone less privileged can have a chance.
But I am not nine and therefore spared all that, but God in heaven I feel sorry for them. Schools have stepped up to take the place of the at-home mother who had a relationship with her kids strong enough so that their emotional needs were being met and they didn’t have to stuff food down their throats for a relief from the ceaseless pressure to conform, and severe emotional loneliness from the absence of a family system.
Instead of your mind, the dominant focus seems to be your body, and at the most vulnerable time in your life. I know they think they are raising good little socialist citizens, who are acutely aware of the struggles of the less fortunate, but add in the bullying of Middle School and little wonder 49% of kids are overweight or obese, and the rest stuffing their feelings 24/7. Great for the food pushers, sucks for the medical system.
Virginia Sole-Smith who is the anointed high priestess of Fat Positivity Culture, has been pushing fat is AOK and in fact, possibly superior to thin-ness, which she never fails to excoriate, for the New York Times, Slate and Science and various other high-end publications for 20 years. Her latest book Fat Talk, which sits on the NYTimes bestseller list is about raising fat children, or not fat children, it’s kind of confusing. Ok, to be fat, but not obese, but you can’t put obese kids on a diet because that will make them fatter, and besides everyone is criticizing them and that has to stop.
Every leftie cliché is brought out of the barn and groomed within an inch of its life. White privilege, thin white privileged women, BIPOC exclusion, thin privilege in sport, entertainment, business, and so on, a system systematically prejudiced against fat people.
Basically, however, Sole-Smith is staking her ground and that is that “small fat”, which is how she defines herself, is normal and we should adjust our eyes to see pudgy tummies as “something to aim for” – as she states in her last chapter called “How to Have The Fat Talk”. We have to start “reclaiming (sic) fatness as a perfectly good way to have a body”.
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May 31, 2023
The Original Mai Tai from 1944
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 May 2023
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May 29, 2023
The high-water mark of the Vegan cult?
In Spiked, Patrick West celebrates the passing of peak food puritanism:
“Welcome to Las Vegans and Vegetarian, Whole Foods fake meat section, Las Vegas, NV, USA” by gruntzooki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of vegan processed food appearing in supermarkets. A growing number of the population also claims to be vegan. But there are signs this trend could be going into reverse. Demand for animal-free food and drink products has collapsed over the past year. One casualty is Swedish oat-milk firm Oatly, which has recently withdrawn its dairy-free ice cream in the UK. Another is the Yorkshire sausage-making company, Heck, which has scaled-down its vegan-friendly range from 10 products to two. Smoothie-maker Innocent discontinued its dairy-free range earlier this year. Supermarket sales of meat-free products fell by £37.3million between September 2021 and September 2022, according to the consumer intelligence firm NielsenIQ.
There seems to be two main reasons. Rising inflation has been cited as one cause, as consumers have scaled back on branded and luxury eatables. Plant-based processed foods are generally more costly than the meat and dairy products they purport to replace. Another explanation is that producers of vegan food may have overestimated the size of the market for veganism, and now they are having to readjust to reality.
Whatever the reasons, we should welcome the retreat of the cult of veganism. And I use the word cult deliberately, because veganism greatly resembles not so much a lifestyle choice, but a way of life itself. It’s a faith that resonates with today’s puritanical and conformist mood.
And I should know, as someone who became a vegetarian in 1996 and has not eaten meat since. Sure, my decision aroused some mockery and derision back then, but vegetarianism had mostly stopped being regarded as weird by the mid-1990s. Ever since then, most of the opprobrium and scolding we vegetarians face comes from vegans, largely because we continue to eat eggs, cheese and milk.
For vegans, nothing must be consumed or worn that derives from animals or insects – even if there is no killing or discernible harm involved. Anything else is a feeble cop-out. Their way of thinking is absolute. In this respect, the best exemplars of the vegan movement are the animal-rights fundamentalists, PETA, whose members are well-known for their shrill, exhibitionist narcissism. Their message is simple: they are better people than you.
It’s no surprise that veganism was turbo-charged in the mid-2010s, when wokery captured the minds of so many – when absolutist, extreme thinking, and the competition to be purer than the next man or woman, took over. The trans movement echoes this rush to extremes. It demands the transformation of your entire body. Indeed, bodily self-mutilation and mortification of the flesh have long been practised by religious fundamentalists.
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How to Plant a Culinary Herb Garden! DIY Kitchen Garden
Food Wishes
Published 1 Jun 2015[Note, description is from the Food Wishes blog. Chef John’s plant selection is Thyme (English, French, and Lemon), Chives, Italian Parsley, Sage, Oregano (Greek and Italian), Tuscan Blue Rosemary, Basil (Genovese or Sweet), and Spearmint.]
I mentioned several times during this “how to plant your own culinary herb garden” video that I’d give a lot more specific information on the blog, but now that I’m here, I realize there’s not much more to tell you.
Herbs are very easy to grow, and besides basil, which doesn’t like to dry out, they only require occasional watering. Any well-drained soil will work, but your best bet is to grab a bag of ready-to-use planting mix. Feel free to double check with the person at the nursery, but it’s basically potting soil with benefits. And, I did say nursery. Drive the extra mile, and talk to people that just sell plants.
I consider these herbs must-haves, but there are many more varieties you can try. I’ve done things like tarragon and cilantro in the past, and while they are a little more temperamental, they can be successfully cultivated.
Nothing beats being able to go out into the garden, and just take a pinch of this and a pinch of that. When you consider the cost of one of these plants is just a little more than for a single bunch at the market, why not have a few pots around, even if they’re on the windowsill? I hope you plant your garden soon. Enjoy!
NOTE: I’m not a gardening expert, so asking me specific question about soil types and weather issues will result in many a guess. My advice would be to use this video as an inspiration, and then check out some local gardening websites.
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May 25, 2023
The greatest economic moment of the 20th Century was when Thomas Edison invented the chicken
What’s that, you say? Edison didn’t invent the chicken? Yes, yes, okay. Technically it wasn’t Edison and technically the chicken already existed long before then, but Robert Graboyes explains why it’s kinda true:
No, Thomas Edison didn’t invent the chicken, despite my fake, AI-generated photographs above. But around the time of the Apollo moon landings, a future Nobel laureate allegedly declared that the most important invention of the 20th century was the chicken. This cryptic statement offers profound wisdom about possible paths of healthcare innovation in the 21st century. The chicken quote was attributed to Robert Mundell, 1999 Nobel economist, by Dick Zecher, who was my boss at Chase Manhattan Bank and, before that, Mundell’s colleague at the University of Chicago.
How is the chicken — first domesticated more than 5,000 years ago — a 20th-century invention at all? And how was the chicken more important than the airplane, computer, atomic bomb, television, interplanetary rocket — or the countless works of Edison and his crew?
Dick told me that the comment, delivered during an Economics Department seminar, attracted the blank stares that often met Mundell’s odd, enigmatic, and always-profound observations. After a prolonged silence, the befuddled seminar speaker asked what Mundell meant.
His insight was that in the 20th century, modern production methods so drastically reduced the price of chicken that the bird became, for all practical purposes, an entirely new good. According to W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm (“Myths Of Rich And Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think“), a typical American in 1900 worked 160 minutes to earn enough money for a 3-pound chicken. An equivalent worker in 2000 needed only 14 minutes of wages to buy that chicken. Pre-1950s, consumers generally had to eviscerate a commercially bought bird or have a butcher do it. (My mother used to shudder when she recalled the itinerant butcher who would slaughter chickens for my grandmother in their kitchen sink.) Herbert Hoover’s promise of “a chicken in every pot” rings dull to our ears, but in 1928, the phrase sounded like “a flying car in every garage” sounds to ours.
Revolutionary production, distribution and storage methods changed chicken from a Sunday luxury item to the everyman’s protein. Our concept of chicken bears little resemblance to our great-grandparents’ image. Massive reductions in food prices explain why rates of malnutrition and starvation have plummeted worldwide since the mid-20th century.
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May 24, 2023
The Original PB&J from 1901
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 May 2023
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May 23, 2023
Mustard: A Spicy History
The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published 15 Feb 2023In 2018 The Atlantic observed “For some Americans, a trip to the ballpark isn’t complete without the bright-yellow squiggle of French’s mustard atop a hot dog … Yet few realize that this condiment has been equally essential — maybe more so — for the past 6,000 years.”
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May 18, 2023
How the Tabasco Factory Makes 700,000 Bottles of Hot Sauce Per Day — Dan Does
Eater
Published 4 Dec 2019On this episode of Cult Following, host Daniel Geneen heads to the McIlhenny factory on Avery Island, Louisiana, where the world’s supply of Tabasco sauce is made. Follow along as Daniel learns about the 150-year-old family-run business, and the Tabasco-making process, from pepper to barrel to bottle.
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QotD: The unironic joys of British cuisine
In the 18th century, when William Hogarth wished to highlight Britain’s political and cultural superiority to pre-revolutionary France in immediately appreciable terms, he did so through the medium of food, distinguishing between the Roast Beef of Olde England, and the ruddy and rotund yeoman nation fattened on it, and the scraps of putrid flesh with which scrawny Frenchmen were forced, beside the crumbling gate of Calais, to satisfy their wants. For food and political nationhood go together like few other cultural products: witness the squabbling between Israel and Palestine over the right to commercialise hummus, Greeks and Turks over baklava, or of Russians and Ukrainians over ownership of borscht. Food is, after all, inherently political, a basic building block of national identity, and it is the humblest foodstuffs, the basic comfort foods of childhood, that are more often fought over than the elaborate confections of the great chefs.
Indeed, it would be trivially easy to trace the shifting faultlines of broader political currents through the prism of food. Witness the sudden shift within America’s food culture, as a previous generations’ celebration of the diverse culinary options provided by mass immigration has morphed into stern lectures from diaspora commentators on the vaguely-defined evils of white people appropriating “ethnic” cuisine. In Britain, equally, a slim volume could easily be written on the political import uncomfortably burdened on fish and chips or chicken tikka masala by devotees of mass migration; a cultural theorist could likewise tease apart the “Proper” label now applied to a distinct category of foodstuff — proper pies, proper burgers, proper chips — as a marker of a specific type of middle-class yearning for proletarian authenticity, while maintaining socially acceptable levels of consumption standards. Like the fetishised fry-ups of London caffs in prosperous areas targeting themselves at tracksuit-wearing millennial creatives, the Proper Burger is the self-consciously gentrified football terrace of our national cuisine, a cultural marker of a precisely measurable socioeconomic bracket.
When this dynamic is considered, Britain’s strange relationship with food, and with its own national cuisine, becomes worthy of analysis. Though much mocked by online Americans, presumably inured to the Lovecraftian horrors of their own food culture, British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.
Yet the much-vaunted culinary renaissance in British food from the Nineties on, despite the buoyant effect of an endless stream of glossy cookbooks on the publishing industry, does not seem to have had an appreciable effect on the food most of us eat from day to day. Which British office worker does not recognise the moment of weary, grudging submission to the lunchtime meal deal, the limp and soggy sandwich which fuels the nation’s economy? If Britain has a national dish, it is more likely to be the Ballardian misery of the provincial train station panini, simultaneously scorching hot and half-raw, than it is a steaming steak and ale pie, its crust crisp with suet, or a plate of sizzling lamb’s liver fried in butter with farmhouse bacon.
There is, as there is with every aspect of British life, a strong class dynamic to British food. The most fervent appreciators of the frugal peasant dishes of the past, the nation’s only consumers of stewed beef shin or lamb sweetbreads, are more likely to be upper-middle class, middle-aged executives, who by lunching at St John or the Quality Chop House celebrate the forgotten folkways of their own country, than the call centre workers or shop assistants who have replaced our rural and industrial proletariat. Yet who in Britain is immune to the sudden craving for comfort satiable only by a serving of rich cauliflower cheese or of dark and savoury cottage pie, or has not felt the hobbit-like “Why shouldn’t I?” satisfaction of choosing the fry up at a hotel breakfast over the continental pastry selection?
Aris Roussinos, “How Britain eats itself”, UnHerd, 2023-02-03.
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May 17, 2023
Texas Chili & The Chili Queens of San Antonio
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 May 2023
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May 12, 2023
The crusade against (insert scare quotes here) Ultra-Processed Food
In The Critic, Christopher Snowden traces the orthorexist journey from warning about the dangers of saturated fat, to protesting against sugar content in foods, through an anti-carbohydrate phase to today’s crusade against “Ultra-Processed Food”:
How the Daily Mail represented the three categories of processed food.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11286753/What-ultraprocessed-food-MailOnlines-guide-help-tell-apart.html
It is barely ten years since Denmark repealed its infamous “fat tax”. It was supposed to be a world-leading intervention to tackle obesity but it proved to be hugely unpopular and lasted just 15 months.
It seems almost strange now that it targeted saturated fat. In hindsight, it was the last gasp of the crusade against fat before all eyes turned to sugar. The anti-sugar crusade seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014 with the emergence of the tiny but phenomenally successful pressure group Action on Sugar. Within three years, the British government had announced a tax on sugary drinks, but by then the anti-sugar movement was morphing into a campaign against carbohydrates. That began to run out of steam a couple of years ago when many of the leading anti-carb personalities found that they could get more attention — and, dare I say, money — from being “sceptical” about COVID-19 vaccines.
They come and go, these food fads, but they all rely on the belief that there is something in the food supply that is uniquely dangerous, something hitherto unknown that only independent free thinkers can see is the cause of all our problems.
The new dietary villain is “ultra-processed food” (UPF), a concept that didn’t even exist until a few years ago but is now everywhere. There have been two books about UPF published in recent weeks and a third — Henry Dimbleby’s Ravenous — dedicated a lot of space to it.
The simple definition of ultra-processed food as used by those who are concerned about them (I am not making this up to make them sound silly) is anything that is “wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen”. Since you probably don’t have emulsifiers, preservatives and artificial sweeteners in your kitchen, this rules out a lot of products.
The argument is that these products make you fat and should be avoided. The evidence for this comes from a study published in 2019. In a randomised controlled trial, ten people were given an ultra-processed diet and ten other people were given an unprocessed diet. Both diets were similar in their overall sugar, fat, protein and salt content, although the meals themselves were very different.
The participants were given all the food for free and they could eat as much as wanted. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories per day more than the other group and, after two weeks, had put on nearly a kilogram of weight. By contrast, the people on the unprocessed diet lost weight.
If you look at the food that was offered to the two groups, the explanation is obvious. The meals and snacks available to the UPF group were delicious whereas the food given to the other group was rather Spartan and was unlikely to make anybody ask for a second helping. If you give people tasty food for free, they will tend to eat more of it.
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May 10, 2023
Feasting at a Medieval Tournament
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 May 2023
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May 3, 2023
The History of the Hawaiian Luau
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 May 2023
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