Literally, the reason food went to shit in the '50s was because that’s when all the shelf-stable and processed “convenience foods” that had been invented for WWII started getting heavily marketed to the public.
I mean… you have to imagine a world without refrigeration. Now it’s ubiquitous, we have it everywhere, you can even get portable battery-powered refrigeration boxes. But at the time, cold meant icebox… literally a box that you put a big block of ice in to keep other stuff cold.
You say “food went to shit” but all those things were a real change to the previous millennia of salted meats and pickled vegetables because there was no other way to keep food edible until the next harvest. It was new and interesting.
It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn’t a bad thing.
But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of “traditions” that are basically fake, invented by marketers:
green bean casserole became a thing to sell Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s Crispy Fried Onions.
Betty Crocker was never a real person, but rather the persona of General Mills’ marketing department.
Fuckin’ Santa Claus as we picture him in the US is basically a genericized Coca-Cola trademark.
Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says “one can of X” or “one box of Y” instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there’s something deeply cynical about that.
I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we’ve created since then.
It’s something I’m sure the internet can’t possibly relate to: brilliant and amazing, life changing innovations that by any metric should make life better in every way made into their worst selves as a means to maximize profits.
Like canned goods are amazing. In the same way advanced grain stores are the difference between starvation and survival in bad years, canning is the difference between a rough year of crap food and malnutrition. And in some contexts canned food introduces a level of convenience that’s worth the cost to nutrition and flavor. Canned beans are awesome. My wife and I consider “cream of x” soups to be Midwestern roux and see them as useful tools in our kitchen.
Then there’s the microwave and refrigerator that had genuinely huge benefits to everyday life and convenience.
But also everything you said is true. It permeated and destroyed our culture and communities. And our culture needed drastic changes, some of which they got. But it’s just like how women did need to enter the workforce for our safety and equality, but it should’ve been in such a way that each parent splits the professional and domestic labor rather than wages plummeting and now both parents need to work full time.
Just as I dream of a socialism in which the trains aren’t billboards but are instead a public good, I too dream of a world in which my casseroles can be made with cream of mushroom soup, not because Campbell’s taught my family to cook with their ingredients but because it’s a recipe where that’s the ingredient that works best. And because I’m very Midwestern, and casseroles are how we show love.
Oh, you are absolutely right. The whole concept of advertising as an industry happened during this period.
There is a pretty great documentary by Adam Curtis on this titled The Century of the Self, which focuses heavily on the influence of Edward Bernays. We are still dealing with the fallout of his impact on society:
Bernays used ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud to help convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.
There were real concerted efforts not just to get people to buy things, but to change the way people thought about things, and they were surprisingly effective.
And as far as the gilded-age cyberpunk distopia goes, I think All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a good follow-up. Curtis shows the overlap and collision of Randian philosophy (which influenced Alan Greenspan), the new field of ecology, and the growing digital computer revolution.
Taken together, I think these documentaries explain a lot of how we got where we are today.
It’s existed as a dish since at least 1375. Way before Heinz. And it was eaten all over the world with many variations. Your Heinz conspiracy is meritless. Read the link in the comment you replied to.
I was immediately horrified, but it appears they date back to at least 1375 and predate fruit gelatin dishes, which makes sense considering gelatin is meat deprived. It also appears they were used for preservation, which… I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
It being described as “essentially a gelatinous version of conventional soup.” And “like ruby on the platter, set in a pearl … steeped in saffron thus, like garnet it looks, vibrantly red, shimmering on silver” certainly piques my curiosity.
Properly prepared aspic is delicious, it was traditionally made to make use of leftover bits of slaughtered pigs (ears, hooves, snout) so that they don’t go to waste. Now those bits go into the gelatin industry but aspic can be bought in sausage form (presswurst).
Also a nice way to make use of the leftovers I learned about from my wife’s grandma:
Snuten un Poten (Low German for ‘snouts and paws’) is the name of a North German dish in which the parts of the pig were originally pickled in brine to preserve them. The cured meat is cooked for two to three hours with spices (bay leaf, juniper berries and peppercorns), removed from the bone and boiled for another 45 minutes with sauerkraut. Traditionally, the dish is served with mashed peas and spicy mustard.
I will never understand how anyone could come to thinking aspic was a good idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspic
Kraft Heinz (makers of JELL-O) propaganda.
Literally, the reason food went to shit in the '50s was because that’s when all the shelf-stable and processed “convenience foods” that had been invented for WWII started getting heavily marketed to the public.
I mean… you have to imagine a world without refrigeration. Now it’s ubiquitous, we have it everywhere, you can even get portable battery-powered refrigeration boxes. But at the time, cold meant icebox… literally a box that you put a big block of ice in to keep other stuff cold.
You say “food went to shit” but all those things were a real change to the previous millennia of salted meats and pickled vegetables because there was no other way to keep food edible until the next harvest. It was new and interesting.
It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn’t a bad thing.
But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of “traditions” that are basically fake, invented by marketers:
Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says “one can of X” or “one box of Y” instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there’s something deeply cynical about that.
I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we’ve created since then.
It’s something I’m sure the internet can’t possibly relate to: brilliant and amazing, life changing innovations that by any metric should make life better in every way made into their worst selves as a means to maximize profits.
Like canned goods are amazing. In the same way advanced grain stores are the difference between starvation and survival in bad years, canning is the difference between a rough year of crap food and malnutrition. And in some contexts canned food introduces a level of convenience that’s worth the cost to nutrition and flavor. Canned beans are awesome. My wife and I consider “cream of x” soups to be Midwestern roux and see them as useful tools in our kitchen.
Then there’s the microwave and refrigerator that had genuinely huge benefits to everyday life and convenience.
But also everything you said is true. It permeated and destroyed our culture and communities. And our culture needed drastic changes, some of which they got. But it’s just like how women did need to enter the workforce for our safety and equality, but it should’ve been in such a way that each parent splits the professional and domestic labor rather than wages plummeting and now both parents need to work full time.
Just as I dream of a socialism in which the trains aren’t billboards but are instead a public good, I too dream of a world in which my casseroles can be made with cream of mushroom soup, not because Campbell’s taught my family to cook with their ingredients but because it’s a recipe where that’s the ingredient that works best. And because I’m very Midwestern, and casseroles are how we show love.
Oh, you are absolutely right. The whole concept of advertising as an industry happened during this period.
There is a pretty great documentary by Adam Curtis on this titled The Century of the Self, which focuses heavily on the influence of Edward Bernays. We are still dealing with the fallout of his impact on society:
There were real concerted efforts not just to get people to buy things, but to change the way people thought about things, and they were surprisingly effective.
And as far as the gilded-age cyberpunk distopia goes, I think All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a good follow-up. Curtis shows the overlap and collision of Randian philosophy (which influenced Alan Greenspan), the new field of ecology, and the growing digital computer revolution.
Taken together, I think these documentaries explain a lot of how we got where we are today.
It’s existed as a dish since at least 1375. Way before Heinz. And it was eaten all over the world with many variations. Your Heinz conspiracy is meritless. Read the link in the comment you replied to.
Aspic is about 500 years older than Kraft Heinz. I don’t think they’re behind its creation.
yes, but did its usage drastically increase because of mass marketing? your comment doesn’t contradict the comment you replied to.
These sort of foods are often a lot older than even either of those companies
Interesting, I had never heard of this before.
I was immediately horrified, but it appears they date back to at least 1375 and predate fruit gelatin dishes, which makes sense considering gelatin is meat deprived. It also appears they were used for preservation, which… I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
It being described as “essentially a gelatinous version of conventional soup.” And “like ruby on the platter, set in a pearl … steeped in saffron thus, like garnet it looks, vibrantly red, shimmering on silver” certainly piques my curiosity.
Properly prepared aspic is delicious, it was traditionally made to make use of leftover bits of slaughtered pigs (ears, hooves, snout) so that they don’t go to waste. Now those bits go into the gelatin industry but aspic can be bought in sausage form (presswurst).
Also a nice way to make use of the leftovers I learned about from my wife’s grandma:
Snuten un Poten (Low German for ‘snouts and paws’) is the name of a North German dish in which the parts of the pig were originally pickled in brine to preserve them. The cured meat is cooked for two to three hours with spices (bay leaf, juniper berries and peppercorns), removed from the bone and boiled for another 45 minutes with sauerkraut. Traditionally, the dish is served with mashed peas and spicy mustard.
Copied from Wikipedia, translated with DeepL.
Sounds delicious to me. I love most of the animal “waste products”. I still don’t like chicken liver or feet though.
*derived
Tf did you just say to me?
Lmao ‘meat deprived’ has me cracking up so I’m gonna keep it.
I mean it tastes good so
Don’t forget the lark’s tongue!
Why does this sound like a slur?
Without the “a,” it is a slur.
It also kind of sounds like “ass-pick” which makes it sound vulgar.
Unfortunate all around.
Probably because it’s delicious.
We have this in Ukraine. My grandma unironically loves it and cooks it from time to time. It’s basically jellified soup
Culinary disaster but I must say that it looks cool!
Looks so cool that I want to keep it contained in glass and left in a museum.
Холодец это вкусно!
Great History channel (YouTube) video from Sohla El-Waylly about uses of OG aspic: https://youtu.be/Uqt-oyrL460