You'd see the differences during dinner. Our neighbors the Eriksens had a mixed marriage. Her ancestry was Swedish, his Danish. He liked sour cream on his jello, she went for whipped cream. Not that jello was a Scandinavian food - they had been regionally Americanized like the rest of us. In a generation rugbrød had become foreign, but everyone knew hot dish and jello formed around things like shredded carrots, Kraft brand miniature marshmallows, fruit cocktail or cottage cheese jiggled on our plates. Even our notion of exotic had been Americanized. Once every few weeks we celebrated a South of the Border meal with "tacos" (pronounced tack-ohs) - toasted Wonder Bread folded in half holding sautéed hamburger, onions and some cheese. Food from your ancestry had been relegated to holidays and properly done by the elderly. The great melting pot included enormous dietary change.
Thinking now .. what were some of the major changes in food since the beginning of the last century? Here's an incomplete list of the top of my head, not in any particular order
° enormous improvements in sanitation, sewage and clean water
° food safety (Upton Sinclair)
° cheap global transportation of fresh produce. You can have greens every day of the year.
° a move away from home gardens for fresh produce
° a cheap and reliable cold chain... flash refrigeration near the harvest, refrigerated trucks, display cases and home refrigerators
° corn-based sweeteners
° obesity replaces malnutrition as a major health issue
° relative to average income food becomes much less expensive
° few people farm (from about half the country to about two percent)
° much less time is spent on food preparation - home cooked meals become a hobbyist activity for some
° restaurant meals become a regular experience for most people
° the introduction of ethic foods across cultures (sadly after I was growing up)
° The Haber-Bosch Process (fertilizer - this was one of the most important revolutions of the 20th century)
° Farmland being used to grow fuel for vehicles
Such lists are fun to think about. Some of these changes are clearly positive, some not so much and others seem neutral. Change is complex and frequently in the eye of the beholder.
A week and a half ago I spent the morning at an institute devoted to pure research - a mixture of physicists, mathematicians, social scientists and historians. The focus of the breakfast was on change brought about by the iPhone. No one argues it's importance as a product in terms of devices shipped and money generated. No one argues that it defined the notion of a smartphone. But there are a lot of interesting questions. What does it mean culturally? Our lives have changed, but what is the balance? How do we meaningfully approach such questions as the history of our interaction with it is being made now. Every generation believes they live in a period of maximum change and removing bias is tricky.
I won't go into details - the Chatham House Rule was in effect as usual during discussions like these - but there was a lot of comparison with television, the automobile and universal electrification. Both of these had and continue to have enormous social impact. The automobile physically changed architecture and cities. Pollution has killed millions worldwide during the depression, but mobility has given us enormous freedoms to connect. This is a very rich area to think about.
How do these rate if your window is two hundred and fifty years - to the early days of the United States? The historians agreed the most impactful event in the US was the invention of the cotton gin. We still are living with the fallout. Oddly enough had it come about thirty years later other technologies would have been more neutral. Of course the steam and electric components of the industrial revolution show up and you can get into interesting games like what would you rather have - electricity or your smartphone (assuming you had a communication technology that didn't require electricity)? Of course the Haber-Bosch Process figures in as the planet's population would have been limited at something like two billion without it. And sanitation and vaccinations extended life spans and generally increased wellness more than almost anything else.
All of these have consequences and externalities. Change is multi-dimensional and highly interdependent. Twenty years ago one of you (hi Karrie!) was in a group looking at, among other things, change at Bell Labs. I hung around with the group a bit simply because the questions were so interesting. You might look at change brought by the automobile along a variety of axes .. and I started to see it as a very large dimensioned space represented by a point that could move in time.1 It gets tricky to think about as many of the measures are social and qualitative and many of the quantitative measures are difficult to nail down, but it's a nice mental model .. it encourages you to think about multidimensional change that can gives different results for different people when they look at it. If you're of African-American heritage, the cotton gin shows up more prominently for example.
I've been trying to think through what happens with electrification, transportation and computation a bit more deeply these days. Like the decade before the smartphone it's an exciting time. Everyone knew there was going to be some sort of convergence of features driven by Moore's Law, but many of the details were hazy. And now the impact isn't all that clear, but we know it's significant. Today someone asked about the rumor of a laser on the iPhone 8 - a bit of thinking gives a very strong hint to something fundamentally huge.
I'll quit here - one can spend a lot of time...
__________
Recipe Corner
I was inspired by the performances of a brilliant Canadian beach volleyball team: Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes. They haven't had a lot of time together, but they're doing great things. On Canada Day they took gold in Porec, Croatia and a week later a bronze in another major tournament. It seemed reasonable to toast their effort with homemade maple ice cream. It isn't exactly safe in quantity, but for celebrations go ahead.
Extra points for using a liquid nitrogen freezing technique as smoothness is a function of ice crystal size (smaller is better) which is related to the rate of freezing (removing heat quickly is good).
Somewhat better than lime jello marshmallow surprise:-)
Maple Ice Cream
Ingredients
° 2 cups of heavy cream
° 2/3 cup of half and half
° 1/3 cup of whole (4% butterfat) milk
° 2 extra large pasteurized eggs (they’re pretty easy to pasteurize and then completely safe)
° ¾ cup of white sugar
° ½ cup of Grade B dark amber maple syrup (the original recipe calls for Grade C, but I can’t get it around here . this gives a light maple flavor)
° * 1 teaspoon of Mapleine® imitation maple flavoring (to get a richer maple flavor add this if you can’t get Grade C syrup)
° walnuts or pecans (I tend to use pecans)
Technique
° Mix the eggs at medium speed in an electric mixer in a 4 or 6 quart mixing bowl. (I don’t recommend beating by hand!)
° When well mixed add the sugar and continue mixing for two minutes.
° Add the heavy cream, half and half, and milk while continuing to mix for two minutes.
° Add the maple syrup and mix throughly
° Pour the ice cream mixture into an ice cream machine and churn freeze as per the manufacturer’s instructions
° When the mixture is fairly stiff add chopped walnuts and continue processing for a minute or so (I like to place full nuts on top rather than chopped nuts inside)
__________
1 OK - I'm a physicist.. it was screaming Hilbert Space and perhaps it makes sense to think of it like that.
Comments