A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s (opens in new tab)

There are a lot of factors that go into milk and its taste. There's: pasteurized (most American milk), homogenized, ultra-pasteurized or UHT (which most German milk probably is), raw milk, how quickly it was cooled-down, cream content, and then there's the variance between dairies based on things such as breed, feed, time of year, quality of life, etc. We can't accurately make blanket statements about one country's milk one way or the other.

There are two dairies near me that I purchase from, but the characteristics of each's milk varies quite noticeably. Dairy A tastes just okay and goes bad after about 5 days. Dairy B tastes excellent and keeps well for at least 8 days. They're both pasteurized, unhomogenized, and packaged in glass jugs. Dairy A milks holsteins (less cream). Dairy B milks jerseys (more cream). Dairy A's is whiter in appearance (less silage/forage, more grain). Dairy B's is yellower (more silage/forage, less grain). No two dairies are alike.

And better than both of them, there's a raw milk dairy that I sometimes buy from whose milk tastes best to me. Plus, it doesn't spoil like pasteurized milk. Rather, it goes sour, and when it sours, I can still use it for cooking and baking.

Just a note: the taste difference you're picking up on is not due to the simple presence or absence of plastic. Paper cartons are lined with LDPE film and milk jugs are usually composed of HDPE. Both options are, in effect, polyethylene plastic containers.

Impact of modern packaging on the taste itself has been proven to be neglible in double blind studies. However, the taste of milk varies wildly based on the animal (food, location, roaming, season etc.) and also of course the process applied to sterilize the milk (pasteurization/UHT, skimming, filtering). Same milk from from same cow will taste very different when raw vs UHT. I am very much a UHT person, but for some weird reason my country (UK) considers UHT second grade so it's not always easy to find them - or they are shunned to "baking" aisles.

Most German milk is either "long life" or UHT, both of which taste better to me than "normal" pasteurized milk, which is the most common in England, for example. The three different pasteurization techniques result in different tasting milk.

I do notice a difference between foil lined carton, plastic jug and carton milk, the latter usually tastes the worst probably because the carton is more permeable?

But I do love fresh raw milk whenever I can get it.

Even milk from the same dairy tastes radically different in plastic than paper.

I always hated plastic milk as a kid. Nobody else seemed to notice the difference though. I sometimes wonder if there’s only a small subset of the population that can notice it.

My family has been getting milk from a brand called Straus family creamery which is available in glass bottles in northern California. Best tasting I've found around here.

I've haven't had much milk or tried different brands...between your recommendation and the apparent milk cult:

"Who are the peoples who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous people, who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades in the world, who have an appreciation for art and literature and music, who are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect? They are the people who have patronized the dairy industry."

good milk definitely sounds worth trying

The secret to the Darigold plastic/paper dichotomy may be in the expiration dates. At least for the 1% product, the half-gallon cardboard cartons tend to expire at least one month, sometimes two, later than the plastic jugs sitting next to them. Not hard to imagine how milk that's been sitting around in a plastic jug for an extra month or two will taste worse.

That sounds like confirmation bias. I've bought a lot of milk in a variety of containers from plastic to paper to glass, from a variety of sources. There is a wide variety of flavors, it has much more to do with what dairy it came from than the container it is packed in.

I grew up drinking mostly milk from our cow, which was usually a Guernsey or a Jersey -- fed on a combination of pasture and commercial grains. Pasteurized in the early years, but raw later on. Never really liked drinking milk. But man, my cousins loved visiting because they could have all the cold milk they wanted. Milk doesn't disgust me the way tomatoes do, or act as a near emetic the way olives do, but I just don't particularly like drinking milk of any variety, well, except for chocolate milk. But I love most of the products derived from it -- cheese, ice cream, butter, etc. With a family cow you really get used to how the cow's diet affects milk flavor -- the lush green grass in the spring was quite noticeable. And of course, I like milk with cold cereal but not with hot cereals. And our beef came from a calf raised to a yearling each year. Eggs came from the chickens, although they were the first to disappear in response to the convenience of the supermarket.

I was born in the early 50s and my folks were Californians from small-town Minnesota, so I'm used to the idea of very sweet dishes being considered okay at all meals. An example, my mom picked up from her Dutch-immigrant mother, a breakfast dish made from thoroughly dried out bread scraps, simmered in milk with cinnamon and liberal amounts of sugar. They called it (I don't know the Dutch spelling) stoot-uh-bray (phonetic) which I suspect meant something like stewed bread. Loved it and the many other fattening 30s concepts of what constituted a proper meal. A slightly less chocolatey version of homemade pudding over graham crackers was considered a perfectly acceptable lunch, Grandma called it cocoa-dope. And though no one pushed my mom to cook all our meals, it was clear she felt it a failure if any of us in our family of six found it necessary to prepare their own meal. Dad was a railroad conductor on 24-hr call. When he got called, she got up and prepared him a meal and/or lunch, regardless of time of day or night. He simply could not break her of this habit. But yeah, my folks and their folks definitely grew up on a diet resembling at least some of what the article referenced, and held similarly strong attitudes about the kitchen being the center of home culture. Sit down meals for the whole family were mandatory until such time as we left home. No TV or radio during meals, just conversation. Not such a bad deal, really -- three mandatory whole-family conversations a day -- two if school was in session. Occasionally I used to quickly walk the 600-yards home (from elementary school) for lunch. Some days I'd trade my homemade-bread sandwich for one of my schoolmates Wonder Bread sandwiches at the outdoor lunch tables of elementary school, both parties usually felt they got the better of the deal. Different times, different attitudes.

The taste is also highly effected by what the animal is fed. Cows fed on fresh gras will produce the most wonderful flavors in the resulting butters and milk vs those fed with dried gras or feed.

I live and the US and have noticed the milk from the "nicer" grocers like Whole Foods and Farm Fresh tastes absolutely awful but the stuff from Food Lion etc in the HDPE jugs with the minimal labeling tastes way better. I don't know why that is.

Not uncommon in the US to have bananas on pancakes, but the bacon -usually- is served as a side (unless you're getting an "Elvis", which would have peanut butter, bacon, and banana, which I have seen as a waffle or pancake option).

But to the article, bacon wrapped bananas, standalone, aren't things any more.

Prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe is standard Italian fare (prosciutto e melone), I can't see bacon-wrapped banana unreasonably far from that. Going to try it tomorrow morning.

Cooked green bananas (both actual plantains, and just unripe regular bananas) are used as starchy sides in a lot of cultures (mostly South America, Africa and the Caribbean afaik).

Not to mention bananas on pizza.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sweden-banana-pizza/

I'm partial to fried spam, eggs and pancakes covered in maple syrup.

If you want to get really wild, coat the spam in sugar before frying it at low-medium heat. It caramelizes around the outside and gets extra tasty.

Vazhakkai Poriyal (made with raw bananas, vegetable side dish) is pretty common here in India.

Same URL, de-amped - https://lastappetite.com/pancakes-at-fandango/

Likewise for German forces in the second war. When they encountered the sheer richness and quantity of U.S provisions after the D Day landings, for many of them it really brought home how hopeless their situation was in ways that abstract ideas of military and economic balances couldn't. Of course this shouldn't necessarily be used to draw absolute conclusions. Soviet forces were basically pushed into battling the Germans while subsisting on what could basically be called starvation rations, but they managed to crush the Wehrmacht piece by piece.

Incidentally, the U.S also fed much of the Soviet Army from 1943 onward, to the point where Soviet food provisioning became highly dependent on U.S supplies (only from 1943 onwards).

I found that difficult to believe. There were refrigerated ships [2] but I don't think flash freezing methods had been invented. The pie would be mushy, and how would it be transported from the port to the front line?

The New York Tribune (18 May 1918, page 3 [1]) has an article describing a much more likely process: send the ingredients to the front line, and send cooks. Apples, flour, butter and sugar transport very easily. Eggs are fragile, but maybe they used dried egg, or maybe that wasn't a problem.

> "When we got our affairs in tip top shape two American girls could cook 3,000 doughnuts a day and 150 pies."

[1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1918-05-18/ed-1/?sp=...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_ship#Timeline

Wouldnt food rations have come via boat during WW1? I'm not sure how fresh a pie would be that was in transit for a week or more.

Because the US troops were supported by super logistics? That's a lot to infer from a pie!

Larger portion sizes, more snacking, much less manual labor. Only the wealthy were obese back then.

It's an intriguing question! People of the early 20th century ate too much fat, too much sugar, too many carbs, too many calories, and yet did not grow obese. There is an interesting paper [1] making a strong case that the cause of the 21st century obesity epidemic is an unidentified environmental contaminant which (1) causes obesity in both humans and other mammals; (2) accumulates in major river valleys; (3) started noticeably affecting the US around 1980, and by now has spread worldwide.

Some possible candidates proposed for such a contaminant include animal antibiotics, PFAS, and lithium (e.g. in industrial lubricants).

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6miu9BsKdoAi72nkL/a-contamin...

Troops consuming 5000 calories a day seems reasonable for walking (and occasionally running) across Europe with a pack and a gun.

a lazy person in the 20s would probably seem fairly active by today's standards... outside of reading books you would have been hard pressed to find an abundance of things to do while sitting around

Logically then, the stuff they ate wasn't the cause of obesity. Modern nutrition must have got it wrong.

Seed oils.

Given how much agricultural productivity has improved, I wonder if these descriptions of meals are more aspirational than everyday.

But why? Speaking as someone from a '3rd world country' [1], the traditional food preparation has been unchanged since the 1920s. The last great change in diet occurred when tomatoes and corn arrived from the America's to W. Africa, then later again when rice became a staple.

The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian. Adding to that, the US food culture always changes to wars, new immigrants, boycott, and government subsidies. Most countries aren't like that, and are significantly more conservative with dietary changes.

[1] We do not love that phrasing. The Cold War is over. Just say which continent you mean specifically.

Would you spare the author 6 months of his life and share what that would accomplish? I mean sure, take a plane ride and turn your clock back xy years but that's not relevant once you arrive back. We want trendlines with a fixed country. You can do meta analysis across countries after.

oh yeah just take off and leave your job and family behind for 6 months so you can write a better article about food, this is definitely something normal people can do

This comment made me think of the food show called Hyper Hardboiled Gourmet Report

I don't think you can easily separate the two. Things might start as a marketing campaign but then catch on in general culture. In modern culture, this would be true of bacon. Bacon was falling out of favor in the US in the 1980s as people were beginning to become heart and weight conscious. But then there was a massive marketing push and now bacon is everywhere even on things like donuts. People think bacon is the most wondrous food/flavor and probably don't associate their obsession with a marketing campaign.

I don't think it's because of the milk lobby (which didn't exist until early 1900s according to other posts) because I once browsed a cookbook from the 1800s and noticed that many of the recipes called for an amazing quantity of butter. The recipe for bread, which made two loaves at once, called for 1 pound of butter. Pound Cake also uses a pound of butter.

People ate less meat/poultry back then. Dairy and eggs were the most common sources of animal fats and protein.

I mean it is cheap while being nutrient and calorie dense. It makes sense to put on a relief menu lobby or no

My grandmother made something like this without salt: cooked meat (usually duck or pork) and lots of fat, poured hot in jars. It kept for a year at least.

The meat was edible straight from the jar, the fat was used for cooking or as spread (but tasted quite disgusting to me heh).

I reckon salted it would last even longer.

This is a baby step into charcuterie, congratulations. It's a fabulous world. It is actually quite straightforward to make hams, bacon, pastrami, corned beef, cured salmon, and a thousand more delicious things. Main ingredient and technique is salt and time. There is no possibility of comparing the results of those recipes and the US commercial products with the same names. In fact, a lot of US corporate product disgusts me now, which I suppose is a downside of eating the real thing. Especially ham.

If you're curious to learn more (and you should be!) I recommend "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing", by Ruhlman and Polcyn.

I have about worn out that book. Even has fabulous non-meat recipes. I use the smoked ham recipe in the book to convert industrial $2/lb bone-in pork butts into a glorious thing.

I don't understand. Just cook stuff from scratch? This isn't difficult. Just modestly time consuming it you want a varied meal plan.

Unless you're saying that even for raw ingredients like eggs and potatoes, it's hard to know what's in them, in the sense that modern agriculture is a complex affair.

My wife cooks home cooked meals everyday from fresh ingredients. She watches the salt, only uses olive oil, is light on the carbs and we always have a large salad. I think that’s all that’s needed for a healthy diet.

> So not only ads are a source of malware, but also of badly written articles.

It's the other way around. Most people who plaster their site with ads want to make easy money. Since the goal is to make money rather than share information, the content doesn't matter. You lure visitors and hopefully generate a click using a purposefully cluttered design encouraging accidental ad clicks while navigating.

That's why I like Twitter. It challenges you to communicate what you need to say in as few words as possible. That is if you don't cheat by chaining posts.

Squid ink ice cream is (was?) a fixture at service area-type places so I think most people have at least heard of it

Never had these ice creams, but Green Tea KitKats from Japan are quite delicious!

squid ink soft serve is common and not weird

Maybe due to the increase of dance macabre themes in visual arts after Black Death?

https://worldhistory.us/european-history/the-plague-and-the-...

You might like Public Domain Review, then.

I'm pretty sure "milk" and "culture shock" are lighthearted. Food might raise an eye, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly unusual content warning from someone more attuned to disordered eating discourse (which I am not particularly).

Do you need a content warning for content warnings? Half joking.

Have you? It’s just words you read

Is it possible that was meant as satire? I wouldn't believe that food would be a valid content warning. The author may have been trying to humorous, or maybe there are people that have issues with food that cause them problems when they read about it. I think it may be worth it to try to think about why they put that there instead of just reacting.

I am concerned that you're actually serious and didn't get that it was a joke.

Surely not, right?

Those are satire.

It's a fun article, but hardly a scientific analysis of the diet back then. It's all anecdotes and no numbers.

Though such numbers do seem to exist for 20th century USA (Android won't render the xls, though): https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per...

> This was the '60s and '70s, not the '20s and '30s, but it still seemed like another world, compared to today. Most food was local and full of taste, having been on a farm just hours before it appeared in the store. People knew what was in season, and took delight in what was available.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember there still being a lot of seasonal variation in produce availability in supermarkets, up to at least the mid nineties. Now there's hardly any. Fresh cranberries have limited availability. Gourds of various kinds are a little bit seasonal. That's about it.

But I've also noticed produce is cheaper and the resulting food is better (probably the produce tends to be fresher) if you go with the seasonal flow. Helpfully, most cuisines are built around seasonality, so it's unusual to find a traditional dish from most cuisines that will call for, say, Summer and Winter produce in the same dish.

It did read more like an abridged version of the book than an actual review. It definitely felt like it would be in the wrong side of "fair use" laws if challenged.