Me; The fact that whole wheat flour is more expensive than bleached white flour is elitist bullshit.
Some poor person in the baking aisle of Hy Vee “What?”
My husband; oh no
Me; WELL IT ALL STARTS WITH THE DOMESTICATION OF GRAIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CLASS SYSTEM
Okay kids buckle in you asked for it.
White bread, for a very long time, was something that only the wealthy could enjoy regularly since white flour takes considerably more time and effort to produce than whole grain flour. You have to grind it extra fine, sift it, ect. Therefore, it has historically been more expensive, and still should be because it takes more steps to produce.
HOWEVER, since it was something that was harder to produce, serving white bread was a ‘special occasions’ sort of thing, which led to ‘rich people showing off how rich they were by serving it regularly’. Poorer people, meanwhile, got their regular whole wheat flour, which incidentally is better for you but we didn’t know that at the time.
(Also, whole wheat tastes better, white bread is just bland. Whole wheat bread tastes sort of nutty and delicious.)
So for the vast majority of time this was how things were. Until modern industrialization made producing white flour on a large scale easier, and all of a sudden you had white bread that ordinary folk could afford!!! So of course it is hugely popular immediately amongst the middle and lower classes. Enter the age of Wonder Bread, where you can buy your bread pre-made and sliced!!! White bread with no labor from you, cheap enough for ordinary folk to afford!
So of course, when everyone can have white bread, the upper classes now have to find a way to be Better again. This dovetailed nicely with the discovery that, hang on, whole grains are better for us than bleached white flour, and the rising craze among the upper classes for fitness (Because being soft and plump is no longer something that only the rich can achieve, so of course now being slim and toned is more desirable)
Enter the rise of the popularity of whole wheat sprouted grain artisanal bread for $10 a fuckin loaf, and the fact that if you want to buy 5 pounds of whole wheat flour, that logically should be cheaper as it still takes less effort to produce, you’re going to have to pay about a dollar or two more than if you buy the same amount of bleached white flour.
And don’t give me shit about supply and demand, because whole wheat and white flour are made from the same exact thing, but one just has more steps involved in production. You’d think companies would be thrilled about this, but nah, they know that upper class people feel More Important Than The Peasants when they pay extra for their whole wheat flour so here I am, a humble middle class drone who wants to make her own whole wheat bread because it is tastier and better for you, paying $5.17 a bag for whole wheat flour when white flour is $3.48
It’s classist bullshit.
In Victorian era (do I love some silly Victorians, ha), the fashion for white bread and its more or less general availability came with an interesting side effect: with their… love for substitutes, bakers pretty much had no choice but to replace flour with substances with no nutritional value if not harmful. It was easier on the health of the richer, as their diet had more variety, but very harmful for the people for whom bread was the main source of calories.
Yep. The number of bakers cutting their white flour with plaster dust, chalk, alum, or similar was absolutely stunning.
It led, eventually, to the establishment of trading standards legislation and the appointment of inspectors who could sample and test food products like flour and level heavy punishment on people selling products not up to standard.
The British Sale of Food and Drugs act was the ancestor of the United States’ modern FDA.
Haven’t bread sigils been a thing since Roman times or something, to prevent bread from being cut with bad shit, or from bad flour being used?
Yep the romans had laws about it, but that whole legal system kinda crumbled with the empire.
You and I can never go grocery shopping. It’d turn into an episode of Good Eats meets Adam Ruins Everything but with us.
This just makes me want to go to a Whole Foods store with you TBH
I want to watch and munch popcorn.
Episode 2 is me finding the spice aisle and going on a three hour rant about the total discrepancy between the prices paid to the producers of spices and the prices paid by the end consumer, because it isn’t 1640 anymore we can ship a lobster from Maine to Tokyo in half a day there is no reason my spice merchants should be paying the Badanese women who own the trees and actually produce the spice a few dollars a pound and then turning around and charging me an arm and a pint of blood for a handful of whole nutmegs.
The second half of the episode is me showing you how to make a recipes from the 1640s in a microwave, but only after an educational segue from the part of the world the spice comes from and how the locals use it.
Pearls are clutched as it is revealed that authentic Italian blends should not contain garlic, as garlic use in China predates it’s existence as a wild herb in Italy by some 6000 years. Your meatballs are a lie but that’s okay, here’s how to make them anyway.
black and asian vikings 100% definitely existed (also, saami vikings)
you know how far you can get into eurasia and africa by sailing up rivers from the baltic and mediterranean seas? pretty fucking far, and that’s what vikings liked to do to trade
then, you know, people are people, so love happens, business happens, and so ppl get married and take spouses back home to the frozen hellscape that is scandinavia (upon which i’m guessing the horrorstruck new spouses went “WHAT THE FUCK??? FUCKING GIVE ME YOUR JACKET???????”)
and sometimes vikings bought thralls and brought them home as well, and i mean, when your indentured service is up after however many years and you’re a free person again, maaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a bit hard to get all the way home across the continent, so you make the best out of the situation and you probably get married and raise a gaggle kids
so yeah
viking kingdoms/communities were not uniformly pure white aryan fantasy paradises, so pls stop using my cultural history and ethnic background to excuse your racist discomfort with black ppl playing heimdall and valkyrie
Also we KNOW they got to Asia and Africa.
Why?
Because Asians, Africans, and Vikings TOLD US SO.
Also, we know there was significant mercantile trade between Scandinavia and parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern India, Kashmir, North and Eastern Africa because there is evidence in burial sites.
Check that out: the goods Vikings and Scandinavians were getting from their trade with the rest of the world was so important they buried themselves with it, as part of their treasure hordes.
We KNOW this.
There’s a reason you can still see many of the trade routes from the ancient world etched into the very earth.
Plus, we know that some Scandinavian cultures that participated in Viking raids had established minority communities of ethnically Mongolian folks living among them during the periods when such raids were common, and it’s difficult to credit that none of them would have signed on.
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
I thought of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi too. Never underestimate the power of a good book.
Every year in my entire schooling in small town Indiana, we’d start the year studying the revolutionary war. By the end of the year we would reach world war 2. The next year, the cycle would repeat. Every year. Revolutionary war to world war 2. Rinse and repeat.
We never studied the Vietnam War. Korea. No current events. No ancient cultures. No history of other countries. When 9-11 happened I was in high school, and me and my classmates legitimately had no idea who would attack the U.S. or why. We were baffled. Because we were taught our entire lives that America is always the good guy.
i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war – how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.
I didn’t know about the free Blight lectures. You can listen to them here:
I remember in my medieval philosophy class my professor once mentioned that silent reading wasn’t always the norm and that rather people would read outlouad typically. One of the most well known examples of this is in Augustine’s Confessions where he remarks that he was astonished at how Ambrose of Milan would read books silently and without moving his lips or mouth at all. It wasn’t that people didnt have the ability to read silently like people would be aware if a situation called for them to read the contents quietly such as a politician or general recieving a letter with sensitive information. The point rather is that in those cases the person would intentionally will themselves to read quietly and if you were going to sit down and read a book or scroll the default was that you would read it out loud so someone that read silently as their norm would be seen as ‘odd’. And by ‘odd’ I dont mean that people thought they were a freak or stupid just that it was a strange quirk.
As a matter of fact reading silently might’ve been seen as a sign that someone was an incredibly heavy reader such as with Ambrose. The reason being that one of the reasons vocalized reading was the norm had to do with how people wrote texts like it was pretty common for there to be irregularities with the script or especially that it was highly common for writings tonothavespacesinbetweenwordssoreadingoutloudfeltlikeamorenaturalasawaytomakeouttheindividualwords. An incredibly ‘veteran’ reader like Ambrose (Augustine also mentions Ambrose could read quickly) might develop mental shortcuts letting them more easily pick part the individual words that had been squished together and in doing so simply gradually drop the habit of reading out loud because it wasnt an aid to them any longer. In Latin Europe this changed when Irish monks in the late 7th century developed the practice of writing with more uniform letters as well as separating different words by leaving blank spaces between them. This slowly spread to the rest of Latin Europe (at least with the monastaries) until it finally became the norm in the 12th century, just in time for the explosive importation of scientific and philosophical literature from the Arabic world which was nice.
Anyway back to before that happened, something my professor said that was pretty interesting was that that if you stepped into a medieval library before this change ocurred is that youd be struct by how much talking was seeming to go on the monks read to themselves. That combined with the fact that the expensive nature of books often meant might could be attached to chains meant that a medieval library would be have a continuous din of murmuring and rattling metal which is interesting imagery for a library.
i edited this post bc i wrote it on my phone at first and some of the wording was awkward + added a little more info
also if youre interested in this then look up the historian paul saenger he’s written a bunch about this especially the relevance of word spacing
On April 24, 1915, exactly 100 years ago today, the Armenian Genocide began.
The mass liquidation of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was brought to fruition by the Young Turk government. At least 80% of the Armenian Ottoman population was marched to the Syrian desert and perished.
Turkey has denied the genocide’s existence ever since. Today, it is still an unrecognized event. Obama has officially
stated he will not recognize it as a genocide to secure ties with
Turkey, and many other countries follow suit.
On the eve of World War II, Hitler justified his own similar actions by stating, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The denial of the Armenians inspired Hitler’s own genocidal Holocaust, and every genocide after.
For the sake of all genocide prevention, it is vitally important these injustices are recognized. The Armenians are not invisible.
I die a little inside every time someone says history is boring. History is one long, epic adventure with battles to be fought, royal scandals to be gossiped about, human rights to be protected. It can be comic and tragic, and it exhibits both the very best and the very worst of human nature. History is all about seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and that is why we all want to be remembered by it.
Person: why are you a history major?
Me: the failures of men amuse me
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 