You underestimate the comfort of the familiar.
People usually prefer something that is just “foreign” enough so that they can talk about it, but not too much, lest they feel challenged.
4 Likes
People usually prefer something that is just “foreign” enough so that they can talk about it, but not too much, lest they feel challenged.
Well, I’d understand it if it was like this glorious example of gastrimargic courage:
But if it is just about tasting a different fruit or cheese or beer that is perfectly safe and eaten by many people abroad or during vacations, I really do not see the appeal of paying more money to have almost the same taste as the stuff at home … ah, marketing marketing 
I read somewhere the other day that, if someone looks into the recipes of post-war America, when women were forced back into to household (etc, that’s not my main point here), they are basically mostly variations of “huge piece of meat, lots of sauces and additives, put in the oven, done”, because although the narrative was of the happy housewife, women hated it and did the equivalent of fast-food today: fatty, salty, sugary, least amount of effort.
So, it was seen as the epitome of cooking, when in reality was the result of “I don’t want to, but I have to, let’s go for appearances”.
But this was the first time I came upon it and I know next to nothing about the subject, so I’m ready to be told that that was factually wrong.
3 Likes
We could talk about Intel 486 sx… but I prefer the odd story of “New Dimension shampoo”: it was a soap with added conditioner. Before New Dimension you had to apply conditioner after washing hair, so the big innovation was 2in1.
Right.
Many other shampoos followed that example and it became usual to find soap+conditioner in shampoos.
So some marketing genius invented the “shampoo without conditioner”! 
You could find on the label a big writing saying “no conditioner in here!”
People proudly bought it, happy to pay a little more not to have conditioner in their shampoo.
Rationality RIP
7 Likes
Good question. It is quite an obscure thing to find a particular source on it (though I found a book on “Feminist Food Studies”), so I gave it a spin and it seems to be a bit off for various reasons:
a) The early women’s movement was not so much about an immediate and total abolision of gender stereotypes and social roles, norms and expectations, but a gradual process with more important stuff set first in line (e.g. women voting, equal pay etc). As a result, at 1940 while there were quite a lot of women in the work-force, numberwise, as a percent it was only around 25.4% … so the statement “when women were forced back into to household” is inaccurate for that era, since they were not out yet, in large percentages.
b) If anything that “let’s do something that looks good, fast” seems like the transition mentality that had to go along in a decade where more women had to go out of the house and work a full time job and return to the house afterwards to take care of the needs of the family. That “fast food” mentality sounds more like the 70es-80ies though were a lot of things actually started to change in the whole way society viewed a family, as a whole.
c) Things like this … without much of a uniform cooking tradition, the US market was (and still is) very very partial to marketing and wild swings of what they like and why.
d) Everytime I have to cook a “slab of meat” like a whole turkey or a big piece of beef/lamb, I have found that it takes some skill and quite a lot of care. You need to turn it around quite a few times and you have to have some experience with the process so that it cooks to your taste. Plus it takes more by default. I am not sure that the “slab of meat” recipes are any easier than the “thin stakes put in the oven, along with other stuff” kind of recipies
If there was such a phenomenon, what does make sense is that since a lot of men were away from their homes due to the war, the women had 5 years during which they cooked only for their own needs or their childrens’. Suddenly you have some dude back from the war that is either their husband which they married before or after the war and they had to add him into the “cooking quota”.
I’d guess some over-estimation in the portion size or some overcompensation of the “oh, come on he was away for so long, let’s cook like it is Sunday” kind was possibly a more reasonable explanation for some of the bloated recipes of the era.
One could say that this was quite an impressive … unconditional loyalty to the product
4 Likes
I was expecting someone who actually tasted the cuisine or has access to the recipes referenced, but you’ll do. 
Nice you read that. Women emancipation grow up from the wars because they became the workforce to do weapons while their men were fighting. Not forget that although not so common, even some did just fight too.
So these women stop to be a domestic pet (How a pet may vote?) like only 100 years ago by proving they could be much more.
2 Likes
It’s kinda popular in Switzerland and some people have their own trees and go around asking coworkers ‘yo, you want 4 kg quinces, I got too much’. I say kinda popular, because many of the younger people probably don’t know quinces and they have an old-fashioned feeling around them. You hardly find them in supermarkets, and if you do, they’re turkish. If you really want to buy some, you should look on the weekly farmer’s market.
We usually make jelly with them, or pies, sometimes a kind of candy, which effectively is super-hard jelly, or schnaps.
4 Likes
I know quince was used in stews in Europe, before potatoes came over, but I see it doesn’t survive anywhere as a practice.
2 Likes
I know that!
My sister in law made some and we didn’t eat them all yet
Not very common here
1 Like
Our neighbour used to do this with rhubarb, and my mother tried so many things, but never really found a way to make rhubarb tasty Probably we were just being picky, I like it nowadays.
I’m pretty sure we had quinces as well, but I don’t really remember their taste.
1 Like
Rhubarb is great as a kompott mixed with straw- and raspberries and on griesmeelpudding or as marmalade. The taste of quinces has been described as similar to roses. I was surprised when I read that, but it’s not wrong. It’s really like roses and apples.
1 Like
No. In Germany, it’s usually called Naturjoghurt. (But of course, we also have some Greek and Turkish products as well. Some of the Turkish products are even produced in Germany. 
)
There are just many Turks who hate Greece very much. 
That’s all…
Another example: Many people think that chilis must be from India or other parts of Asia, but they are originally South American.
4 Likes
There’s a lot to unpack here, but my favorite is that there’s countries, and then there’s “Eastern Europe”, “Brussels” and “Latin America”.
2 Likes
Now I want those books. 
1 Like
I think this is real. As in, an actual page that exists.
I should get off the internet for today.
3 Likes
These last weeks I got some weird time where I try to play when it’s not my turn in correspondence games.
I mean at least playing his color, not mine, pffff…
How troublesome is that? Do you experience that too?
1 Like
I’ve been dabbling in Inca history lately, and arguably they were the first functional socialist society. Not with socialist ideas peppered in, but the whole menu.
The noteworthy here is the individual development of such a system, isolated from other “think hubs” with similar ideas.
For some reason, Incas are the ones with the least material I can find about, out of the 3 major empires of the region.
I’ll let you know how that avenue goes.
4 Likes
I actually came across the same realization recently regarding the Incas with a brief study of them. Very interesting and surprising in my mind, but it is difficult to find out a lot about them as not much was recorded. I was given a summary of their system and so I will try to summarize the passage a little later.
And, to be fair, while not quite like the Incas, the Aztecs were more socialist than a lot of people realize as well.
Most people just know about their religious sacrificies and “that’s all” … noone really knows if they were really as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors made them out to be (since they themselves were quite keen of commiting atrocities and genocide) and if it was not an “excuse” to paint them as savages to be “eradicated” and their thus feeling “justified” in destroying their culture and language and traditions (which is what actually happened in the end).
I find it ironic that today we scoff and people go into rage about cultural appropriation when someone dresses up as a native American in Helloween, but we are perfectly fine in ignoring that we (the Europeans/Western world) totally eradicated and uprooted them, so systematically that they cannot even remember what their language used to sound or what their own religion was.
No wonder our societies so afraid of other people coming to our countries, eh?
Deep down we know what we did when we went abroad to “new worlds”, and unlike what a lot of people complain that “the foreigners are not like us” deep down they actually pray that is actually true.
Historical facts make clear that if they are like us, that would make them significantly more dangerous eheheh
P.s.
A church on top of a pyramid … “Cultural appropriation” level 1000
2 Likes