badscienceshenanigans:0hcicero:emmersdrawberry:supersoftly:willesqueleto:fini-mun:theamazingsallyhog
badscienceshenanigans:0hcicero:emmersdrawberry:supersoftly:willesqueleto:fini-mun:theamazingsallyhogan:siphersaysstuff:jesus what was wrong with peopleThey suddenly had money, fridges, freezers, and access to a variety of foods - all things that hadn’t been widely available before. Suddenly people had access to things that were beyond the dreams of people just a 100 years prior.Enter corporations willing to go “oh yeah, you know what’s great (now that you can afford it)? Cold beef soup, served in a glass. Drink up your beef!”Early 40s/50s foods are something I’m very passionate about.They had no concept of what flavors tasted good together so they tried everything. The biggest ideas that were latched on to were things like loafs with layers that compose your entire meal and the suspension of basically anything/everything in jello (jello actually helped food last longer, because the gelatin sheltered whatever ingredients were used from bacteria. So, naturally, you put a fish in it).Also pineapple. It was harder to get before then so the sudden availability of it made people go nuts. Bananas too to a degree.Welcome to the wild and wacky world of Aspic, otherwise known as meat jello.jello history is a fucking trip i am pretty sure the entire 1940′s was made out of hollandaise and aspic@bdbeastie the true horror movieAspics were around for a LONG time before the ‘40s… again, it was about the best way to keep leftovers edible. IN FACT, ASPICS ARE HOW USING AGAR FOR PETRI DISHES GOT INVENTEDThe science dudes started out using gelatin but a) some bacteria just dissolve the shit out of gelatin so it turns into goop and smells terrible and b) it melts at like 80-90F so you can’t incubate it at room temperature on account of, again, it turns into goopso this lab tech named Fannie Hesse started using agar instead of gelatinwhy? because agar had been used in southeast Asian cooking forever to make food do the gel thing, and it was starting to get adopted by European cooks to make things like ASPICS THAT DON’T MELT IN THE SUMMERwhich apparently had been a thing that plagued European cooking previously? anyway 50/50 this is a story about the triumph of feminism and also how to profit off of indigenous knowledge, or “colonialism in a nutshell.” the dudes in the lab had been futzing around for years trying to find different ways to make gels for growing bacteria, but none of them tried agar because none of them knew it existed. Fannie had learned it from a Dutch ladyfriend who’d learned it during her girlhood colonizing Indonesia/the Dutch East Indies, where people’d been using agar for centuries to make jellies that don’t melt in the tropics. European men at that time… did not cook. So it was pretty much impossible for knowledge of agar to spread through male social networks. so anyway that’s the story of how horrifying jello salads, colonialism, fucking off gender norms, and seaweed came together to bring us pretty much the entire science of microbiology. -- source link