Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice | Hacker News Reader

Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice

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111 pointsKednicma53 comments

My favorite insight:

> “[...] tenancy conditions tended to be more favorable in rice-farming areas than in wheat-farming ones, with a lower portion of the total harvest going to the landlord. Thus the irony that precisely because labor was so abundant, rice farming tended towards labor-intensive methods and solutions, which in turn improved returns to labor (compared to returns to capital), putting the small farmers, despite their abundance, in a marginally better bargaining position.”

> But it also goes to the difficulty many Chinese states experienced in maintaining large and effective cavalry arms without becoming reliant on Steppe peoples for horses. Unlike Europe or the Near East, where there are spots of good horse country here and there, often less suited to intensive wheat cultivation, most horse-pasturage in the rice-farming zone could have – and was – turned over to far more productive rice cultivation.

The bigger reason why China did not produce horses for cavalry was they couldn't. Soil in China is deficient in selenium, which is required by horses to produce strong muscles.

From

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Initiation_in_China_...

"The soil in China lacked Selenium, a deficiency which contributed to muscular weakness and reduced growth in horses.[40] Consequently, horses in China were too frail to support the weight of a Chinese soldier.[41]"

> The bigger reason

It's a tricky thing estimating coefficients for non-repeatable experiments like much of history. I'd prefer to phrase it as "another significant factor."

China is an enormous country. Surely this wasn't universally true?

The reference cited on Wikipedia is available on Google Books and has a map of selenium in China on page 51 https://books.google.de/books?id=IaQeC5fxYlQC&q=Selenium+eco...

The area with low selenium content is quite large and encompasses much of central China, where Chang'an, the capital of the Han dynasty at the time of the War of the Heavenly Horses (fought over horses) was located. (The modern city of Xi'an in the same place is marked on the selenium map.)

So the theory that selenium deficiency led to difficulty maintaining cavalry without importing horses from elsewhere seems plausible.

Where Egypt allowed seasonal flooding to deposit silt into the Delta passively, my understanding is that China had a more active process for silt harvesting[1]. But in either case, silt only travels so far from the river, even less if carried in a bucket. And although the head waters might be in a mineral rich area, your tributary might not.

I don't remember enough of geography in China to overlay the rivers onto that selenium map, but I'm guessing the horses didn't get fed from the best fields at any rate.

[1] Farmers of Forty Centuries, F. H. King, out of copyright

> I don't remember enough of geography in China to overlay the rivers onto that selenium map

The map includes two black lines corresponding to the Yangtze (ending near Shanghai) and the Yellow River (ending north of Jinan). Of course the rivers changed their course by a lot over the centuries, but I don't think that makes much of a difference in terms of selenium transport.

It's worth noting that China is not universally a rice-growing area. If I recall correctly (and I might not be) most of the area of China that historically grew rice is in the part of that map which is in the moderate selenium territory. So the OP's theory might explain the relatively low amount of cavalry there.

A little known fact is that Germany resorted to using sawdust in bread when they had flour shortages during the world wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommissbrot

Are ther any other strange flour replacements that people have heard of?

In Scandinavia, before potatoes, people sometimes used the inner layer of bark from trees as a supplement to grains when there was a shortage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread#Bark_bread_as_food

Survival books still sometimes refer to it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this layer also contain minerals and some of the sap? So it would have some value as a supplement and not just a filler.

My favorite in this category is separating the minerals from grass by chewing (not swallowing) or boiling it in a tea. Not much calorie value, but it'll prevent deficiencies while you find a staple food or burn body fat. And you can do the former while doing other survival chores (time seems to be the dominant resource you have to manage).

In Scandinavia they reguarly added inner bark to flour during famine. In Russia, nettle and orache were used. There a good article which goes through what many cultures eat during famine below [1]. Some of it is pretty horrific:

> “…I have no idea how I managed to survive and stay alive. In 1933 we tried to survive the best we could. We collected grass, goose-foot, burdocks, rotten potatoes and made pancakes, soups from putrid beans or nettles.

> Collected clay from the trees and ate it, ate sparrows, pigeons, cats, dead and live dogs."

It goes further into mentions of infanticide canabilism which I won't quote directly here but is worth reading.

Birch inner bark flour seems to be "common" as far as obscure flour goes. Apparently it wasn't even a famine food as such, and just a normal part of their diet. [2]

[1] https://www.askaprepper.com/ingenious-foods-people-made-fami...

[2] https://practicalselfreliance.com/birch-bark-flour/

In some ways that's not terribly different than one of the traditional starch sources in Papau New Guinea, sago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago

I am not sure what to make of "collected clay from trees" - sap? Lichens? Seems like a problem with the translation.

I assumed sap too. As a kid we had a load of sycamore trees - a close relative of the maple. My dad saw a documentary about tapping maple trees and he set out to tap the sycamore - it tasted vile.

But apparently Birch sap is fine, it seems to be enjoying a fad as a successor to coconut water at the moment.

How the hell do you eat a live dog?

Err... to give you a genuine answer - by experiencing real starvation.

Have you never seen any cartel execution/torture videos? Those people are literally just doing it because a higher up told them, they're making money, and stimmed out of their minds on a daily basis.

Eating a dog alive is really nothing to a human that's actually facing death from starvation. Please don't forget we're just animals.

I believe what that means is they found the dog alive, killed it themselves, cooked it (I hope) and ate it. In contrast with finding it already dead, like a road kill, which they eat also...

I lived with Karen people in Easter Burma for several years. One year the combination of poor timing for the rains[1] and fighting with the Burmese[2] left food scarce for many, including the village I lived in. We ate thin rice soup with bamboo shoots (bamboo is all fiber and water, very little if any nutrients) and greens for the first few months, and then fresh or fermented bamboo soup.

Normally the village elders have strict rules on where and how much fishing they allow to keep it sustainable, but that year people were so desperate they fished the river clean. You couldn't catch even the smallest fish, and it took several years to recover.

[1] There was too much rain and the slash-and-burn farms never had a chance to dry out. Slash-and-burn farms are very dependent on an old forest (usually 10 to 20 years or more) and a dry period in which to burn it off and expose the rich soil underneath.

[2] The Karen would try to hide their rice silos in the forest so the Burmese troops would be able to find it. If the soldiers did find them they'd take what they wanted and burn the rest.

I wasn't familiar with the Karen people until your comment, thanks for sharing your story. What led you to live with them for several years?

Sylvester Stallone made a film about the plight of the Karen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(2008_film)

People dismiss it as just another (bloody) action movie, but it's not - it's a moral and political condemnation

Most bread in England in Victorian times was adulterated with plaster of paris.

I think one of the British history shows mentioned gypsum, which is just a name for Plaster of Paris that sounds less like something you should keep out of your mouth.

Some people did an (albeit informal) experiment trying to find out how much sawdust you can add to a rice krispy treat before people start to notice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDal51f5LU

Americans basically do the same thing with their cheese, but not because of shortages, it's because they don't want to shred it themselves.

“Cellulose is cellulose,” regardless of if whether it comes from wood pulp or celery, says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group that advocates healthier, more nutritious food. He says no research points to health problems related to consuming cellulose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Science_in_the_Publ...

https://www.thekitchn.com/cellulose-the-wood-pulp-in-you-146...

So glad I ditched pre-packaged shredded cheese - it only takes like 5 min to shred a large cheese block and that lasts for weeks in my fridge (and the cheese block lasts for even longer so I always have shredded cheese and a few blocks waiting to be shredded).

Note: means without cheese are difficult if you have kids.

I don't use a lot of shredded cheese, but grated is harder to avoid.

Also during the (US) Civil War, acorns, peas, and all kinds of other things were used as coffee additives or substitutes.

https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

That one is really interesting, as the US South actually does have a caffeine producing plant native to the area: Ilex vomitoria

It also goes by Yaupon, or Black Drink, and is similar to Yerba Mate.

The native americans in the area typically used it in rituals to the point of vomiting, hence the name. Due to this history, though, it was not used as a caffeine substitute during the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_vomitoria

I'm still fascinated by the fact that the fact that cellulose is mostly sugar.

It literally is two glucose molecules bonded via a condensation reaction. The linkage between the molecules is what makes it different from starch, and subsequently what makes it not useful as a food source for most animals.

Is that linkage much more energy dense compared to starch, I always wonder why so few life forms digest cellulose.

Adding sawdust to nutmeg gave nutmeg dealers a poor reputation resulting in an insult in the 1860 election of Stephen Douglas calling Abraham Lincoln a nutmeg dealer (he threw in some other insults in the same line).

horrid looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly (sic) in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man

> A little known fact is that Germany resorted to using sawdust in bread when they had flour shortages during the world wars

That wiki article suggests the use of sawdust in bread during WWI, but for a reference uses another encyclopedia-like source [1] (which does not cite any reference, and whose about page suggests it was written by a single individual). While it may be true, I'd be very hesitant to accept it without seeing a better source (and preferably one made before the wiki-circular-citation thing started).

[1] http://www.zum.de/whkmla/economy/period/warecwwi.html

Someone once put it to me that cooking is a process of converting inedible calories (combustibles) into edible ones. Mostly by cooking difficult to digest food, but also increasing longevity of other foods (eg, smoked meat).

Somewhat tangentially, the British during WWII rediscovered that rose hips contain vitamin C. I don't know the degree to which roses were embedded into the collective consciousness before but they certainly earned it at that point.

Rose hip tea helped with the supply constraint pressure of the U-Boats.

Anyone know which WWII british cookbook contained the recipe for "life sustaining glop"?

Doesn’t brown rice inhibit iron uptake?

Source? A casual search suggests the opposite:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19919516/

Whole grains do have anti nutrients, e.g. phytic acid, which can inhibit uptake of some nutrients, but whether that's a problem or not depends heavily on the rest of your diet.

They tell anemics to stagger intake of certain nutrients so your body doesn't have to choose between iron and other things, such as calcium.

They're also told to put ascorbic acid on all of their iron sources as it enhances absorption. Get some lemon juice on that fish.

On a tangent, the author has an article in the Atlantic about the increasingly strained economics of universities. Combine that with the novelty of Patreon's fundraising and it's worth pointing out the author's Patreon page. He has a very reasonable "buy me a coffee" subscription.

It's no one's fault that a chunk of society goes down the humanities PhD rabbit hole only to discover the adjunct professor job market is bonkers (some of the world's smartest [or some semblance of it] people competing intensely for almost no money). But, I think blogs and subscriptions like his are a potential way to remedy the situation.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=20122096

Yeah, strongly seconded. This kind of blog is exactly what's great about having academic historians around.

I've been reading him for a long time now, and I just wish he'd do a podcast or a video essay YouTube channel or something (or partner with someone skilled in these areas to make it happen). He's much more knowledgeable than the existing people doing this in these areas, yet he has a tiny fraction of the audience solely because of his choice of blogging medium. His actual content is genuinely interesting and obviously well-researched and I'd put him up favorably against any of the others.

Ironically, I follow Bret's work over other, more famous people, because I prefer reading over listening or watching.

Same. I can read quickly, and when suits me. Video I have to be sat at a computer paying attention which is time I can use for other things, and go at their speed.

The quick must be ironic. His articles are insanely long, could be an hour read sometimes for a slow reader. Each post is a booklet long if it were put on paper.

Not a criticism. I like long text too. That would be extremely boring in a 30 minutes video though.

I think it's long because writing a short letter is harder, as the joke goes.

But a video covering that would be 30 minutes. I can read it in a lot less. Having been through academia, you do after all learn to read quickly :-)

Yes, I really learned a ton from him. Please donate if you enjoy and are able to!

No it’s not. The only way to sustainably fund smart people in the humanities is for the State to provide such funding, and we should be funding a lot more than we do today. I find it incredibly difficult to understand why Americans don’t understand that funding for scholars is a solved problem and we should simply be committing more to it. The US has the largest number of universities but could easily support double that, not to mention expanding existing universities, which are mostly well run.

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