On the impracticality of a cheeseburger (2011)
waldo.jaquith.org
waldo.jaquith.org
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
But I can't find the original source.
For a real challenge I suggest making soy-based tofu at home. Growing the soybeans is the easy part. Natural sources of gypsum for calcium sulhphate - at home, is painful. Then, lemons place a hard climate requirement. Mind you there are probably other ways to do this.
In the same way, a cheeseburger would have been certainly possible to make for any pre-Industrial European of moderate means - at its heart it's just ground meat and a slice of cheese between two fluffy buns, with a variety of optional condiments. The marvel of industrial civilisation is that you can get a cheeseburger anywhere, anytime, for an absurdly low price.
In fact, if you discount the tomato, a delicious cheese-burger would have been completely possible to make as early as Ancient Rome, see this excellent Reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b4zdd5/would...
Also have a club sandwich and regal it’s impracticality.
I don't know how people can do that, slaughter an animal they've raised themselves. Me, I make cheese. When the time comes to cut into a wheel, I don't want to do it. They look so lovely, I just want to keep them that way for ever (which is of course impossible- even hard cheese goes bad eventually). I can imagine, if they were actually living, breathing things that I had brought up from babies, I'd really have trouble destroying them.
That doesn't mean I couldn't kill an animal, I'm just saying I couldn't kill an animal if I had brought it up myself, fed it, cared for it, and so on. If I had animals, I'd probably ask the neighbours to do it and offer to do theirs in return. But even that would feel dirty, giving up my little goat or sheep to be killed by some stranger? Now that I think of it, that actually sounds worse and I'd be really torn between doing it myself and giving the animal away, I think.
If you're going to raise animals, you do have to be careful to maintain distance. A chicken will get cozy in your arms if you let it, not unlike a cat.
Still, the birds are pretty dumb. With pigs, cows, etc. you feel you can connect with them. I've given up eating mammals for that reason. The birds I feel less guilt about, and most seafood even less.
Oddly, I have no trouble cutting into an elaborate wedding cake I've made. It was meant to be eaten. I've known it longer than your wheels of cheese, though the hands-on time may be on par.
From "So You (Don't Particularly) Want to Be a Farmer", https://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/02/24/how-to-exp...:
"Wait until you have either a sick one that desperately needs to be put down, or some animal so obnoxious and unpleasant that the thought of eating them is actually kind of appealing (my three year old still announces, with some satisfaction "We ate Corey" - the mean rooster who kept attacking him.)"
Easily? Before the Disney-fication of our idea of Nature, facilitated by the ability to have several middlemen between us and our food and/or to get it in highly processed form, that's what people just had to do and did to get meat.
It might sound like this was the case in some distant medieval past, but as long as at least the 1970s, in e.g. villages all over western Europe that was the norm - not supermarkets. People bought from a butcher, but also had animals they tended and slaughtered themselves.
And it remains the same in huge swaths of the developing world, Latin America, Asia, etc.
An insteresting consideration is, that, for all urbanites soapy modern "feelings" about the issue, they eat meat far more often than those people in those rural places.
Though he didnt use quite as extreme a definition of "from scratch." Everything in the sandwich did appear to be made or acquired by hand, but it doesn't look like he raised the chicken or cow himself for example.
That sandwich should have been DELICIOUS. Instead it sounded very ordinary. You would think that if you were going to that much effort, you could spare a few minutes to talk to a chef and figure out how to make the sandwich tasty.
no things that take other things like cheese (rennet), just essentially out of the ground/off the tree/slaughtered from paddock to plate food.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
They seem to be more interested in carbs based diet than foraged or simple farm to plate food.
I found it compelling and switched, feeling healthier and lost around 20kg in 6 months without thinking about calories.