Category:
Food

Snail Dough Maker

Thankfully it's for making dough to wrap snails in, rather than making dough out of snails.

source: Catalog of the Unusual (1973), by Harold H. Hart

Posted By: Alex - Sat Mar 16, 2024 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Technology

Food from Petroleum

In recent years there's been lots of talk about finding new sources of food (insects, lab-grown meat, etc.) to feed the world. But back in the 1960s researcher Alfred Champagnat had already invented what he thought would be the food of the future: protein from petroleum.

Newsweek - Feb 27, 1967



Scientific American - Oct 1965



Champagnat's idea seems to have fallen by the wayside. There's a fairly recent article in Mold magazine that discusses his invention. It simply notes that the food industry had other priorities:

The urgency of providing sustainable protein alternatives was pressing and the petroleum process uses a lot less water than the equivalent weight in vegetable-based protein, not to mention the 2,000 gallons required to produce just 1 pound of beef. The project for single-cell proteins ran over many years until it was left aside because of other food industry priorities.

Wikipedia has some more info which suggests that the protein obtained from petroleum wasn't entirely safe to eat:

The "food from oil" idea became quite popular by the 1970s, with Champagnat being awarded the UNESCO Science Prize in 1976, and paraffin-fed yeast facilities being built in a number of countries. The primary use of the product was as poultry and cattle feed.
The Soviets were particularly enthusiastic, opening large "BVK" (belkovo-vitaminny kontsentrat, i.e., "protein-vitamin concentrate") plants next to their oil refineries in Kstovo (1973) and Kirishi (1974). The Soviet Ministry of Microbiological Industry had eight plants of this kind by 1989. However, due to concerns of toxicity of alkanes in SCP [single-cell proteins] and pressured by the environmentalist movements, the government decided to close them down, or convert to some other microbiological processes.

Posted By: Alex - Sun Feb 25, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Food, 1960s

Stan Freberg’s Chun King Commercials

Well-known for his comedy and innovative commercials, Stan Freberg outdid himself for the Chun King campaign.









If you go to YouTube, you can see a classic hour of comedy that Freberg did with Chun King as the sponsor.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Feb 24, 2024 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Humor, Television, Advertising, 1960s

Miss Frozen Rabbit Meat

In the 1950s there was a brief effort to make rabbit meat a more mainstream part of the American diet. In 1957, this led to the crowning of "Miss Frozen Rabbit Meat," whose job it was to convince housewives to buy more frozen rabbit meat.

I know it's possible to get rabbit meat in specialty butcher shops and markets here in the U.S., but I've never seen it in an American supermarket. So the effort to make it more mainstream evidently fizzled.

More info: Lola Mason's imdb page
Related Post: Recipes for Cooking Domestic Rabbit Meat

Daily Telegraph - Oct 26, 1957



Longview Daily News - Mar 31, 1958



Below, part of the marketing campaign to get Americans to eat more rabbit.

How many times have you said to yourself, or perhaps out loud, "I wish there were some new meat animal"?

Baltimore Evening Sun - July 18, 1957

Posted By: Alex - Sat Feb 17, 2024 - Comments (10)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Food, 1950s

Self-Combusting Pistachios

The German Transport Information Service warns about the possibility of pistachios self-combusting:

Fat decomposition in pistachio nuts leads to the risk of self-heating and, ultimately, to a cargo fire.

Fat decomposition may proceed as follows:

by hydrolytic/enzymatic fat cleavage or
by oxidative fat cleavage

Hydrolytic/enzymatic fat cleavage:

If the critical water content of the pistachio nuts is exceeded, this promotes hydrolytic/enzymatic fat cleavage. Fat-cleaving enzymes are activated by the elevated water content. The additional action of light and heat may accelerate this process. Free fatty acids sometimes have an unpleasant odor and taste. In the event of extended storage or improper cargo care, these cause the cargo to become rancid.

The free fatty acids formed are consumed by respiration processes in the pistachio nuts to form carbon dioxide and water, a process which is associated with considerable evolution of heat.

Self-heating of pistachio nuts is an extremely vigorous process, as the consumption of fatty acids by respiration processes is associated with a considerably greater evolution of heat than is the case with the respiration equation for carbohydrates. Here too, as with cereals, the spoilage process proceeds in a type of chain reaction, because heat and water are formed by the fatty acids consumed by respiration, which in turn contribute to an intensification of the process.

This shouldn't be a problem for any pistachios you've got at home, unless you're storing A LOT of them.

via Dave Barry

Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 13, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, Firefighting, Arson, Wildfires, Infernos and Other Conflagrations

Miss Futuristic Canned Foods

What would futuristic canned foods look like? And at what point in the future will we get this stuff?

Putting those questions aside, what I find really odd about the clipping below is that it gives the Social Security Number of Miss Futuristic Canned Foods.

At first I thought the number must be a joke (though I didn't understand the joke), but according to the Social Security Death Index that number belonged to a woman named Janet Lee, who was born in 1935 and died in 2008. The dates are about right. Jan would be short for Janet. And Lee would be her married name. So that must really have been the SSN of Miss Futuristic Canned Foods.

The numbers indicate that the card was issued to her in Indiana sometime between 1936 and 1950.

Charlotte News - Mar 5, 1957

Posted By: Alex - Sat Dec 16, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Food, 1950s

Follies of the Madmen #583

In 1969, everything had to relate to drugs.

Source.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Dec 05, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Drugs, Food, Advertising, 1960s

Gladys Sellew’s 15-cents-a-day diet

Back in the 1930s, sociologist Gladys Sellew decided to find out if it was possible to survive spending only 15 cents a day on food. I think, in today's money, that would be about $3/day.

She used herself as a test subject and, five years later, reported that not only was it possible, but she actually only spent an average of 13 cents a day on food.

She said she was going to remain on her frugal diet for the rest of her life.

Austin American Statesman - June 3, 1942



The headline below claimed that she gained weight on her diet, but in the picture above it sure doesn't look like she had any extra weight on her.

Hartford Courant - Feb 24, 1941



A typical day's meal plan:

Austin American Statesman - June 3, 1942



By way of comparison, here's a more recent version of an experiment in frugality: "Spending $5 a day on food. Is it possible?"

Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 04, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, 1940s, Dieting and Weight Loss

She sold her body for gingerbread

Requesting "all the ginger-bread she could eat" in exchange for her body after death initially struck me as a bizarre detail. But the more I think about it, the more reasonable it seems given that condemned prisoners often request cookies, candy, junk food, etc. as their last meal.

Whiting Weekly News - Jan 25, 1890

Posted By: Alex - Sat Nov 18, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Death, Food, Prisons, Experiments, Nineteenth Century

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