exasperation

Jim, would you like a sex metaphor or a nature metaphor?

Don't count on it. Instant Pot managed to sell so many units they're in what seems like almost every kitchen. And then that was that, because everyone already had one, so their sales volume plummeted and they went bankrupt. I still use mine all the time, but the original company went away.

Back in the day you called a repairman.

That guy’s time is worth probably $30/hour, so if you want to use up his 8 hour day you’d better be willing to pay $240, plus parts, plus the gas money of driving his truck to your home, plus the cost of keeping those parts on hand and the truck available.

Or if it’s something he knows is only a half day job, then he can book something else so that he only really needs to charge you $120.

Now that a lot of these appliances are like $500, it’s pretty hard to justify the cost of professional repair.

50 years ago, when the price of an appliance was something like 50 hours of a repairman’s hourly wage, it made a lot of sense for most issues to be fixed by a professional. Now that these appliances are worth like 15-20 worker hours, it’s much harder to justify.

51% is the threshold for calling it "process cheese food." The stuff that is called "process cheese" is only allowed additives off of a particular list: water, salt, milkfat up to 5% of the weight of the total, acidifying agents, spices, artificial coloring, mold inhibitors up to 0.2% or 0.3% of the total weight. There's basically not an easy way to make something match the legal definition of American cheese without making it out of at least 90% cheese, because the amount of water and fat you can add to fit within the requirement that the end result be 47% fat, except that only 5% of the total can be from added fat, makes it hard to cut corners.

Every culture takes/mixes foods from other cultures and makes it their own.

Perhaps more importantly, every generation remixes their parents’ and grandparents’ food.

French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican food aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago. Lots of new dishes were invented and remixed, sometimes from imported influence. It’s not like chefs sit around and refuse to do anything different from how they learned. They do invent and innovate and tweak recipes. That’s, like, the job.

It was a funny joke, a fun juxtaposition of the child’s book already under discussion, and a contentious and violent period in recent UK history.

due to rationing still being in place for a while, and food was pretty dire still in the 70s and 80s. That was definitely true of Japan, too, where ramen was a poverty food popularized out of necessity, that then became a foundation for innovation up the value chain. Same with Korea, where American occupation (and a whole history of foreign conquest and occupation) made for interesting combinations of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American ingredients. Now Spam is probably bigger in Asia and the Pacific Islands than it ever was in America. Same with many American food traditions being rooted in the slave trade (see West African food culture being remixed with new world ingredients and exported right back to the Americas in what would become southern U.S. and Caribbean food). And of course there’s the broader discussion between the interplay between fine dining, casual dining, home cooking, industrial/mass production of prepared/processed foods, etc., that often creates its own foodways. I’m biased in that I think the cultural mixing in the Americas makes for better food innovation, where so many American classics are some sort of mix of German, Italian, Mexican (which is itself a mix of indigenous and Spanish cuisine, while Spanish cuisine itself has significant North African influence), Caribbean/West African, with even a little bit of French Canadian influence mixing in on Cajun food. Merely importing ingredients is only part of it. There’s a lot to be said for techniques, tools/equipment, and traditions, too.

But you described it as “suffering.” The subjective experience of a person in that culture is that the food is less pleasant to consume. In other words, the enjoyment of the food is actively discouraged, in favor of another criterion (the suffering that comes from eating it). So we can point out that the culture does not prioritize the enjoyment of food as much, and can stand by that particular metric as having directionality on that spectrum.

Even in puritan cultures that intentionally eat plain food to shun “hedonism”, food becomes a vehicle for virtue signaling. The suffering is a ritual practice. Food, even then, plays a critical cultural role. Yeah, but one can view that cultural tradition and conclude that their culture does not value the deliciousness of food as much as some other cultures.

British food is unironically great, and the stereotype is based on experiences during WW2 rationing I think this overstates things. A substantial number of countries have their modern culinary culture defined in the post-war decades, though. Japanese culinary identity came together after World War II, and many of the dishes and traditions defining their cuisine are recently invented or have evolved considerably during the post-war period: the popularization and evolution of ramen, katsu, Japanese curry, yakitori, etc. Even ancient traditions like sushi and Modern Japanese food draws a lot of influence from classic pre-war cuisine, but the food itself is very different from what was eaten before the war. Even French cuisine underwent a revolution with nouvelle cuisine, heavily influenced by Japanese kaiseki traditions. Before the 20th century, French cuisine was about heavy sauces covering rich, slow-cooked foods (see for example the duck press and how that was used), and it took a few waves of new chefs pushing back against the orthodoxy to emphasize lighter, fresher ingredients. The most notable wave happened in the 1960’s, when Paul Bocuse and others brought in small, lighter courses as the pinnacle of fine dining. Korean, Italian (both northern and southern), and American culinary traditions changed pretty significantly in the second half of the 20th century, as well, through changes in food supply chains, political or economic changes, etc. And that’s true of a lot of places. Britain’s inability to shake off an 80-year-old culinary reputation comes in large part from simply failing to keep up with other more food-centered cultures that continually reinvent themselves and build on that classic foundation. Some of the criticism is unfair, of course, but it’s not enough to point at how things were 100 years ago as if that has bearing on what is experienced today.

Terrible distribution of options. A good list would have a series of technologies and tools that became obsolete at different times. Almost all of these became obsolete with the rise of broadband internet in the early 2000’s, while a handful were earlier (rotary phones) or later (paper maps, paper checks).

Smithers, I really feel like a free spirit. And I’m really enjoying this so-called “iced cream.”

The choices also tend to center around 2005, with only a handful of technologies that were made definitely obsolete before 1995 or after 2010.

I thought we were posting corn to return to actual shitposts, this one is too informative and interesting.

We think in terms of tokens, too, but we have the ability to look under the hood at some of how our knowledge is constructed. For the typical literate English speaker, we seamlessly pronounce certain letter combinations as different from the component parts (like ch, sh, ph, or looking ahead to see if the syllable ends in an E to decide how to pronounce the vowel in the middle). Then, entire words or phrases have a single meaning that doesn’t get broken apart. Similarly, people who are fluent in multiple languages, including languages that use the same script (e.g., latin letters), can look at the whole string of text to quickly figure out which language they’re reading, and consult that part of their knowledge base. And usually our brains process things completely separately from how we read or write text. Even the question of asking how many r’s are in “raspberry” requires us to go and count, because it isn’t inherent in the knowledge we have at the tip of tongue. Someone can memorize a speech but not know how many times the word “the” appears in it, even if their knowledge contains all the information necessary to answer the question. Even if we are actively thinking in the context of how words are constructed, like doing crosswords, these things tend to be more fun when mixed with other modes of thinking: Wordle’s mix of both logic and spelling, a classic crossword’s clever style of hints, etc. Manipulation of letters is simply one mode of thinking. We’re really good at seamlessly switching between modes.