I may not work at Starbucks anymore but that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop bitching about secret menus.
(and before someone asks, the TERFs threatening me over the TERF dog whistle post didn't get me fired, I quit during the union busting and when they cancelled my insurance long before that)
Anyways, Secret Menus.
They're dogshit.
so i get this pizza from the local place that's mushroom and truffle oil. last week i ordered it with extra mushroom and when rhys went to pick it up the guy was like "was that a mistake? that would be a lot of mushroom"
rhys assured him it wasn't a mistake, i just REALLY like mushroom, so he put the extra on and finished it up
this week i ordered it again, rhys went to pick it up and pizza guy is like "i assumed since she ordered it again it wasn't too much mushroom so i actually put a little EXTRA on this time"
i can still see bits of the base, good sir, but a valiant effort
tempted to order double extra mushroom next time to really fuck with him
rhys says if i order double extra mushroom i have to go and pick it up because the pizza guy might snap and decapitate him with a pizza cutter
also the pizza guy thinks he's alexis because the orders are all in my name and he has too much anxiety to correct him which is very funny but also i can lean into this and just say i'm rhys (reese) since we both have neutral names
glad we're in agreement that the appropriate amount of mushroom is All Of It
Needs more mushroom, I feel
thank you, just-mushroom-thoughts
That has enough mushrooms if you also replace the red sauce with mushroom duxelles
Lacroix is illegal now
habitable zone
I live in Massachusetts and I was curious what the Fuck this could possibly mean and uh
Basically no one knows what’s in it and it’s maybe poison but Massachusetts is the only state that holds carbonated water to the same health and safety standards as regular water so LaCroix is just doing nothing and hoping there’s no consequences
So I had to look this up because my “omg, not CHEMICALS!!!” sense was tingling.
The lawsuit also alleges that the chemicals in LaCroix “include limonene, which can cause kidney toxicity and tumors; linalool propionate, which is used to treat cancer; and linalool, which is used in cockroach insecticide.”
Okay so let’s get more information about these "scary” chemicals:
Limonene: it comes from citrus peels
Linalool: it comes from a lot of chemicals, including citrus peels, lavender, and cinnamon
Propionate: it comes from literally every organic process
this shit is so tiring, y'all.
EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS
CHEMICALS ARE NATURALLY OCCURING IN NATURE
IF YOU SAW THE CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN OF A COMPLETELY NATURALLY OCCURRING FRUIT YOU WOULD SEE A LOT OF SCARY SOUNDING WORDS AND SOME CHEMICALS WHICH ARE INDEED TOXIC FOR CERTAIN THINGS ESPECIALLY IN HIGH CONCENTRATIONS AND QUANTITIES
Do I think food safety is important? Yeah. Do I think it’s good that beverage manufacturers are being held to a high standard? yeah.
Do I think La Croix should be put out of business for using naturally-occurring chemicals that come from fruit? fuck no
If you want to ban those chemicals from food, you’ll have a hard time finding anything to eat
I just saw yet another debate over MSG sensitivity online.
The way I see it, the problem with MSG usage in processed food isn’t that it has MSG, just that it has a metric shit-ton of it.
I’m sensitive to MSG but I’m fine with it in the lower quantities that it occurs naturally in many foods - it’s just that the amount in, say, a bag of Doritos, or in the flavor packet in instant ramen, is enough to give me a very bad time. (And I was experiencing these bad times long before I ever heard of MSG sensitivity or knew that MSG was a thing, so I don’t think it’s a placebo effect.)
I have done some experiments to find where my threshold is and it’s kind of annoying to do; all I know is that it’s higher than nothing and lower than the amount used in a single-serving bag of Chili Cheese Fritos. (Plain Fritos don’t cause me a problem.)
Since MSG levels are never outright stated in a food’s nutrition label, it’s easier to just assume that if something lists MSG in its ingredients it uses too damn much and to have something else.
[ID: Tumblr reply from qwertystop asking, “found this and showed an acquaintance when MSG sensitivities came up in conversatoin - do you get problems from soy sauce, parmigiano-reggiano cheese, vegemite, boullion cubes, meat stocks, etc? Things which contain similarly extremely high levels of glutamic acid, but not as something isolated and added back in?]
Soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, no. Boullion cubes and meat stocks, it depends on whether they’ve had MSG added in or if they’re just full of the natural glutamates. Vegemite, I have no idea, I can’t stand the flavor of it.
I had an interesting conversation with someone about this where it seems plausible that the problem isn’t with the MSG itself but with the brain’s response to being overwhelmed by the concentrated flavor. Like, apparently MSG kept in gelatin capsules and swallowed doesn’t cause a problem, when the same amount tasted and spat out can.
Given that migraines are often a response to a sensory overload condition it seems like it could be the concentrated MSG flavor itself that’s the issue. My migraines tend to be triggered by protracted intense sounds and smells, so that feels plausible, anyway (although the specific symptoms I have when I eat MSG-laden foods are different than my usual migraines).
Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.
Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.
Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.
Reminder: don’t mess with people’s food to “prove a point”
The main thing I get from Dylan Hollis cooking old recipes is this:
Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are great, and I suspect it’s because they were made by someone with limited resources. But they found a way to make something good, maybe even something fantastic with those limited resources, and they wanted to write it down and share with their friends so that they could also make something out of saltines and potatoes. Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are written down and shared in love.
The recipes you should fear come from the 1950s and 1960s, which I’m pretty sure are written down and shared as a form of McCarthyism.
I strongly suspect that the rise in horrifying recipes in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that this is when recipes were being used as advertising. Whether or not the recipe was tasty or even palatable at all was a secondary concern at best to if it could convince a housewife to buy more Chlorox Brand Lard™️ to try it out.
He touches on this in his longer video about the tomato soup cake!
Okay… Lemme drop a big ol’ bombshell on folks:
Slavery and War are the reasons.
Okay. Maybe that’s a little too harsh to not explain… Let’s start with Slavery.
Back in the first 400 years of America being populated by white colonizers and enslaved black folks it was mostly black people doing the cooking. Particularly in the South. Oh, for sure you’d have poor white folks cooking for themselves and their families, using traditional recipes handed down. Or making things with New World foods like Potatoes and that newfangled Corn stuff.
But particularly in the South, Slaves did the majority of cooking. And when they were freed in the 1860s and 70s, you suddenly had a mess of wealthy white folks who didn’t have a -damn- clue how to cook. You know how Tiana’s Dad started up a restaurant in The Princess and the Frog? Yeah. LOTS of former slaves did that. Used the skills they learned working for white slavers to cook banging meals they knew the white folks couldn’t cook for themselves.
It took -decades- for white folks to start getting their culinary feet back. To really understand how to cook and make recipes work.
And then you know what happened? WW1. Food shortages before the Dust Bowl happened caused people to tighten their belts and try and figure stuff out. Know what the most popular meat was on the dinner table? MUTTON. Sheep. Lamb. Delicious and flavorful and just -so- good for you with it’s healthy amounts of fats and all the luscious goodness in that nummy snackiness.
Recipes expanded. Exploded. Got shared.
Then WW2 hit. And this is where shit went sideways again… but this time? Not because of Shortages. See, Mutton was cheap. Cheap for the people, Cheap for the Government. And that made it the premier Ration for American GIs… but.
Tinned mutton is a slimy gross paste.
And soldiers were eating it two to three times a day. No MRE packs with variety menus. Just straight up canned mutton over and over and over and over. And when they got home? They BANNED it from the dinner table. The sheep industry in the US went from top dog to bottom of the barrel.
So once again you’ve got American Culinary Understanding flailing and reaching out for anything it can to replace a -staple- of the American Diet.
“Beef, it’s What’s for Dinner”. “Pork, the Other White Meat” “Chicken of the Sea”
Folks knew how to prepare -Mutton- and -Lamb- and maybe Chicken. And now they’re slapped with these other foods? Add in the massive changes in availability of new products (Again that are largely untested) and marketing pushes for things like Crisco or Gelatin…
The 50s and 60s are a culinary nightmare in the US’s collective memory for the same reason the 1880s were: No one knew what the fuck they were doing.
Don’t forget to add in the absolute explosion of people owning refrigerators in the Baby Boom/Post-WWII period. Then you have the fact that the great sort of… mixing-up of people that happened in the late 40s through the 50s when the suburbs exploded… moved a lot of young mothers away from their support structures.
See, Jell-O between WWI and the late 40s was largely used by women who had tea in the afternoons. Gelatin already featured heavily in cookbooks intended for Ladies Who Lunch.
But then you hit the late 40s and you have these harried women who were trying to put A Nice Dinner on the table for their husbands, and their husbands remember dinners where their mom had like 6 or 7 daughters to help her while the men were out in the fields, and aunties and grandmothers to hand to take the baby for a minute but their mother made two pies for supper and two for dinner, every day!*
And so these women, who now have refrigerators instead of iceboxes and have far less support in caring for their children than previous generations, are trying to put together a Nice Dinner 7 days a week. And here’s this miracle substance that can turn out these jewel-tone dinners and desserts, and they make it in savory flavors now, and it’s very modern and there are lots of recipes!
Basically, Jell-O was the Instant Pot of the post-war period. 🤷🏻♂️ Yeah, people didn’t know what they were doing to some extent, but a lot of people who did really needed a quick way to do things alone for which they’d had community support before.
*Yes, my great-grandmother (different one from that one post) did this on the farm she and her husband owned. Two pies a meal, 2 meals a day, for 50 years. I have her recipes. :p
I want to give the "pakistani tribal elders react" people actual good american food
It's all fun watching these dudes eat a twinky but I really need them to know that there is good cooking made by hand with love that Americans can be proud of. Give them brisket
I love that the first American food you think of is Jewish immigrant food lmao
No I’m. I’m happy about that I said I love it
oh a thousand pardons I've been conditioned to read that kind of message as bitter sarcasm
Honestly fair. *hands you a bagel*
That said, it’s worth seeing what Native American food is like. Some of it is pretty darn amazing! And it’s definitely had a lot of influence on modern American food, as well as Mexican food (which is a lot closer to being indigenous American food than anything that is referred to as “American” cuisine, which is primarily of European origin).
I’d love to see tamales get more love worldwide.
My dad was a veterinarian in the meat animal industry so here is an explanation of why medium rare is a thing with steaks, but not chicken:
In beef, what you worry about is e. coli. In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering. The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there. So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it. Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”.
With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken. Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat. As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen. That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then. However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well. The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg.
As a side note, with pigs the concern is trichinosis, a parasite that used to be common in pigs and spread to humans through under-cooked pork. However, it has been essentially eliminated in commercially produced pork these days. It should be safe now to eat “medium rare” pork, but trichinosis was so horrible and the fear of it so ingrained that it is rare to see pork that is not well done.
^ Good addition!
I also wanted to mention that apart from the salmonella risk (which is a freakin’ big “apart from”), you also have the risk of Campylobacter infections. Not only can these lead to really really horrible gastro-intestinal problems, a small number of infections also cause an auto-immune response that leads to the body destroying its own myelin (the stuff around your nerves that makes them good at carrying electrical signals). Basically, your nerves stop working and even if you survive, you’ll be hooked up to an iron lung for… a long time. I don’t know how long it takes to regrow myelin, I’m not a neurologist.
Don’t eat raw poultry, guys
RB for awesome info, ty! I knew the info but not the reasons and as a “I need reasons to remember things” person this is really helpful!
Note that you CAN safely have slightly-pinkish chicken if it’s been cooked with a pasteurizing-type cooking process such as sous vide or other low-and-slow techniques. However, chicken cooked that way will just be, like, slightly pinkish, and consistently so throughout, rather than a band of well-done meat surrounding a transparent core like in most of those photos.
It’s also still a bit risky and not particularly recommended.
*immediately goes into a trance floating into the kitchen to prepare ito’s fuck toast like an obedient zombie*
that actually sounds delicious???
