company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party.
The drink was technically fruit-flavored, but limited wartime resources made that descriptor not wholly accurate. Its ingredients were less than appetizing: leftover apple fibers, mash from cider presses, and whey, a cheese by-product. “[Fanta] was made from the leftovers of the leftovers,” says Mark Pendergrast, who, as the author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, revealed this hidden past. “I don’t imagine it tasted very good.”
In 1841, an invasive water mold began to infect the world’s potatoes. Starting from Mexico, the infectious agent of blight traveled up through North America, then crossed the Atlantic. Eventually it reached Ireland, where, as the journalist Charles Mann described it, “four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.”
The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action. The question of avoiding starvation becomes harder still if some apocalyptic event causes the whole world to starve. How might a government prepare for a worst-case scenario?
This is an interesting article, but I do have a lot of concerns with mixing food waste with the often contaminated waste-water systems. Waste water, municipal sewage contains everything from motor oil, pharmaceuticals, PFOAs from dish washing and landfills, landfill leachate, wash waters from industrial processes. It's problematic to be spreading it composted on the fields, even if poop and food waste are good fertilizer. I'd rather see more development up SSOW -- source separated organic waste, rather then mining the waste from mixed sourced sewage sludge.
Drinking coffee from a saucer was certainly done as a way to quickly cool down the hot beverage inside the cup. Because coffee was boiled, it was served extremely hot. Saucers, some of which were more like shallow bowls, allowed the liquid to cool faster by spreading it over more surface area. It was more efficient, and more polite, to drink coffee from a saucer rather than slurping it while it was hot.
It's not clear where drinking coffee or tea from the saucer started as a practice. There are references to the practice being common in Russia and Scandinavia. In Sweden, they purposely overfilled their cup so they could drink from the saucer; they would hold a lump of sugar in their front teeth and sip the hot beverage through it in a tradition called "dricka pοΏ½ bit" or "drink with a lump."
"Vanilla, vanillin, and ethyl vanillin taste similar. Theyβre all used to make food taste like vanilla. As well as in the making of perfumes and other scents. They also seem to popular in the e-cigarette community. But the three flavorings diverge in origins, application, and taste. What are the differences between vanilla, vanillin, and ethyl vanillin?"
Candy corn first appeared when America was largely an agrarian society. The tri-color design was considered revolutionary and the public went crazy for it. We don’t know if the fact that so many Americans had farm experience at that time, if urban dwellers found it charming or if it was some combination of the two that made it so popular. Lack of machinery meant that candy corn was only made seasonally, probably gearing up in late August and continuing through the fall. It has remained unchanged for more than 100 years and is a favorite at Halloween.