Posts Tagged ‘Food’
“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple”*…
Jason Toon on a man whose applied creativity birthed not one, but two major industries…
Global canned food sales are now more than $210 billion annually. The average American eats about 200 pounds of canned food every year. Meanwhile the worldwide paper industry has seen steep falls in the production of newsprint, printing paper, and writing paper since 2010, but the rise in paper and cardboard packaging has more than made up for it. The paper industry is bigger than ever, with revenue of $485 billion in 2025.
For better or worse, our world would simply not look the same today without these two industries. And one person was the key figure in starting both of them. Bryan Donkin can legitimately claim to be the “father” of the canned-food industry and the paper industry as we know them. So who was he, besides one of the very few guys named Bryan in the 18th century?
Born in northeastern England in 1768, Bryan Donkin went into the same business as his father: real estate. But it didn’t speak to him. So in 1792, at the rather ripe age of 24, he became an apprentice to John Hall at Dartford Iron Works to pursue his true calling as an engineer.
At the time, all paper was made by hand, more or less the same way it had been done since the Middle Ages. Cotton and linen rags were soaked in water and beaten into a pulp. A shallow, rectangular mold with a screen bottom would be dipped into the liquid slurry and shaken. A thin layer of the macerated fibers would settle on the screen; when dry, you’d have yourself a single sheet of paper.
Donkin started his post-apprenticeship career making these molds. But around 1801, he got connected to the Fourdrinier brothers, who produced stationery in London. They’d made a deal with a French inventor, Louis-Nicolas Robert, to bring a new paper-making machine to Britain. At the time, between the post-revolutionary turmoil in France and England’s more advanced industrial base, the latter seemed to hold more lucrative prospects for the new invention.
Unlike the laborious single-sheet, mold-based method, this new “Fourdrinier machine” used a cylinder to continuously produce rolls of paper. A mechanism called the “shake” agitated the conveyor belt at a high speed, to spread the wet pulp fibers in an even layer. Unfortunately, this rapid movement put a lot of strain on the mostly wooden machine. One of Donkin’s improvements was to use metal parts instead, for improved stability and precision.
Another refinement of his was adjusting the rollers that squeezed the water out of the paper, to maximize contact between them and the paper, to dry the paper more quickly and thoroughly. This and other improvements turned the Fourdrinier machine from an interesting prototype to a viable technical advancement.
It quickly became the industry standard, and remains so over 200 years later. The publishing boom of the late 19th and early 20th century wouldn’t have been possible without it. Those big machines you see today producing rolls of paper are most likely Fourdrinier machines. Donkin also made some key advancements in printing technology, so the Pulitzers and Murdochs of the world owe him double gratitude.
His fortune secured, now the head of a company bearing his name that still exists (these days they make gas valves), Donkin’s restless mind turned to another puzzle: the preservation of food. Like too many technological quests, this one was spurred by military needs. Best frenemies England and France were both spreading their empires around the planet, frequently clashing, and looking for ways to keep their troops fed. In such wide-ranging conflicts as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), far more sailors died of malnutrition than in combat.
It seems yet another French inventor had visions of pounds sterling dancing in his eyes. Philippe de Girard had come up with a method of preserving food by putting in inside a sealed tin container, then boiling the container in water to sterilize it. Or maybe he swiped the method from another French inventor, Nicolas Appert [see here]. Or maybe they were in cahoots. What we do know is that in 1810, de Girard went to London and engaged a merchant named Peter Durand to be his frontman for getting a British patent, which de Girard would not have been eligible for since Britain and France were at war.
Durand was duly awarded the patent in his name. Ever since, he’s been often called the inventor of the tin can, despite having nothing to do with inventing it, and doing nothing with it except selling the patent for £1,000 in 1812. The buyer? Bryan Donkin’s old apprenticeship master, John Hall.
Now on equal terms as budding titans of industry, Hall put up the money and Donkin provided the brains along with a third partner, John Gamble, to bring tin canning to an industrial scale. Again, it took a couple of years, but Donkin and Gamble steadily refined the process. One of their major innovations was to use iron coated in a thin layer of tin, combining the strength of the former with the non-reactive properties of the latter for an imperturbable can that could survive the longest, roughest ocean voyages.
For the second time, a French invention plus Donkin’s enhancements equaled le jackpot. After getting the likes of Queen Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington hooked with some free samples of canned beef, the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble received an order for 156 pounds of canned food from the Admiralty in 1813. That grew to 2,939 pounds the following year, increasing annually to 9,000 pounds by 1821.
Having bested the canning challenge, Donkin again wandered off in search of other worlds to conquer: helping Charles Babbage with the “difference engine” that would eventually become the computer, consulting on bridge and canal projects, inventing the first metal pen and a screw-cutting machine, being a founding member of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Astronomical Society.
He died in 1855, an esteemed eminence in Victorian scientific and engineering circles. Today Bryan Donkin’s impact is out of all proportion to his memory. On a visit to his grave in London, the BBC found, [there was] no mention of his achievements. Cemetery staff didn’t know who he was.
I can sense the question from some quarters of the audience: are Bryan Donkin’s achievements worth celebrating? Not only did canned food help enable imperial conquest and war, it also led eventually to the mass industrialization of food production, with its attendant crises of public health and monocultural farming, and our psychological distance from our food supply. And one look at any municipal dump will show you how much paper and cardboard waste still goes into landfill, even in a supposedly “paperless world”.
Those points are well taken. But it’s easier to dismiss these advancements when you live in a world that’s always known them. Over the last century or two, large-scale paper production enabled the rise of mass literacy, from only 10% of the world’s population being literate in 1820 to 90% today.
And it’s not just British seamen who eat better because of canned food. A 2011-2013 National Institutes of Health study found that people who eat six or more canned items a week “consume more nutrient-dense food groups such as fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and protein-rich foods, and also have higher intakes of 17 essential nutrients” including potassium, calcium, and fiber. Canned food has helped overcome the tyrannies of distance and time to get more nutrition to more people.
From the perspective of people in 1810, both food canning and mass paper production were immense steps forward. We can’t lay our subsequent inability to maintain some equilibrium at their feet. It’s true that Bryan Donkin didn’t invent the machines he perfected. Both industries probably would have happened, in some form, eventually, without him. But in being the first to perfect them for large-scale use, and granting all the downsides they’ve brought along with them, he hastened the coming of a less hungry, more educated world. Not bad for a guy named Bryan…
How one genius fathered both the canning and paper industries: “The Lives of Bryan,” from @jasontoon.bsky.social.
* Willy Wonka (in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
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As we devise, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Dan Bricklin; he was born on this date in 1951. An engineer, he was the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. Known as “the father of the Spreadsheet,” he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1981 for VisiCalc and was one of six people spotlighted when “the Computer” was named “Machine of the Year” by Time magazine in 1982.
Neither Bricklin nor Frankston reaped huge financial profits from their spreadsheet program, though it sold over a half-million copies by 1983. At the time, copyright protection was not generally sought for software; their company was subsequently acquired by Lotus 1-2-3, which became the new spreadsheet standard (until, of course, Excel).
“Food, culture, people, and landscape are all absolutely inseparable”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: Stephen Lurie and our friends at The Pudding with an elegant and insightful looks at what America’s earliest restaurants can teach us about America…
The New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of menus, dated 1880-1920, captures the emergence of modern restaurant dining…
… A menu describes what a reataurant serves– but a menu also describes who is being served. [Collectively] they refect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.
The thousands of menus in this collection document a period of fundamental transformation– and the birth of the society and the restaurant we know today.
I’ve searched through the archive to tell you that story in ten dishes. Your table is ready– right this way…
Restaurant dining in America was once an Imitation: wannabe aristocrats attempting French feasting. But as the 19th became the 20th century, the American middle class and the true American resaturant emerged: diverse, accessible, opinionated… and at times, chaotic.
From Bisque d’Ecrevisses and Celery in a Crystal Celery Vase through “cosmopolitan” and “ethnic” food to Potatoes O’Brien Au Gratin and Baked Alaska, the tasty (and illuminating) tale of dining out in America: “A History of Menus is a Menu of History,” from @luriethereal.bsky.social and @pudding.cool.
* Anthony Bourdain
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As we dig in, we might send tasty birthday greetings to a man who has built a culinary domain that epitomizes (in its scale, at least one huge quadrant of) the current state of the restaurant business: Wolfgang Puck; he was born on this date in 1949. He made his name with Spago restaurant in Los Angeles in 1982. He now has more than 20 fine dining restaurants and dozens of pizza bars, bistros, cafes, airport restaurants, express outlets, catering services, cultural center cafes; he sells gourmet foods, cookware, and appliances; and he runs a catering empire (that has catered he official Academy Awards Governors Ball every year since 1994).
“I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.”*…
As Frank Landymore explains, we’ve been underestimating fungi…
Scientists have mapped the Earth’s entire underground fungal network, showing that it’s so extensive that if it were stretched into a straight line, it would reach other star systems — and span a sizable chunk of the Milky Way galaxy, for that matter.
The groundbreaking work, published in a study in the journal Science, focused on microorganisms known as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Forming the hidden backbone of our planet’s soil, they circulate water and nutrients and regulate the climate by locking away vast stores of carbon.
Altogether, the global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons, the study found, which is four to six times more than the biomass of all human beings. Around 40 percent of that fungal mass resides in high-altitude or flooded grasslands, like the Everglades in Florida.
The authors hope that their work will highlight the indispensable but overlooked role that these fungal networks play in the Earth’s ecosystems, with around 70 percent of all ground-based plant life depending on the fungi.
“People just aren’t paying attention to these ecosystems,” coauthor Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam and director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), told The New York Times. “What we want to do with these data is really shine a light on some of these hidden patterns underground.”
“I hope this builds into the conversation for their protection because wild grasslands are going away quite quickly,” lead author Justin Stewart, a fellow SPUN biologist, told Live Science. “These are areas that people are really ripping up because it’s much easier to rip up a grass than it is to rip up a tree.”
To unearth this subterranean network, the researchers used data from over 16,000 soil samples across 300 previous papers that calculated the local density of fungal filaments, or hyphae, across the globe. They then fed this data into a machine learning model to predict the density of these hyphal networks per square kilometer of topsoil.
The results were staggering. In all, the model found that the planet is lined with more than 110 quadrillion kilometers of hyphae, or 68 quadrillion miles, which is almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On a cosmic ruler, that equals nearly 12,000 light years, or about a tenth the diameter of our galaxy, which is enough to take you to the Westlund 1 super star cluster.
It’s the clearest picture yet of just how much fungal networks underpin our terrestrial ecosystems. What’s fuzzier from the model, though, is what it says about their health. The density of the fungal networks were lower in soil used for growing crops, but “we don’t know where networks are very healthy and where they’re threatened,” Kiers told the NYT…
“Earth’s Underground Fungus Network Is So Gigantic That If You Stretched It Out, It Would Reach to Other Star Systems,” from @futurism.com.
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As we muse on the mycorrhizal, we might ponder a different kind of massive spread, as we recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev said that without Spam, the Soviet Army would have starved. And Spam was not only eaten but was also incorporated into many other aspects of the war (e.g., grease for guns, cans for scrap metal).
During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Japan, Korea, Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a singular part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific region.
Today Spam is regualrly eaten in 50 countries around the world. According to the Spam website, there are 12.8 cans of Spam products consumed every second; over nine billion cans of Spam have been sold (so far). Big Ben is 1,163 Spam cans tall, and it would take 415,469,599 cans of the stuff to circle the circumference of the Earth. Need to know more? There is a museum devoted to anything and everything related to the Spam brand in Austin, MN.
Contrary to rumor, Spam is only made from six ingredients: pork with ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.
“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”*…
On the rise and fall of the Las Vegas casino buffet…
… With the May 31 closure of the MGM Grand Buffet, the Strip is down to about half a dozen all-you-can-eat buffets. It was once home to more than 10 times that many.
Excluding the sushi bar, the MGM Grand’s $44 Sunday mimosa brunch might have looked about like it did when the resort opened in 1993. It offered crispy brisket at the carving station, biscuits, scrambled eggs and sauteed vegetables. Most of the meats had a tub of gravy next to them, either dark brown or as beige as the decor. The anachronistic vibe at the 535-seat establishmentstood in contrast with more expensive buffets at nearby Caesars Palace and Wynn, overflowing with luxury offerings like turmeric grilled baby octopus, Peking duck and lobster toasts garnished with caviar.
“Young people complain that it looks old,” says Shaunell Samano, the MGM Grand Buffet’s assistant general manager. She has a job lined up at the nearby Luxor. All five of the servers hustling the floor had worked there since the resort’s opening. Most of the staff had been prepping the buffet for at least 26 years. Samano recalled guests even visiting twice a day, including retired boxer Evander Holyfield and his wife a few years ago.
The vanishing old-school Vegas buffet comes as Americans rethink their relationship to food and travel. A 2025 Cornell University study found that the proliferation of GLP-1 drugs is driving down demand for the kinds of indulgent foods available at all-you-can-eat buffets, and several studies show that gastronomic experiences are fundamental to choosing a vacation destination. Still, a 2025 Pew Research Center study indicated that even if consumers are more health-conscious than ever, taste and affordability remain the most important factors in deciding what to eat.
All-you-can-eat buffets may be receding from their spiritual home of Las Vegas, but the country isn’t abandoning them yet.
Golden Corral Chief Executive Officer Lance Trenary told Bloomberg Intelligence in November that his company’s restaurants were averaging the same number of meals served as they were pre-pandemic. The all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ and hot-pot chain KPOT had three locations in 2020; it plans to have more than 150 open by the end of the calendar year. Yelp’s 2026 Trends forecast cited a 252% increase in searches for “all you can eat buffet.”
“Customers like buffets,” says Eric Chiang, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas economics professor who loves using buffets as a way to explain economics. “It’s a flat price with no risk involved and no surprise at the end,” he says.
The novelty of all-you-can-eat dining is rooted in contradictory American lifestyles: One diner sees freedom and abundance, while another sees waste and gluttony. They’re rare restaurants where, at least for an hour or two, anyone can eat like royalty…
… the all-you-can-eat buffet is inextricably linked to the glamorous excesses of Las Vegas, where famed promoter Herb McDonald hired Norwegian chef Arne Hansen Rom in 1946 to tailor the European smorgasbord to the tastes of the Western Yankee. The Midnight Chuckwagon, later known as the Buckaroo Buffet, lured gamblers at the El Rancho hotel and its previous incarnation, the Thunderbird. Along with a lounge act came unlimited food ranging from deviled eggs to shrimp cocktail to Rom’s specialty: barbecue spareribs. The all-you-can-eat buffet evolved into a signature loss leader for resorts competing to attract a new wave of Las Vegas tourists: families and international travelers.
When John Curtas recalls his first visit to a Las Vegas buffet as a 10-year-old in the early 1960s, the veteran Las Vegas food critic remembers a haunch of beef that looked 12 feet tall manned by a chef wielding a carving knife like a scimitar. Beside the beef sat piles of shrimp, whole-cooked turkeys, potato salad and cowboy beans. It cost just $1, and he could return for more without embarrassment.
“Buffets gave you such a dazzle factor and eye candy,” Curtas says. “But they also gave a lot of perceived value for people and for families.”…
More on the social psychology and economics of buffets: “The Quintessential Old-School Las Vegas Buffet Bids Farewell” gift link from @bloomberg.com.
* Mae West
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As we go back for seconds, we might spare a thought for Edwin Traisman; he died on this date in 2007. A food scientist, he is best remembered for helping to create Cheez Whiz for Kraft, then for perfecting the method used by McDonalds standardize their french fries (by freezing partially-cooked fries for transport and storage). But relevantly to the piece above, he also helped initiate research on E. coli 0157:H7, which was at the time (1987) a little known pathogen.
“Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude”*…
Your correspondent is hitting the road, so (Roughly) Daily will be in hiatus for ten days ro so. Regular service should resume on (or about) May 24…
Tal Lavin devotes the latest installment of The Sword and the Sandwich, the wonderful newsletter he co-authors with David Swanson, to the quintessentially-American fowl, the turkey…
There are very few occasions in life in which someone gets to choose their own name: confirmation, conversion, or, in my case, transition from female to male. Out of all the names in the world, I chose my own; I wanted to pick something that would allow me to present as my male self, that would erase confusion, that would say something essential about me. Choosing your own name is not to be taken lightly.
In the case of the turkey—that busty bird whose thinly-sliced meat is a ubiquitous filler for club sandos, Thanksgiving-leftover feasts and deli lunch-hour specials—the ability to choose its own name might have been a mercy, and avoided a tremendous amount of confusion. The etymological journey of why a turkey is called a turkey makes the fraught rite of transgender name-choosing seem like a cake walk (or bird strut).
The turkey, meleagris gallopavo, is a big galumphing bird indigenous to the Americas, famous for its huge breast, commanding carriage, and bland but abundant meat. In English, it is named after Turkey, which is a country across an entire ocean from its native stomping grounds. In Turkish, the language of Turkey, a turkey is called a hindi, which means “from India.” In Hindi, the language of India, a turkey is called a टर्की (Ṭarkī). In Slovak and Albanian, its name means “chicken from overseas.” In Scandinavian languages and Dutch, it’s named for Calicut, a major trading post along India’s Malabar Coast. In Welsh, it’s twrci. In Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, it’s indyuk, indyk or indeyka—Indian bird.
In other words, languages across the entire world are eager to praise (or blame) the wrong country for this entirely American bird. And they can’t even agree on what wrong country to attribute it to. Linguists and historians have put their heads together on why this is, and it seems to come down to a fowl case of mistaken identity.
What’s undoubtedly central to this geographical misunderstanding is the role the Ottoman Empire played in trade to Europe around the period of the Columbian Exchange…
Read on the rest of the fascinating story: “Turkey,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we gobble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1607 that a group of 104 colonists from England arrived in what we now know as Virginia and established the first permanent English colony in America. They named the settlement Jamestown in honor of King James I.
We might also recall that we have this group (as it grew)– not the New England pilgrims– to thank for Thanksgiving.
The first documented English Thanksgiving in North America happened in Virginia in 1619, one year before the Pilgrims even arrived at Plymouth Rock. This first Thanksgiving lasted “10, 15 minutes,” according to Graham Woodlief, the president of the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival. No Native Americans were invited, no women were present, and there’s scant evidence of turkeys or yams.
We might also note that it was on this date in 1968 that Frank Zappa released his debut solo album, Lumpy Gravy on MGM’s Verve Records label (an early version of the album had been issued by Capitol Records on 4-track cartridge in August 1967).
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