Posts Tagged ‘hot dog’
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”*…
Your correspondent is headed into a melange of meetings (and their attendant travel), so (Roughly) Daily will be on pause for a few days. Regular service should resume on or around June 19. I’ll leave you with a (timely?) tale from the past…
“Steve” publishes a wonderful weekly newsletter, Dates With History. In a recent post he shares the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt…
If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.
A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.
On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.
A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event 645 years ago next Monday—15 June 1381.
That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.
His name was Wat Tyler…
[Steve explains the origins and workings of the feudal system in England, the (extraordinary) impact of the Black Death, the Poll Tax, the subsequent rise of peasant resistance, the Revolt itself, Wat’s demise, and the immediate aftermath. He concludes…]
… Wat Tyler enters the historical record on 7 June 1381 and exits eight days later, 15 June 1381, when he was executed. That’s his lot.
The revolt failed.
But the idea it carried—that labour had value, that taxation required some semblance of fairness, that the common man had rights—survived.
The Peasants’ Revolt echoed what the barons had done at Runnymede in 1215—confront a king and extract written concessions from him. Tyler’s rebels knew their history. Had they succeeded, those sealed charters would have amounted to a Magna Carta for the poor.
Over the three centuries that followed, the power of English rulers to do as they pleased eroded steadily. By 1689, the Bill of Rights made explicit what three hundred years had been quietly establishing—that rulers governed within limits they did not set themselves.
Wat Tyler hadn’t written that principle. But he had fomented one of its earliest and most violent proofs of concept.
There wouldn’t be another poll tax in England for six hundred years—until Margaret Thatcher introduced one in 1990 and was promptly removed from office.
History, it turns out, has a long memory for bad ideas…
(Trying to) hold power to account: “It’s 1381 and the peasants are revolting.”
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch) in Paddy Chayefsky‘s and Sidney Lumet‘s Network
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As we ponder power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring that most proletariat of dishes, the hot dog. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another”*…
Wisdom for the exquisite Existential Comics (“A philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes.”)…
Frege was an early philosopher of language, who formulated a theory of semantics that largely had to do with how we form truth propositions about the world. His theories were enormously influential for people like Russel, Carnap, and even Wittgenstein early in his career. They all recognized that the languages we use are ambiguous, so making exact determinations was always difficult. Most of them were logicians and mathematicians, and wanted to render ordinary language as exact and precise as mathematical language, so we could go about doing empirical science with perfect clarity. Russell, Carnap, and others even vowed to create an exact scientific language (narrator: “they didn’t create an exact scientific language”).
Later on, Wittgenstein and other philosophers such as J.L. Austin came to believe that a fundamental mistake was made about the nature of language itself. Language, they thought, doesn’t pick out truth propositions about the world at all. Speech acts were fundamentally no different than other actions, and were merely used in social situations to bring about certain effects. For example, in asking for a sandwich to be passed across the table, we do not pick out a certain set of facts about the world, we only utter the words with the expectations that it will cause certain behavior in others. Learning what is and isn’t a sandwich is more like learning the rules of a game than making declarations about what exists in the world, so for Wittgenstein, what is or isn’t a sandwich depends only on the success or failure of the word “sandwich” in a social context, regardless of what actual physical properties a sandwich has in common with, say, a hotdog.
“Is a Hotdog a Sandwich? A Definitive Study,” from @existentialcomics.com.
* René Descartes
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As we add mayonnaise, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Norbert Wiener; he was born on this date in 1894. A computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines– a field that has had implications for implications for a wide variety of fields, including engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (Wiener credited Leibniz as the “patron saint of cybernetics.)
His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and many others. Wiener was one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms and could possibly be simulated by machines– an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.
“I’m more American than apple pie. I’m like apple pie, with a hot dog in it.”*…
From Kelsey McKinney and the invaluable Defector.com, investigative reporting at its most trenchant: just how many hot dogs do Americans eat?…
Last summer, my friend Dana brought me a very important question. She and some friends had been debating all weekend whether or not a certain officially reported number could possibly be true. Could I report it out? Could I find out whether there were lies afoot and frauds being perpetrated? As a good friend, I promised that I would try. And here I am, a mere 10 months later, trying.
The issue is this: The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council puts out a figure each year claiming to be the number of hot dogs an American eats annually.
I will give you a second to think about how many hot dogs this might be.
…
have asked this question at every party I have been to in the last 10 months, and most people give an answer somewhere between five and 25. I, a lover of hot dogs, guessed 30 when first faced with this question. It is still nowhere near the number the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council claims.
The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (from here on out referred to as Big Hot Dog) claims that the average American eats … 70 hot dogs a year… To be clear, this number includes only hot dogs. It does not include bratwursts or sausages or those mini dogs that can be rolled up in pigs-in-a-blanket. It does not include veggie dogs. It is only hot dogs that Big Hot Dog claims we are each eating 70 of every single year…
I emailed Eric Mittenthal, president of Big Hot Dog, last May to ask him where this number comes from and he said, “The number is an estimate based on the sales data we have.” OK, yes. I figured that much. I tried to ask follow-up questions, but they were left unanswered. So we are forced to try to confirm this figure using our powers of deduction. It is important that we do because this number is cited left and right. In the past five years, Big Hot Dog’s numbers have been quoted by Newsweek, and USA Today, and Time and a dozen other major publications. But are they … real?
Seventy hot dogs per American x 341,362,543 Americans = nearly 23.9 BILLION hot dogs per year…
How many dogs do Americans down? Read on to find out: “Big Hot Dog Must Tell The Truth,” (gift article) @mckinneykelsey @DefectorMedia.
* Stephen Colbert
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As we pass the mustard, we might note that today is “New Beers Eve,” the day before National Beer Day in the U.S.– a commemoration of the date (in 1933) that the Cullen–Harrison Act came into effect, legalizing the sale of 3.2% alcohol beer in the U.S.– which presaged the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment (on December 5, 1933) via the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, and the end of Prohibition.
“Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving, and identity”*…
Your correspondent is heading several time zones away, so (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus for a week. Meantime…
Kelly Alexander on the very real way in which we are not only what we eat, but also what we imagine eating…
Despite the faux social science of trend reports, I have always been interested in the flavours that exert a hold on our collective hearts and minds. I’m especially intrigued by how the foods we seem to fetishise in the present – the artisanal, the local, the small-batch – are never the ones we seem to associate with the tantalising prospect of ‘the future’.
How do we know what will be delicious in the future? It depends on who ‘we’ are. For Baby Boomers who didn’t grow up on a diet of Dune-style scenarios of competing for resources on a depleted planet, it was TV dinners, angel whips and Tang – the instant powdered orange drink that became a hit after NASA included it on John Glenn’s Mercury spaceflight in 1962. That same year, The Jetsons – an animated show chronicling the life and times of a family in 2062 – premiered on US television. In one episode, mom Jane ‘makes’ breakfast for son Elroy using an iPad-like device. She orders ‘the usual’: milk, cereal (‘crunchy or silent?’ Jane asks Elroy, before pre-emptively selecting ‘silent’), bacon, and one soft-boiled egg, all of which is instantly beamed to the table…
For many students in my Food Studies courses at the University of North Carolina, the ‘future delicious’ conjures readymade meal ‘solutions’ that eliminate not just the need for cooks but the need for meals. This includes Soylent, the synthesised baby formula-like smoothies, or the food substitutes slugged by software engineers coding at their desks. It includes power bars and Red Bulls to provide energy and sustenance without the fuss of a dinner table (an antiquated ceremony that takes too long). Also, meal kits that allow buyers to play at cooking by mixing a few things that arrive pre-packaged, sorted and portioned; and Impossible Burgers, a product designed to mimic the visceral and textural experience of eating red meat – down to realistic drips of ‘blood’ (beet juice enhanced with genetically modified yeast), and named to remind us that no Baby Boomer thought such a product was even possible.
Such logic makes the feminist anthropologist Donna Haraway wary. It betrays, she writes, ‘a comic faith in technofixes’ that ‘will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children.’ To Haraway’s point, the future delicious tends to value the technological component of its manufacture over the actual food substrate, sidestepping what the material culture expert Bernie Herman described to me as ‘the fraught and negotiated concept of delicious’…
More tastiness at: “What our fantasies about futuristic food say about us,” from @howamericaeats in @aeonmag.
See also: “The perfect meal in a pill?“
How do science fiction authors imagine the food of the future? Works conceived between 1896 and 1973 addressed standardised consumers, alienated by a capitalist society in pursuit of profitability. Were these works prophecy or metaphor?
* Jonathan Safran Foer
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that Nathan’s Famous, on Coney Island, sold it’s one-millionth hot dog. The restaurant (which has, of course, grown into both a chain and a retail brand) had been founded by Nathan Handwerker in 1916.
“Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside”*…
A logistical note to those readers who subscribe by email: Google is discontinuing the Feedburner email service that (Roughly) Daily has used since its inception; so email will now be going via Mailchimp. That should be relatively seamless– no re-subscription required– but there may be a day or two of duplicate emails, as I’m not sure how quickly changes take effect at Feedburner. If so, my apologies. For those who don’t get (Roughly) Daily in their inboxes but would like to, the sign-up box is to the right… it’s quick, painless, and can, if you change your mind, be terminated with a click. And now, to today’s business…
After seeing the Open Data Institute’s project on the changing British Diet, I couldn’t help but wonder how the American diet has changed over the years.
The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of these sort of things through the Food Availability Data System. The program estimates both how much food is produced and how much food people eat, dating back to 1970 through 2013. The data covers the major food categories, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, across many food items on a per capita and daily basis.
In [a wonderful interactive chart], we look at the major food items in each category. Each column is a category, and each chart is a time series for a major food item, represented as serving units per category. Items move up and down based on their ranking in each group during a given year….
The always-illuminating Nathan Yau (@flowingdata) lets us see what we ate on an average day, for the past several decades: “The Changing American Diet.” Watch chicken zoom from behind… see carrots have a moment… puzzle over the state of dark leafy greens…
[Image above: source]
* Mark Twain
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As we ponder the perseverance of meat and potatoes, we might send tasty birthday greetings to Nathan Handwerker; he was born on this date in 1892. In 1916, with $300 borrowed from friends, he and his wife Ida started a hot dog stand on Coney Island– and launched what evolved into Nathan’s Famous restaurants and the related Nathan’s retail product line.
An emigrant from Eastern Europe, Handwerker found a job slicing bread rolls for Feltman’s German Gardens, a Coney Island restaurant that sold franks (hot dogs) for 10 cents each. Encouraged by a singing waiter there and his piano player– Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante– Handwerker struck out on his own, selling his hot dogs (spiced with Ida’s secret recipe) for a nickel. At the outset of his new venture, he reputedly hired young men to wear white coats with stethoscopes around their necks to stand near his carts and eat his hot dogs, giving the impression of purity and cleanliness.
Handwerker named his previously unnamed hot dog stand Nathan’s Hot Dogs in 1921 after Sophie Tucker, then a singer at the nearby Carey Walsh’s Cafe, made a hit of the song “Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin?”
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