The Empire Builder Diet, Part 4- Enter the Meat and Potatoes

Missed the first three parts? Go here, here, and here.

By the turn of the 20th Century, it might seem as though everything was going pretty well in America- electrical power was spreading across the nation, refrigeration was becoming popular, Tesla had invented X-rays, radio, and radio controlled vehicles, the automobile was in its nascent stages… life was moving forward nicely. All was not exactly hunky-dory though- living conditions were deplorable, half of the food on the market was poisonous bullshit, and people were being worked to death and murdered by the Pinkertons when they had the temerity to demand decent wages or a reasonable working day. In short, life was improving in some regards and going straight to dogshit in others, not unlike any time in America outside of the period between the 1940s and 1980s… provided you were white, that is.

For instance, though the ultra rich were wildly, insanely wealthy, the top 1% of the population owned as much as the remaining 99% put together. The wage gap, driven by a massive influx of cheap labor from Europe, meant that competition for even the shittiest jobs was horrendous and people slaved for a pittance. Work in steel mills, for instance, utterly destroyed the health of those in them for a maximum of $38 a day in 2019 dollars, though they put in 12 hour shifts in 117 degree temperatures year-round. Older workers made $23 in the same conditions, sweeping up to avoid starving to death given that there was zero opportunity for retirement at the turn of the century and no provision to ensure the elderly didn’t die alone in the dark at the time (Bettman 77-79). There was no provision for workers who were injured doing their dangerous jobs, so if a family member became sick, crippled, or injured, the family would soon be evicted and would sleep on the streets or in police stations. The average family couldn’t make enough money to afford meat in the cities, so “they [would] often live on bread alone and have no meat for weeks” (Bettman 80).

“There is a benign nostalgia for the food of the Gilded Age, reinforced no doubt by the proliferation of old-fashioned cookbooks crammed with mouth watering recipes. The cornucopia comes to mind as neatly symbolizing America’s blessed fertility which lured the half-starved Irishman across the ocean. Culinarily speaking, America appeared to be one gigantic, groaning board.

But the board in reality groaned only for a small minority of Americans. The country’s fertility notwithstanding, the masses were forced to subsist on a crude and scanty diet of which tea and bread were staples, supplemented now and then in trash cans, and many people shopped for their dinner in the secondhand food market- where they could select from leftover groceries and castoff trimmings and bones from butcher shops (Bettman 109).

Food Becomes Poison Because… Capitalism. It’s Clearly the Best.

Even when they could afford meat and butter, people were often fucked if they were living in the city, because all of the food was rotten, bootleg bullshit, or just straight up poisoned. People tend to think that food in bygone eras was untainted and pure, though that was far from the case- city fare in the early 1900’s would have been healthier if it had been prepared by Jolly Jane Toppan. Up until the meat packing industry really took off, people were eating meat cut from emaciated and maimed cattle that arrived in deplorable conditions by rail, and then was stored unrefrigerated after butchering, where it generally rotted some before it hit your plate. And for side dishes, they often ate overripe or rotting fruits and vegetables, as the grocers were butt-fucking retarded and had a tendency to only purchase ripened fruits for sale.

The milk was hardly any better- diluted 1/1 with water, dairy producers or gorcers added molasses, chalk, or plaster of paris to it in order to hide its actual color, which was more like purulent green. Distilleries would also sell their garbage to farmers for their cows to eat, which produced what was known as “swill milk” which would get the babies who drank it completely hammered- feed the cows mash and they produce alcoholic milk, it seems. The milk situation was so bad that in 1870 it was revealed that some of the city’s milk cows were so fucked up from tuberculosis that they had to be held up by cranes so they could be milked until they dropped dead (Bettman 115).

Feeling like you might just puke on your shoes? Well, buckle up, buttercup- it’s about to get a lot fucking worse. The butter of the late 19th Century sold for $5.80 a pound in 2019 dollars, in spite of the fact that it was invariably rancid and usually a mixture of casein and water or very inexplicably a wacky combination of calcium, gypsum, gelatin fat, and mashed potatoes (Bettman 117).

“The alternative was ‘bogus butter,’ and the ingredients of this concoction were so wildly incongruous as to generate several investigations by city and state. Fat from hogs along with every other conceivable animal part that the slaughterhouse could not turn to cash were picked up by the oleo makers and processed in filthy worksheds. Bleaches were blended into the mix to give the product the appearance of real butter.

A margarine factory employee in 1889 told New York State investigators that his work had made ‘his hands so sore…/ his nails came off, and his hair dropped out and he had to be confined to the Bellevue Hospital for general disability.’ That customers frequently bought that pestilent muck and fed it to their families was due to the artfulness of the grocers, who scraped off the real labels and relettered the boxes ‘Western butter’ or ‘best creamery butter'” (Ibid).

And the food adulteration didn’t end there- bread had everything from oven ash to grit to sulfur of copper and doses of alum in it. Coffee was mostly beans and chickory, children’s candy was colored with an array of toxic shit, jarred pickles had acid so strong in them that the pickles dissolved and the juice burned your fingers, and tinned meat was often ancient and rotten. Little kids became addicted to the less acidic pickles because they were so undernourished that the high salt content acted like a strong stimulant in their bodies. Their emaciated bodies could barely handle real food when they were offered the opportunity to eat it, so they actually had to be put in homes and taught how to eat real food, though they necver lost their weird-ass cravings for pickles. As for the poor adults, they ate so quickly they hardly knew what they had eaten afterwards, and usually had horrific indigestion from scarfing down their shit-dog food during their very literally five-minute lunch breaks. In short, life in the city was fucking horrific at the turn of the 20th Century, and the culprit was capitalism… which is something to consider the next time you go to the polls with a compulsion to vote for an ultra-rich person who clearly hates you and everyone who looks like you.

If You Avoided the Poison, Eating Well Was Pretty Simple in the Early 1900s, Because You Had No Choice

“Prior to industrialization and the development of commercial food processing, typical American families prepared simple meals, from scratch, at home. In the early 1900s, there were no fast food chains or frozen TV dinners. When planning a 1908 menu, you were limited to what was readily available in your garden, cellar or icebox — or at the nearest general store, which could be several miles away” (Casto).

As America was still an agrarian nation, by and large, in the beginning of the 20th Century, it was still possible for a lot of the population to access wholesome foods- you just couldn’t live in or around a city. Even in the areas that would become the suburbs, people hunted and fished for wild game and grew their own vegetables and herbs in backyard gardens. That meant their fruits and veggies were completely seasonal, and the chicks and proto-douchebags had to forgo the 300 avocados they now require every year to sustain their lives.

Typical spring fare for the average rural American consisted of a meat-heavy diet revolving around “veal, steak, roast beef, hamburger, ham, oysters, clams, flounder, mackerel, codfish and shad” for protein sources, and every day’s menu included potatoes, along with “tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, turnips, beets or asparagus” (Casto). Fruits weren’t all that plentiful at the time, and when they were eaten, they were eaten either in the morning or as part of a dessert, and generally consisted of berries, apples, cherries, pears, and citrus fruits transported from the South by rail.

As I mentioned above, milk was a dicey proposition that generally only consisted of canned milk reserved for baking. And holy fuck, were Americans at this time obsessed with baking. Bread baking was a daily occurrence, and muffins, cakes, or pies were a regular part of the menu as well. The first pizzeria opened in the US in 1905, and pizza making rapidly spread outward from New York City as people discovered the awesomeness of the most perfect food ever conceived.

America Becomes a Culinary Version of Epstein’s Rape Island

As with anything else, the drive for Americans to be the biggest and the best on the planet from a physical standpoint had to come to an end. Hell, even Texans have given up on the masculine ideal of broad shoulders and a barrel chest for the cozy idea of dad bods and fat asses, as almost 70% of Texan adults are either fatties or fucking land whales. The beginning came not with bang, but as with most things, a whimper. A combination of ridiculous Christian diet fads intended to keep people from having libidos combined with efforts to produce tasty, non-poisonous foods (that’s actually how processed foods rose to popularity) to just fuck modern man sideways diet-wise. No matter how noble their intentions, the things designed to make our lives better in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century ended up fucking us harder than Jeffry Epstein’s celebrity buddies fucked preteens on his rape island.

Cereal

To understand the history of the edible atrocity known as breakfast cereal, you must first understand one thing- America is for whatever reason a breeding ground of pants-shittingly-crazy, doom-sayer Christian psychotics. Since the nation’s founding, these motherfuckers have just been eating paint chips and screeching about everything from “unnatural” sex to dancing to the coming Christian-ordained apocalypse, because Jesus hates the planet and aims to destroy it like a Teva’s-clad Godzilla at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Breakfast cereal was their solution to the fucking and dancing- Seventh Day Adventists wanted to replace a protein-rich diet with one that would leave you malnourished enough that you’d join their cult and you’d lack the energy and the testosterone necessary to do any fucking. That’s not hyperbole- John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, was obsessed to the point of distraction with preventing masturbation, and in particular female masturbation.

“These manipulations came from dark and foul sources, such as constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, anal fissures, and uncleanliness of the organs. Other foul temptations were to be found in choice of bedding. Said Dr. Kellogg:

‘Soft beds and pillows must be carefully avoided…the floor, with a single folded blanket beneath the sleeper, would be preferable. A hair mattress, or a bed of corn husks —covered with two or three blankets or a quilted cotton mattress makes a very healthy and comfortable bed.’

And as you make your child comfortable on their bed of dried cornhusk or smashed brick (whatever you have available), Kellogg recommended children sleep on their sides, curled in upon their genitals. If you child is obstinate and keeps rolling over during sleep, tie a knotted sheet or rope to their backs. The discomfort will urge them back on their sides, where their genitals are less likely to be stimulated.

Speaking of stimulation, avoid consumption of sexually aggressive food such as tea, candy, cinnamon and peppermint. Said Kellogg, “Tea and coffee have led thousands to perdition in this way. Candies, spices, cinnamon, cloves, peppermint, and all strong essences, powerfully excite the genital organs and lead to the same result” (Oneill).

The man’s prescription for the evils of masturbation for adults was just a diet only fit for livestock, but for kids, he would circumcise boys without anesthesia, cut off chick’s clits, or burn them with carbolic acid and other blistering agents. And that’s how we came to have the bullshit you people undoubtedly feed to your kids, though it lacks any nutritive content and is basically just sugary bullshit you stuff down their throats because you’re too lazy to make real food. If you’re unconvinced by corn flakes on their own, here are a couple more reasons to avoid that bullshit just on principle, without getting into the shit nutrition in cereal:

• the inventor of the first breakfast cereal was a Grahamite (follower of Alexander Graham, a Seventh Day Adventist obsessed with the “evils” of masturbation. Graham invented the Graham Cracker so people would stop fucking and playing Spider Man in hotels. “He was on a strong anti-masturbation crusade [and] said, ‘If you’re eating meat, you’re acting like an animal and you should avoid those types of primal instincts — like the urge to have sex’”) The first cereal was called Granula, and along with colonics was believed by its idiot inventor to cure stomach ailments and prevent your dick from getting hard.
• Kellogg invented that bullshit hikers and girls love eating, granola, out of Granula, and believed it was the first step in keeping your peen soft enough to satisfy the most ardent No-Fap fuckwit.
• C.W. Post, the man who founded the Post Cereal company and invented that inedible gravel bullshit called Grape Nuts, was an acolyte of Kellogg who had horrible stomach pain he was convinced he could cure with his bullshit cereal. he couldn’t, so he blew his fucking brains out, yet people still condier that horrible shit to be food.

Random Aside: No Matter What You Think to the Contrary, Pre-Modern Man Outfucked Us

For those of you who bemoan the gay pride parade and the death of heterosexuality or whatever the fuck uneducated people who jack dicks to the Bible bitch about, you’re bemoaning a recent problem. There was no “gay” or “straight” prior to the modern era, because people just liked to fuck. The historical record is bursting at the seams with bisexual sex in all walks of life. Hell, even the biggest anti-same-sex fuckwits like the Catholics had multiple priests who had male partners.

“Modernity and sexuality are understood to go hand in hand—bound together in an overdetermined, co-constitutive relationship. Perhaps the most abiding narrative of modern sexuality, and of modernity more generally, is the story of the emergence of the notion of sexual identity and the formation and firming of a homo/heterosexual binary—the conviction that sexual desires, feelings, and actions signified sexual types: kinds of persons fundamentally defined by their sexual object choice. Indeed, the very notion of “sexuality” as a cornerstone of individual identity and selfhood is itself a modern production, created out of the confluence of modernity’s distinctive forces. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century scientific and medical theories identified and differentiated new sexual types, often linked to racial taxonomies… [and the] rise of a modern bureaucratic state raised the stakes of sexual identification further, rewarding heterosexual settlement and targeting the homosexual as anti-citizen.

The equation of modern sexuality with the invention of sexual identity was most famously articulated by Michel Foucault, who argued that the late nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic and consequential shift in the understanding of sex—one that bound sexual acts and desires to sexual identities. Increasingly, he proposed, medical and state authorities identified the homosexual as “a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.” (Kunzel)

So, quit yer bitchin’- homosexuality is no less natural than homosexuality, because both of them are fucking unnatural. And get to fucking, because if you’re “straight” or “gay” you’re fucking half as many people as your great-great-great grandparents likely did.

H.J. Heinz and Ketchup

H.J Heinz was actually a god among men at the turn of the 20th Century. Depending on whose story you deep true, he claims to have invented tomato ketchup (which at the time was vile, based on fish paste or anchovies, and was just there to hide the taste of rotting meat). Truly, ketchup prior to Heinz was some vile shit, reminiscent of liquamen, the disgusting Roman fish sauce that I’m certain I mentioned at some point. Here’s one historical recipe for old school ketchup, which is enough to make my wonder how people managed to eat anything at all, ever.

“‘Take a Gallon of strong stale Beer, one Pound of Anchovies wash’d and clean’d from the Guts, half an Ounce of Mace, half an Ounce of Cloves, a quarter of an Ounce of Pepper, three large Races of Ginger, one Pound of Eschallots, and one Quart of flap Mushrooms well rubb’d and pick’d; boil all these over a slow Fire till it is half wasted, and strain it thro’ a Flannel Bag; let it stand till it is quite cold, then bottle and stop it very close…’

The mushrooms that played a supporting role in this early recipe soon became a main ingredient, and from 1750 to 1850 the word ketchup began to mean any number of thin dark sauces made of mushrooms or even walnuts” (Jurafsky).

In the 19th Century, the recipe began to include tomatoes, and Heinz perfected it in 1876 with Heinz Ketchup. Not only was it the perfect condiment for the newest food fad, hamburgers, but it was designed to be a safe alternative to all of the disgusting, adulterated shit on the market. A “pioneer in both scientific and ‘technological innovations to solve problems like bacterial contamination,'” Heinz “personally worked to control the ‘purity of his products by managing his employees,’ offering hot showers and weekly manicures for the women handling food” (Wikipedia). The man was nearly a saint, creating the first factory in the world run on electric power, gave his workers health benefits and recreation facilities, and was basically a father figure to a class of people who were typically just abused and discarded like trash, or slaughtered by Heinz’s neighbor Andrew Carnegie. The company he created, however, which improved the health of so many people in the early 20th Century, would lead the charge to destroy the health of Americans by heavily utilizing high fructose corn syrup in the place of sugar in just about everything it produced. 

Milton Hershey’s and America’s Obsession with Being Obese

A contemporary of Heinz and fellow resident of Pennsylvania, Milton Hershey shared Heinz’s genuine desire to do good in the world, and to provide superior comestibles to the people of the United States. Hershey is the man who introduced caramel and milk chocolate made with fresh milk to the world, an innovation that made him almost instantly rich. He passed that wealth down to his line workers, whom he treated better than most people of the time treated their own family, founding an extremely clean and well-equipped orphanage, a trust fund for scholarships to his Industrial School, and the most badass company town in history, replete with tree-lined streets, comfortable accommodations, and an amusement park for his employees. Tragically, he created a lasting legacy ultimately to be undone by the fact that in his wake America has become very, very fat. Certainly, not all of the blame lies at Hershey’s feet, but his creation of milk chocolate, and the production of it for an entire American candy industry put a sweet tooth in Americans that only methamphetamine derivatives have been successful in quelling.

Coca-Cola and the Soda Craze

It was also in this period that America began its love affair with soda, one of the primary drivers of obesity in the world. Though soft drinks began to be sold as early as the beginning of the 18th Century, they didn’t really hit their stride until a named pharmacist John Pemberton from Columbus, Georgia invented Coca-Cola, which changed the world’s taste buds, waist lines, and dental health. Others piled onto the band wagon, and then in the late 1970s they began to use high fructose corn syrup in their drinks to ensure every motherfucker on the planet could enjoy a nice dose of metabolic syndrome.

Which brings us to the present… though I realize I’m skipping the war years and all that, but those decades will actually get covered in the next (and last) installment in the series I thought would be a quick one or two-parter and has now grown beyond my ability to control it.

We Know It’s Poison, Yet We Keep Eating The Shit

High Fructose Corn Syrup was introduced in the 1970s, and that, combined with America’s newfound fat phobia and love of jogging combined to drop the average American male’s height for the first time since the Civil War. In 1979, the average American male’s height was 177.54cm (5’10”), and it’s dropped a full inch since then. I’ve mentioned that we’re growing less and less virile, strong, and intelligent as we grow fatter with every decade, and it seems to be due in large part to this horrible shit American companies love so very much. I’ll cover it more in depth in a future article, but until then you might want to revisit this one to get a broad understanding of my hatred of processed foods.

Think You’re Eating Too Much? You’re Probably Just Eating Too Much of the Wrong Things

If there is a more annoying bunch of illogical, self-aggrandizing, useless pseudointellectuals than the calories in-calories out crowd, I don’t know who they might be (I think most powerlifters and Olympic Weightlifters staunchly adhere to the CICO theory), but if you’re one of them, take a step back and literally fuck your own face. Not only is that just a bold-faced inability to understand basic concepts, but it is such a simple thing to wrap your arms around that you might need to seek help finding an assisted living home where they cater to people of your intellectual caliber.

In any even, much is made about the fact that we eat more food than our 1970s antecedents- 23% more calories, in fact. What is generally not mentioned, is that the composition of those calories has changed greatly. Of the 2481 daily calories Americans eat, on average,

“Nearly half of those calories come from just two food groups: flours and grains (581 calories, or 23.4%) and fats and oils (575, or 23.2%), up from a combined 37.3% in 1970. Meats, dairy and sweeteners provide smaller shares of our daily caloric intake than they did four decades ago; then again, so do fruits and vegetables (7.9% in 2010 versus 9.2% in 1970). Most of the fats we consume are in the form of vegetable oils: soybean, corn, canola and other oils used as ingredients or in which foods are cooked. Such oils contributed 402 calories on their own to our daily diet in 2010” (DeSilver).

So right out of the gate, we’re eating fewer meats and far more processed grains. That is significant, because of the thermic effect of protein as compared to fats or carbs, something about which the calories in-calories out dipshits apparently never learned while getting a master’s in gym class. The thermic effect of food is essentially how many calories you burn simply to make use of the food you consume. For protein, it’s 20-35% of the calories consumed, whereas it’s 5-15% for carbs and between nothing and 10% for fats, which are very easily digested. Highly processed foods, which is what most Americans now eat, have extremely low thermic effects, so their metabolisms are unimpacted by the bullshit their shoving down their fat, uneducated gullets… which means they have plenty of calories to expend spreading bullshit about diets all over the fucking internet (Barr).

Not only are we eating fewer meats, but we’re eating the wrong meats, and the wrong dairy- put the goddamned yogurt and cheese down. This isn’t a sorority house, and if you’re snacking on wine and cheese I’ve no idea why the fuck you’re here, but get the fuck out.

“Several interesting shifts are happening within food groups. For the past decade, for instance, chicken has topped beef as the most-consumed meat. In 2014, Americans ate an average of 47.9 pounds of chicken a year (2.1 ounces a day), versus 39.4 pounds (1.7 ounces a day) of beef. While average chicken consumption has more than doubled since 1970, beef has fallen by more than a third. Over in the dairy aisle, Americans are drinking 42% less milk than they did in 1970: 12.6 gallons a year, equivalent to 4.8 ounces a day. However, we’re eating a lot more cheese: 21.9 pounds a year, nearly three times the average annual consumption in 1970. And yogurt has soared in popularity, from negligible levels in 1970 to almost 1.2 gallons per person per year in 2014 – a 1,700% increase” (Ibid).

And the low carb craze? Misguided. Again, we ditched far healthier rice and potatoes for bread and more bread, with a side of that goddamned high fructose corn syrup.

“Americans consume 29% more grains, mostly in the form of breads, pastries and other baked goods, than they did in 1970 – the equivalent of 122.1 pounds a year. But that’s actually down from 2000, the year of “peak grain,” when per capita annual consumption was a hefty 137.6 pounds. While corn products are a somewhat bigger part of the average American diet (14 pounds per person per year, up from 4.9 pounds in 1970), wheat is still the country’s staple grain. America’s sweet tooth peaked in 1999, when each person consumed an average of 90.2 pounds of added caloric sweeteners a year, or 26.7 teaspoons a day. In 2014, sweetener use was down to 77.3 pounds per year, or 22.9 teaspoons a day. (Note that those figures don’t include noncaloric sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose and stevia.) While most of the sweetener consumed in 1970 was refined sugar, the market is now almost evenly split between sugar and corn-derived sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup” (Ibid).

So again, we ditched the old school meat, milk, and potatoes for chicken, bread, cheese, yogurt, and various sugars, yet people persist in claiming all calories are fucking equal. This isn’t the world of Harrison Bergeron, and no matter how hard you try to say that all calories are equal in the eyes of your metabolism they’re not. And what’s truly fucking ridiculous about the entire thing is that “73% of Americans said they were very or fairly focused on healthy and nutritious eating,” yet they’re disgusting fatbodies. So maybe it’s time to rethink what we’re eating and look to the past for a sensible answer, because you’re certainly not going to find one out of these “gurus” on Facebook and Instagram.

The last part of this will drop this weekend, because I wrote this and it as a single article that got way too long, and I have the solution to the problems you are having in the bedroom, gym, and boardroom… not those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, but because those who fail to learn history are doomed to be made to look fucking retarded by yours truly. 

Didn’t get enough rage in that one? Need to feel a little more of my hate burning through your soul? 365 Days of Brutality, my badass new book is available in print and ebook!

Sources:

Barr SB, Wright JC.  Postprandial energy expenditure in whole-food and processed-food meals: implications for daily energy expenditure.  Food Nutr Res. 2010; 54: 10.3402/fnr.v54i0.5144.

Bettman, Otto. The Good Old Days–they Were Terrible! New York: Random House, 1974.

Brownlee, John.  How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bottle.  Fast Company.  21 Dec 2013.  Web.  11 Sep 2019.  https://www.fastcompany.com/1673352/how-500-years-of-weird-condiment-history-designed-the-heinz-ketchup-bottle

Casto, Rae.  Typical American family diet in 1908.  Livestrong.  https://www.livestrong.com/article/461209-the-typical-american-family-diet-in-1908/

DeSilver, Drew.  What’s on your table? How America’s diet has changed over the decades.  Pew Research.  13 Dec 2016.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/

Jurafsky, Dan.  The cosmopolitan condiment.  Slate.  30 May 2012.  Web.  19 Sep 2019.  https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/ketchups-chinese-origins-how-it-evolved-from-fish-sauce-to-todays-tomato-condiment.html

Kunzel, Regina.  The uneven history of modern American sexuality.  Modern American History. 2018: 1–4.

Lentzner, Matt.  Meat and potatoes- back on the menu.  Robb Wolf.  3 Nov 2011.  Web.  18 Sep 2019.  https://robbwolf.com/2011/11/03/meat-potatoes-back-on-the-menu/

Oneill, Therese. John Harvey Kellogg’s legacy of cereal, sociopathy, and sexual mutilation. Jezebel. 24 May 2016. Web. 18 Sep 2019. https://pictorial.jezebel.com/john-harvey-kelloggs-legacy-of-cereal-sociopathy-and-1777402050

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!