If there is a demand for a forensic capability, there's someone willing to sell it to a police department (and a jury).
evasive_chimpanzee
joined 2 years ago
The real reason behind all the gelatin salad abominations is that after gelatin was first discovered/isolated, it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.
Isolating gelatin requires long cook times (which require lots of fuel) at ideally fairly low temperatures. Then there needs to be some level of filtration to make it as flavorless as possible, and then dehydration to sheets or a powder.
Finally, to actually make one of these "salads", you need refrigeration.
Production of gelatin was industrialized to make it much cheaper, and refrigerators became normal household appliances. You went from gelatin being only really used in "fine dining" to something you could do at home. In the same era, pineapple went from being a fruit that only the rich could get to something anyone could, so it went through a similar explosion of popularity.
The alternative funny answer is that the company that sold gelatin, Knox, was run by a husband and wife, and all the crazy stuff didn't start until the husband died, so either he was holding her back, or once she lost her husband, she thought everyone else should, too.
I think full modern-strength liquor is relatively new-ish (500-1000 years). I'm just thinking back to the meme of the wikipedia article on the "timeline of Irish inventions" that has the invention of whiskey and then a gap of 300 years before they invented anything else.
"Fortified" means that liquor is added which acts as a preservative and it also stops further fermentation so you can have more sugar left in the wine. Oftentimes, herbs are added, too, which also acts a preservative.
In beer, IPAs are similar in that greater amounts of hops were added so it could survive the trip to India with less chance of spoiling.
I've made wine (and a lot of beer). It's not hard, and people have been doing it for ages, but creating a good, consistent product does rely on chemistry/biology knowledge that they wouldn't have had back then.
I suspect that a lot of the mystique around wine (like the idea that terroir is magic) is just down to the fact that a few hundred years ago, most wine/beer was trash, and the only stuff we'd consider "good" by modern standards is just down to luck that a batch didn't get infected with the wrong yeast/bacteria, or exposed to too much oxygen, or a style that is meant to be drunk young (vinho verde) or oxidized (sherry).
There's probably good reason that much of the wine that was aged/transported long distance a couple hundred years ago was fortified (Madeira, Port, sherry, vermouth, etc.).
Millenia of selective breeding have changed grapes, too. Without knowing for certain, my guess would be that on average, the sugar concentration in the raw grape juice would be roughly the same as now, but relying on wild yeasts or polycultures would not ferment as completely, so the final product would have lower ABV and higher sugar.
In beer, the actual grain and malting technology has greatly changed over time. 150 years ago, German immigrants to America couldn't brew the lighter styles they were used to because American grain was much higher in protein so they had to dilute it with corn/rice. Older grain had a higher propensity for certain defects, too. Basically you had more inconsistency back in the day, and also just some things that were different.
People usually don't log stuff that they see every day. So a person who lives in Oregon (statistically more likely to be in doug-fir country) goes east and notices that a different tree predominates and they want to know what it is, they'll log it.
Personally, I log stuff that I don't normally see cause there's a chance that it's either: a rare native plant, a native plant on the edge of its range, or a non-native. Those are all things that I'm less likely to know off the top of my head, and I think it's probably more important to tag for scientific purposes.
It depends on what you are cooking, but I usually do. Maillard and caramelization reactions will not occur in the temperatures that your pressure cooker will get to. If there's an option to add those flavors to a meal, I'm going to do it. There are cuisines, though, where that's not traditional or desired.
Think about rice, for example. Sometimes, you want more delicate fluffy plain white rice, while other times you want to do a pilaf technique where you brown it first. Neither is "better", just different.
Generally, if an ingredient is susceptible to overcooking, I'm not going to pressure cook it. Rice is easy since the grain size is consistent, but something like chicken breasts, I'm not going to pressure cook.
Adding more high temp cooking will drive out more moisture, but sometimes that's worth it. I would never eat a steak without a search, for example.
The problem is most of these places don't have reliable electricity. Obviously solar isn't reliant on a grid, but being able to store enough energy and output enough power for a cooktop/oven requires fairly substantial resources.
It's largely a problem of harm reduction as I understand it. Many people cook indoors over wood, which creates a lot of indoor pollution. Moving to cooking outside helps greatly. Additionally, much of the cooking is over more or less open fires which don't combust very well, so changing to stove designs that enable more complete combustion both saves fuel and reduces pollution.
Ideally long term, electrification is the goal, but that will likely take a lot longer.
There are companies like biolite trying to address the issue (I have no clue how good they are ethically) with devices that use thermoelectric generators to run fans to improve combustion and produce electricity for small devices.
Yeah, this article is real soft on them. You can point out things you admire without ignoring the child abuse/puppy mills/etc.
I think there's also a big difference between "a community garden" and "a community that gardens". Lots of (most?) "community gardens" are simply a collection of rental plots where everyone just grows what they want to grow in their plot. When I've had gardens like that, yeah people will give each other some handfuls of whatever they have too much of, but there's not that much sharing.
In an ideal world, i think you'd actually have a bit of a plan as a group and distribute tasks^From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs^. E.g., maybe Alice has a yard that's perfect for growing tomatoes, Bob has a lot of shade, so he can grow leafy greens, Charlie hates gardening but likes foraging, Dave has a good spot for composting, etc.
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This is really cool. Years ago, I had a fish tank that cracked on the bottom during a move. Trying to repair the glass seemed sketchy, but it also seemed like a shame to throw out an otherwise fine-looking aquarium. I just put it on top of a waterproof tray, threw a thin layer of soil in the tank, and put a few rocks/sticks in as hardscaping, and then covered everything with moss.
I just doused everything with a spray bottle whenever I thought about it, and it really thrived. Everyone thought it must be a terrarium for frogs or something. The only maintenance i ever had to do was occasionally wiping down the glass to get rid of algae.