What is American food?

Natasha Gelling at Smithsonian Mag:

Are there any dishes or foods that you would classify as typically, or even exclusively, “American?”

A number of iconic foods—hot dogs and hamburgers, snack food—are hand-held. They’re novelties associated with entertainment. These are the kinds of food you eat at the ballpark, buy at a fair and eventually eat in your home. I think that there is a pattern there of iconic foods being quick and hand-held that speaks to the pace of American life, and also speaks to freedom. You’re free from the injunctions of Victorian manners and having to eat with a fork and knife and hold them properly, sit at the table and sit up straight and have your napkin properly placed. These foods shirk all that. There’s a sense of independence and a celebration of childhood in some of those foods, and we value that informality, the freedom and the fun that is associated with them.

I grew up eating mainly a mix of my mom's homemade Chinese cooking and then random American dishes when she was busy, so the primary attribute I associate with American food is convenience. TV dinners, pizza delivered to your door, frozen hamburger patties you can throw on the grill, something you can toss in the microwave, cereal you can dump out of a box and finish with a pour of milk. With two busy working parents and a houseful of kids to feed, dining is a daily hurdle to be leaped three times, it has to be built into one's schedule. An occasional shortcut that satisfies that requirement with minimal work is bound to be popular.

Nowadays, my dining is definitely shifted around to accommodate my work schedule, thus Gelling's quote rings so true: “It’s not the meal that shapes work, it’s the work that shapes the meal.”

It's fascinating to hear her discuss the social conventions that came to shape the three meal a day tradition that is the dominant model in the U.S. today as it is so instructive as to how dining differs from country to country and why.

How did the associations between certain meals and certain foods, like cereal for breakfast, form?

You start in the very early colonial era with one meal in the middle of the day—and it’s the hot meal of the day, dinner. Farmers and laborers ate earlier because they were up really early, and the elite were eating later in the day because they could sleep in. Breakfast and supper were kind of like glorified snacks, often leftovers or cornmeal mush, and there was not a lot of emphasis placed on these meals. Dinner, the main meal, at which people did tend to sit down together and eat, was really not the kind of social event that it has become. People did not emphasize manners, they did not emphasize conversation, and if conversation did take place it wasn’t very formal: it was really about eating and refueling. That’s the time where there are very blurry lines between what is and what isn’t a meal, and very blurry lines between what is breakfast, dinner and lunch.

Then, with the Industrial Revolution, everything changed, because people’s work schedules changed drastically. People were moving from the agrarian lifestyle to an urban, factory-driven lifestyle, and weren’t able to go home in the middle of the day. Instead, they could all come home and have dinner together, so that meal becomes special. And that’s when manners become very important, and protocol and formality. It’s really around then that people start to associate specific foods with certain meals.

Then, with dinner shifting you have the vacuum in the middle of the day that lunch is invented to fill. People are bringing pie for lunch, they’re bringing biscuits, but the sandwich really lends itself to lunch well. So the popularity of the sandwich really does have something to do with the rise of lunch—and especially the rise of children’s lunch, because it’s not messy. You don’t need utensils, you don’t have to clean up—you can stick it in a lunch pail really easily.

Gelling's upcoming book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal sounds quite promising.

h/t Marginal Revolution

Early adopters of illegitimate professions

When the movie industry first came into being in the U.S., it wasn't seen as a very reputable profession. Given discrimination against immigrants and women in other more established industries, it was only natural that they were first in line to grab jobs in Hollywood. Specifically, many ”screenwriters“ in those days (I put screenwriter in quotations because it was the silent era for movies so the job consisted of writing the interstitial title cards, not dialogue) were women:

Women had been a major force in the film industry during the silent era, particularly in the area of "screenwriting." Since dialogue wasn't needed, and inter-titles were a separate discipline, screenplays were called "scenarios", with the concept of "play" devolving onto the movie itself, which commonly was called a "photoplay" in the first generations of cinema.

June Mathis, who helped make Rudolph Valentino a superstar, wrote the scenarios and screenplays for over a hundred films, and also as an "editorial director" on many other films, from the mid-Teens until 1930.

Women directors were not uncommon during the silent era (In fact, the first "feature" film was directed by a woman, back in 1896).

After sound came to the movies, however, women started to be squeezed out of the movies. Why?

The era of the Talkie launched was followed closely by The Great Depression, and several dominoes toppled into each other in succession.

At first, movie studios were not hurt by the downturn in consumer spending, as Americans sought entertainment in the movie theaters. By the end of the Hebert Hoover Administration, attendance was declining as economic conditions worsened.

The studios were forced to turn to the New York money center banks to seek capital. The banks put their own representatives on movie studios' boards of directors. The financial experts brought in to the industry by the banks reorganized the business and imposed a corporate management paradigm on the studios. This outside influence exerted a great deal of pressure towards conformity and the imposition of strict hierarchies.

It is a truism of organizational theory that the more complex the structure, the more control is exerted over all aspects of the organization, and the more conformity is demanded from organizational players. The corporate hierarchies were dominated by men, and the pressure for conformity made the vertical, publicly traded studios inhospitable to women, who by their very gender, could not conform to the dominant corporate paradigm.

Notably, it was a woman, Frances Marion, who was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood from 1916 through 1935.

I think of this story when I read about discrimination in other fields. The life cycle of discrimination often repeats itself across industries, leading its victims to be early adopters of new and not yet socially respected professions.

Force fed women

In Mauritania in West Africa, where food is scarce, a large, even obese woman is seen as more desirable and prestigious a mate. Because of that, girls are force fed using the practice known as gavage, the same technique used to fatten geese to produce foie gras.

Once they reach a marriageable age, girls are sent to 'fat camps' in the desert where they are fed 15,000 calories a day. 

For breakfast, the girls have breadcrumbs soaked in olive oil washed down with camel's milk. They then have frequent meals throughout the day of goat's meat, bread, figs and couscous, all with more camel milk to drink.

This is terrible and cruel, and it also points to the dangerous connection between health and social norms.

In the U.S., the norm is flipped as obesity has become linked with lower income and celebrities are touted for their washboard abs and bikini bodies. It's a signal, perhaps, of copious leisure time and the ability to afford a personal trainer (both possible markers of wealth), though it's not foolproof.

Impact of landscape on time horizon of your thinking

To reach that conclusion Dr van Vugt and his team randomly assigned 47 participants either to look at three city photographs, or three country photographs, for two minutes each. After that participants were asked to pick between €100 ($135) now or a larger sum, which grew in €10 increments up to €170, in 90 days’ time. Those beholding natural landscapes made the switch to deferred gratification at a sum, known as the indifference point, that was 10% below those who scanned cityscapes. The same was true when another 43 volunteers were asked either to walk in an actual forest outside Amsterdam or in the city's commercial area of Zuidas.

It turns out our environment, the landscape we're in, may affect the time horizon of our decision-making. It's still not clear why.

What, then, is it about brooks and meadows that propels thoughts of the beyond? Dr van Vugt speculates that competition—for jobs, attractive partners and large bank accounts—is concentrated within cities, rendering them unpredictable. Unpredictability may in turn shunt people onto the fast lane. He admits, however, that the study does not determine whether cities spur impulsive behaviour, or whether the countryside inspires patience. Or, indeed, whether the effect holds for different types of non-urban locale. Sublime deserts or the Arctic tundra may be (as Coleridge himself would be the first to aver). But their inhospitability makes them possibly more unpredictable for their human inhabitants even than bustling Amsterdam.

Whatever the reason, for long-term planning, it may indeed pay to get away from it all and escape into nature.

Dogs prefer to align with Earth's magnetic field when pooping

Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm MF conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under Unstable MF. The best predictor of the behavioral switch was the rate of change in declination, i.e., polar orientation of the MF.

Next time your best friend is doing his/her business, maybe you can pull out the compass on your iPhone and do your own research.

I'm curious what prompted the researchers to set off on this arduous experiment. What the hell, I'm going to tag this post with “science.”

We measured the direction of the body axis in 70 dogs of 37 breeds during defecation (1,893 observations) and urination (5,582 observations) over a two-year period.