UK readers of A Certain Age will recall the TV advertisement of the 1970s where a brand of instant mashed potato was promoted under the slogan "For Mash, get Smash". A group of metallic, springy aliens reflected on their most recent trip to earth, and chortled at the memory of women (yes, it was exclusively women) laboriously preparing, cooking, and, um, mashing potatoes, rather than pouring boiled water onto the contents of a packet.
Needless to say, the stuff tasted, as we would say round these parts, shite.
For mashed potatoes with sausages and perhaps other meats, mustard is your friend.
Currently, both English mustard and French Dijjon mustard are popular in the UK. You can usually find a small selection of "French" mustard (ironically, there is very little Frenchness about it, and is "particular to the UK" according to Google), which is milder and runnier, and sold, apart from to the occasional connoisseur, primarily as a condiment to hotdogs. There is also whle-grain mustard, of course, but that's a cooking spice, not a condiment. It seems like at some point other radish-based condiments were popular, but today I can only see them sold in tiny 50g jars right next to the tiny 50g jars of mint sauce. I haven't actually seen any german brands of mustard. Overall, I would say that the popularity of mustard is falling in the UK.
While "french mustard" is a thing, I think I confused it with French's yellow mustard; thanks for catching that. English french mustard has caramel colouring (maybe once they used real caramelised onions), and has other spices in it (oregano, garlic, chilli) https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/essential-french-mustard/007636-3576-3577
Colman's "French" Mustard is no more, thanks to the EU, which deemed it un-French. I believe Waitrose make an equivalent still. In the 1970's when steak houses opened up all over England (such as the Berni Inn chain, or Trust House Forte) there was always Colman's French mustard on the table. I sometimes make a simulacrum with English mustard powder, vinegar and maple syrup.
Another condiment of similar style that is still available is horseradish sauce. Excellent with roast beef.
I'm equally partial to English and Dijon for something on the side of the plate, but English would work better when the mustard is somewhat muffled by the potato.
I remember that ad! Years later, I tried a packet of Smash. It wasn't horrible, but yes, it was not the same as real mashed potato.
A few years back I tried another packet of Smash, but whatever they did to the formula in the meantime, it was disgusting.
Some brands of instant mash are the same as wallpaper paste and would be better used for that purpose. Out of curiosity, I've tried the American Idaho brand when I saw it offered online for the grocery shopping and again, not horrible, but not the same as the real thing.
Although Smash's trump card was ease of execution, no product is so simple that it will never be misused. I recall wading through a particularly gruesome example at a friend's house. Bad practice included the use of hot rather than boiling liquid; and failure to eliminate lumps (the latter no doubt made more likely by the former). A large dish of tepid lumpy ersatz potato; perhaps not surprising I can remember that from 1977.
All that said, the ad of course was great; that you and I can both remember it would be proof enough of that. The words were adopted for our own uses in the school playground. In these benighted times, it would surely have become a meme.
The ad was way more fun than the end product. We were cheated of the promised future! Flying cars and instant mash indistinguishable from the real thing!
In the day I sometimes used to get instant mash (always in flake form, I think) and add black pepper and peas (frozen peas, thawed in a mug with water from the kettle). It was a bit glutinous but edible. Now I am old and only eat real spuds.
As someone who loves real mashed potatoes and does not like instant, you can get the instant stuff (Idahoan at least) to be pretty good. You just have really make sure it all mixes well, and usually even dehydrate it a bit after mixing in water.
I've found that too; if you put in the amount of water on the packet of whatever brand it is, the mash turns out a sludgy mess. It's tricky, because too little water and there is always that crust of dried flakes at the bottom, too much and it's a slurry. A little less than the packet amount, and if it's too dry you can always adjust by adding a little more. You can't undo "too much".
The brands that turn out best are the ones that recommend you substitute milk-and-water for all water, and to add some butter.
Lovely review, and I appreciated the well executed title bait-and-switch. I'm surprised that LLM slop warranted a single paragraph, when it seems tailor made for comparisons to IMP. But then again one grows tired of hearing about this sad development.
I thought the otherwise-great essay fell apart once the author started trying to point out specific instances of IMP-isms. I get why that part is there, that sort of thing is sort of expected in ACX contest entries, the equivalent of the mandatory love-interest subplot in every Hollywood movie, but I would have preferred a more open-ended conclusion that left the door open for other interpretations (I was heading down the “late 20th century American society sucked actually” interpretive path myself).
Being unfamiliar with American products, am I supposed to imagine something similar to Mousline? Mousline is pretty good. The prose in this piece is very enjoyable but whatever deeper message there is hinges entirely on disliking the instant mashed potato product --- it's very much a piece in the "products I don't like are a manifestation of postmodern degeneracy" genre.
I like the article overall, but Scott and Aporia have pointed out a number of studies indicating that humans either can't tell the difference between real and AI art or actively prefer the latter, when the latter is given appropriate prompts. I'm not sure how well that really maps to instant mashed potatoes.
The comparison only works if satisfaction is the primary metric. If I grow up only tasting IMP, I might be satisfied because I’ve never encountered the thing they’re simulating. There’s no contrast left to train the appetite.
With AI art too, the question isn’t just whether it's pleasing, but whether it hollows out the experience it imitates. When you lose the reference point but keep the name, the name becomes the thing.
Well, our author grew up on IMP and was NOT satisfied. But their dad, who had the real deal WAS satisfied. (Because they could imagie the real thing that was being imitated or so..)
That's directly in contrast to what you are suggesting here.
I didn’t mean that everyone always prefers the fake if they’ve never known the real. I meant that without contrast, preference formation becomes unmoored. Sometimes you’re disappointed without even knowing why. Sometimes you’re content, but only because you’re remembering something that’s no longer there.
AI art in those tests is the better art, picked out by the people running the contest to go up against selected human artworks. The slop that is the cartoony, oversaturated yellow-tinted, mass product on the top of every article and post online is dreadful.
That's the comparison here: cardboard flakes reconstituted with water and margarine, not 'we used the best potatoes, carefully dried them, remixed them with full-fat milk and butter' versus the traditional mashed potato.
Your AI comparison is just Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." You're now comparing the best human art (since you never encounter most it) to the perhaps the median AI art.
I strongly reject Scott's conclusion on the AI art thing. In reality, he proved that if you pick a sampling of random genres that a person has barely experienced and never given much thought to, they won't be able to tell the difference between manmade slop and AI slop.
I was very confident, and correct, in discerning between manmade and AI art in genres that I was actually used to looking at, and judging by the comments on that article I was far from alone. Sure I struggled to differentiate between manmade and AI impressionist scribblings but I don't consider either of them real art, so I don't think it was fair for that to be scored against me.
On first sip, people prefer Pepsi over Coke. On first walkthrough, people prefer the new Sheetrock and particle board “luxury apartments” to the well-built older one. When picking things out at the supermarket, people preferred the bright colored Red Delicious over other varietals that never looked quite as pretty.
The question is what people actually like more when they engage with the product long term, as it is actually used.
For ephemeral illustrations in a post to be read once, superficially appealing AI slop can be great, especially since it’s cheap and easy to tailor it to the topic at hand. But for actual prolonged engagement with art, it doesn’t compete.
I recently read a piece on Coke vs Pepsi. I think they said that Pepsi gets generally gets the nod in a blind test but if the subject knows the brands they lean Coke.
Yeah the claim that "The memory of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work" seems very suspect to me. The review mentions chicken McNuggets as an example of IMPism but I'm quite confident there are millions of kids out there who love McNuggets despite no particular attachment to real chicken.
Their parents, who buy the McNuggets in the end, might have more of that attachment. When the intended consumer of a product are not the people who buy it, ads have to either choose who to target, or try to entice both. See this 2016 ad, found on google images:
And whatever your target demographic is, you certainly won't show the real process of producing McNuggets, because it's exactly as the author says: the real process grinds up chicken meat into a paste, then flavors and reshapes it into the final product that has only the most tenuous of connections to actual chicken meat.
I just don't think the "how it was made" matters much to most people. The process of producing "real" chicken meat is pretty ugly as well but for the most part we're happy to ignore that because we enjoy the final product.
The reviewer allowed for this as well. When the economics of buying McNuggets clearly overwhelm those of raising and processing your own chickens, then McNuggets it is. The reviewer also doesn't fundamentally reject this, but wants to remind us that the conflict does exist.
>Nowadays, I do not judge people for making use of instant mashed potatoes. I certainly take plenty of other prepared food culinary shortcuts myself. In the modern world we all make compromises for the sake of convenience. If we didn’t, we’d still be stomping on chuño to survive the winter.
The point is what we become accustomed to. If you've eaten nothing but chicken McNuggets as a kid, when you grow up, then for you chicken *is* McNuggets and you may well not even like a proper roasted chicken because your tastes have been formed and set.
Like this video, about a guy who has been trying for ten years to cook the perfect roast chicken, and he gets a recipe he's finally happy with.
Then he admits it's not as good as his memories, when every weekend when he was a kid his mother bought a rotisserie chicken.
Because for him, *that* is what roast chicken is. He's eating the memories as much as the real chicken, and I'm sure the commercial product is nowhere near as elaborate as the ones he's tried to cook. HIs tastes were formed when he was a kid, and now that's the ideal against which all others are judged. He can't be objective about it, no matter what he tries.
(I'm the same around black and white pudding: I prefer the ones with more meal in them because those are the brands I grew up eating, not the 100% pork meat ones that are now in my price range).
If people become accustomed to AI art and fake mashed potato and ersatz community via lovebots and plastic exruded product then they grow up on that, and prefer it to the real thing in the long run, but that's a genuine loss.
Formative experiences are certainly a factor; the issue is about memory and how it gets hijacked by modern advertisers, after all. But it can't explain everything. Do you, adult-Deisach, eat exactly as child-Deisach did, nothing more and nothing less? Among the things I loved as a kid were canned ravioli and frozen spinach-sludge, and I hated olives. Now I love olives, and can't stand canned ravioli and frozen spinach-sludge on account of having eaten much better versions. So I certainly don't eat as child-Engine did, and I'd be surprised if anyone did.
It's weird, because I do! I've branched out and tried more things, but I do recognise that even Irish cooking has become more adventurous in recent years, but I stick to the tried-and-trusted recipes I've grown up with.
I'm willing to *try* a lot of things, but when it comes to cooking them *myself*, I don't adventure very far.
I didn't grow up on Mac'n'Cheese, but I understand very well why people will always prefer the box of commercial product to the 'made with real pasta and real cheese' version 😀
That's the question at hand, isn't it? Is the inside of a McNugget still chicken meat? The process of making a McNugget starts with killing and deboning a chicken for its meat. If you then proceed to grind that meat into finer and finer components, then eventually you'll end up with sub-atomic particles, which nobody could positively identify as having originated from chicken meat; it's no longer chicken meat. At some point between "fresh chicken breast" and "sub-atomic particles", there has to have been a transition between "chicken meat" to "not chicken meat". The transition is gradual, or you could make up enough discrete phase changes as to call it practically gradual.
Where exactly one places the binary distinction of meat/non-meat is arbitrary and up for debate, but undoubtedly you have to draw it somewhere, and that's the larger point the review makes.
I'm not sure you picked up the main point in the piece: instant mash is a simulacrum of the real thing that people mistake for the real thing. You can prefer the fake, like the author's father does, by all means, but it's all too possible to not know that it's an imitation to begin with.
That’d be true if the point were just “these flakes taste bad.” But I took it more as: we don’t know what we’re missing. It’s the fact that it pretends to be something it’s not, and people who've never had the real deal won't notice.
Karl Marx isn't exactly favored in these parts, but he had a term for the process by which products are separated from the choices of the people producing them: alienation.
Larger systems demand that people make and distribute products that the workers making them would not generally choose to make or use themselves.
Marx ideas spread like wildfire because he correctly identified major contemporary sources of problems. Alienation is imo a very valuable term to understand modern unhappiness. Ironically, it also is, if anything, more applicable to communist systems than to capitalist systems, due to the latter having at least some mechanism of correction both on the consumer side as well as on the provider side, albeit imperfectly.
But it's somewhat unfair to blame Marx himself, since finding good ways of dealing with new problems is a lot of trial and error, and the analytical theories underlying his favored solutions and predictions for the future had multiple errors only later proven empirically wrong.
I think it was mostly the Bolshevik Revolution that caused his ideas to spread https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/das-karl-marx-problem/ Of course, it did have to spread at least to Russia in order for the Bolshevik Revolution to happen, but most of its spread has happened since then.
>finding good ways of dealing with new problems is a lot of trial and error, and the analytical theories underlying his favored solutions and predictions for the future had multiple errors only later proven empirically wrong
Did he highlight these concerns in the Communist Manifesto, or elsewhere?
As others have said that’s hardly unique to capitalism. Most workers throughout history are working on stuff they don’t really want to do, what choice did slaves have, do servants really want to slop out a commode, or cook for ten people everyday, do factory workers in socialism have any control in what is produced (or any ownership after).
Marx’s alienation isn’t really just ”doing things you don’t wanna do” and more specifically about the great abstraction of production in industrialised capitalism that’d be pretty top-of-mind in his time
Well he said that people were alienated from what they produce. The only people who aren’t are self employed.
You have discovered something about Marx though. He was uncomfortable with the modern world, if hardly alone in that. This harping back to a primitive era, this flawed idea
of early primitive communism, along with theories of alienation are all a cry against the world.
That's not something you have to dig very deep into Marx to find though -- just the manifesto is basically all about modernity/capitalism/the ascendant bourgeoisie sweeping away everything old in very grim and gothic terms.
Still, I think it's way too reductive to frame Marx as just some primitivist sentimental opponent of modernity -- he pretty explicitly criticises this tendency (including a whole section of the manifesto on "reactionary socialism") and is pretty clearly opposed to pre-modern power structures and mores. His day-to-day politics was pretty whiggish and often practically positioned as a radical wing of the liberalism of his day. Modernity as not good and bad in itself fundamentally, but necessary to both implement and overcome.
Remember: in his view the proletariat, his heroic revolutionary subject, is just as much a product of the industrial, modern capitalism of his time as is their bourgeois antagonists!
The sort of complicated view on modernity makes sense in terms of his hegelianism -- history as a force unto itself working through internal contradictions. It doesn't really make sense in his framework to wanna harken "back". The only way is through.
On alienation: yes, and pre-capitalist production involved modes of organising production much closer to modern self-employment for professional craftsmen and farmers.
Furthermore, estrangement from the product is only one part of Marx's alienation, there's also stuff like how work itself is sub-organised (repetetive sub-assembly etc), from work itself in that it is abstracted away as a special sphere apart from being human, from other workers, etc etc etc etc. I think many of these are fairly specific to industrial production, and some specifically to capitalist organisation therein.
I really miss <a href="https://vancedyoutube.org/">youtube vanced</a>—it was perfect for how I like to watch videos. Lately I’ve been trying ReVanced and NewPipe, and they’re actually pretty great. Not exactly the same, but close enough to feel familiar. Love that people keep finding ways to bring back the features we all enjoyed.
There's an interesting argument as to why potatoes seem to have such a important place in many traditional Old World cultures, from Cork to Hokkaido to Guizhou, despite being far more recent introductions than wheat, millet, barley and rice etc.
Potatoes are a pretty good source of calories, but generally not as efficient as wheat or rice per hectare of quality arable land. But, 1) they can be planted almost anywhere with little effort, so mobile agriculturalists the world over could plant them on a non-irrigated mountainside, and come back and dig them up a few months later; 2) they can be eaten in a pretty wide timespan, from 10-25 weeks after planting, which is perfect for mixed-strategy, mobile livelihoods; 3) a very "James C. Scott" argument - potato crops aren't very visible, so they can be hidden from the nefarious state, so your British-Irish or Qing China landlords won't tax your agricultural produce!
I'd always thought that compared to wheat, potatoes are also much easier to eat. Wheat needs to be ground into flour and baked into bread, which is a relatively labour-intensive and technical process; potatoes can be cooked easily or even just eaten raw. Do you think that's part of the picture too?
You can cook wheat grains like you cook rice, whole grain. Milling them into flour is obviously the much preferred solution, but in a pinch you don't strictly have to.
Wheat needs to at least be threshed and winnowed, even to cook as we do rice. Potato, in a pinch, just stick it in the coals, don’t even need to wash it.
If you're *really* in a pinch, don't even need coals. It's possible to eat raw, like an apple, straight out of the ground and into your mouth. Less efficient to digest, but somebody half-dead from starvation, or concerned that any fire would be noticed by an enemy army's foraging scouts, https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/ may not care quite so much about efficiency.
I used to eat raw potatoes while walking the family dog around the neighborhood. People kept telling me they were poisonous, but I didn't die even once, which is how I'm able to write this comment.
You can't really eat them raw - I mean, you can eat a bit and you will not die and probably even get some nourishment, but there are resistant starches and maybe toxins that are easily eliminated by cooking (which can be as simple as a few minutes in the microwave).
They're also more filling. In fact, potatoes are one of the most satiating foods. Plus, you can just dig them up and boil or bake them, vs. threshing/winnowing/milling wheat.
Don't think so. Enshittification is a steady decline in quality in order to increasingly cash out and rent-seek. While that certainly exists in the food industry and others about as much as in software, the author admits that current IMPs are better than WW2 IMPs, which are better than chuño.
It's more about the contrast between advertisement and reality, such as when on TV you see a smiling young maid slowly stirring a bowl of strawberry yoghurt in a rural kitchen when the reality is huge steel tanks, electric motors, and genetically engineered bacteria producing the flavor molecules. It's about press-ganging images of the past into service for today's efficiency.
Not in those exact words, I wrote that for simplification. Consider:
> The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.
Clearly even the awful WW2 IMPs must have had the overall advantage over chuño, or the US army would have used chuño.
Yes, by "advantage" I did not mean any singular quality such as taste or cost, but the overall fitness for purpose, i.e. the weighted sum of all properties. Obviously, WW2 IMPs have different requirements than mashed potatoes in a fancy restaurant, and even though the fancy mash tastes infinitely better than the IMP, you wouldn't use it mash as a ration for soldiers; both are valid for their purpose and not the other. Maybe chuño also has some qualities that are superior to IMPs, but overall, IMPs were considered overall better than chuño for feeding US army soldiers in WW2.
Like the other response says, enshittification doesn't apply to many IMPish foods as they have mostly gotten considerably better since their inventions.
Enshittification is better applied to foods like chocolate, where many popular consumer brands are known for substituting lower quality ingredients and shrinking sizes
I recently bought some boxed macaroni and cheese for my toddlers to keep in the pantry as emergency food. The first time I went to make it I discovered they've further "optimised" boxed mac and cheese from my childhood to simply microwaved in 3 minutes then mix in a packet of something. Presumably the pasta is parcooked in someway already? I don't know. My toddlers have no taste buds so think it equivalent to the home made mac and cheese I sometimes make, which honestly isn't even that hard to make. I wonder if this new variant will displace the old version in 20-30 years.
I feel this way about modern parenting. We feel this Herculean effort is necessary to shape and mold our children because we simply don’t raise people the way we used to. The nuclear family is a historical irregularly, but is very convenient to optimizing the broader economy for maximum GDP growth to have a worker able to move anywhere to be maximally productive. It makes me wonder if the declining fertility rate is an example of how we’ve lost the desire for the simulacra because it’s gotten so far from the original good it represented.
It’s not just convenient for the broader GDP - it’s convenient for the family at every moment to be able to make their own decisions on things without having to consult all their extended friends and family who are tied up in their house. I sometimes think about getting a big residence with a bunch of friends, and then realize how many of those people move in a five or ten year period, and how annoying it would be to find a new roommate each time that happens, rather than just being able to treat the whole household as a single unit.
Probably people move in 5-10 years because of jobs, and those jobs pay more than there jobs at home--that is the convenience to the gdp, because moving made those people more productive. People didn't move so much before the modern economy
Yes, but they're choosing to do it. They aren't acting out of some devotion to GDP - they're acting out of their own interests.
One of the things I was thinking about a lot in response to the post the other day about deep communities is that having deep community relations with people really does get in the way of convenience. Doing things in the convenient way is how we all get rich, and once you're rich enough, you can afford some of the inconveniences that enable community, but all the conveniences that we each independently adopted on the way towards wealth did damage the communities along the way.
Potato "origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins." How in heaven's name did some prehistorical person figure this out, "must eat clay with potatoes"? For another example, my hillbilly family was so poor they had to eat poke sallet (just like Annie), which has to be boiled twice before it is non-lethal poisonous. Did one person in prehistory eat raw pokeweed and died, so the next person said, "I bet if I boil it, I will not die," then when that person died, the third person said, "Well, if I boil it twice, I won't die." I am becoming skeptical of all history.
> In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten.
> Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work.
I suspect that poke sallet is a like actual mannioc.
If you try eating manioc is poisonous and it tastes bad. If you eat enough of it, you throw up. If you boil it, it tastes less bad and you need to eat more before you throw up. It does not actually take a genius to realize: "Hey, if we boil this more, maybe it might taste better!", even if you don't know that boiling is one of the most common ways to remove poison from food.
The manioc story might be a convenient Fable, but it's rooted in the idea that black people couldn't possibly notice that a poisonous version of a food tastes bad and makes you throw up.
If you slice manioc (aka cassava aka tapioca) up like a potato and deep fry it, the result is a very tasty french fry substitute - which gives you pretty bad stomach cramps a few hours later. If you slice it up, soak it overnight, then drain and deep fry, it is a very tasty french fry substitute with no side effects. I've done both, the first time by accident. So it's not that big a deal. It's only if you want to make flour that you can store for longer term use that there is a lot of work involved.
* Finding new edible things actually mattered to them, for real. Sometimes they would be close to starving to death. When not starving to death, finding food and preparing it was a large chunk of anything they did, period. They didn't have physics, literature or latest TV show to worry about - search for food occupied a large part of everyone's mind, including that of the very smart or very reckless people. If somebody discovered something - a way to preserve food, to make something inedible edible - it would be huge for their culture and they would hold onto it. Maybe the discoverer would gain status. At any rate, he or she probably wouldn't starve as easily as others.
We know and understand the world where kids are dreaming about launching a startup and making a billion dollars, or becoming celebrity athletes or youtubers. Imagine a world where all the intellectual energies by necessity are focused on not starving to death. What crazy things might people try then?
* They had timescales of tens of thousands or years to figure things out. Even though there were much fewer people trying things, on the other hand they would all be working on similar problems.
* You might naturally eat some potatoes covered in clay because they are coming from the dirty ground and you don't always have the opportunity to wash everything. Then you might notice that washing = upset stomach and sickness, and not do it. You may notice the general idea that boiling food = less sickness, and get adventurous and try boiling something normally poisonous. Try boiling something mildly poisonous when boiled extra hard to make it safe. You wouldn't get this creative when not starving to death, but conveniently very often you would be starving to death.
> You wouldn't get this creative when not starving to death, but conveniently very often you would be starving to death.
My guess is a lot of the early-stage experimentation would actually happen in times of plenty: people get bored with whatever they have enough of, while elaborately prepared, rare, and/or risky "delicacies" become prestigious. Marginal case of food poisoning is easier to recover from for someone otherwise healthy. Once acceptably safe preparation methods have been prototyped, iterative refinement continues as a niche hobby, ready to scale up if all the better options are exhausted during a famine.
Honestly, when you see the amount of processing some foods require in order not to kill you ded the second you bite into them, it's astounding how anyone ever figured it out and survived.
Who, for example, ever thought "hey, I bet if I put in the stuff for boiling with clothes when doing the laundry, it'll be perfectly fine to produce an edible foodstuff?" for bagels. That one does sound more like discovery by accident, e.g. "help! I used the laundry water by mistake, if I dump it out fast maybe the dough is still usable?"
Other processes really sound too extreme to have worked. It's like the mystery of evolution, except even more mysterious, because how on earth do you get from "we tried eating this and it killed us" to "we cooked it as normal and it killed us" to "we figured out that if you grind it this one particular way, then cook it with this particular mineral in this particular way, then do this other particular step in this particular way, eventually it won't kill you"? That sounds like a lot of people died along the way, and it's really only "it's a choice between this and starvation, and at least if this kills us, it might do it faster than starvation" desperation at work there.
"It's like the mystery of evolution." Exactly. Like how get from a one-cell primordial organism to a blue whale. I am starting to doubt evolution in all forms. Maybe solipsism is the only explanation of the universe I perceive . . . that or an actual Creator of the universe whose wonders to perform are miraculous indeed.
Evolution at least is understandable because "over millions of years tiny changes in every generation got winnowed out until the ones that benefited stayed", but when you're talking about a population of humans relying on foodstuffs not to die, it goes:
Step 1 - it killed us
Step 1 and 2 - it killed us
Step 1, 2 and 3 - still killed us, but slower this time
Step 1, 2, 3 and 4 - not dead yet, let's see if this works. Hang on, it killed us really slowly this time
Step 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 - okay this time not dead yet, seems like we have a winner!
There's no amount of processing will save you from the mushrooms in this case:
So it does seem that "eating this will kill you" and keeping going by trial and error even in the face of "it killed us, it still killed us, it keeps killing us" is something incredible. For some foods it will work, for others it won't ever work. Clearly there are some gaps in the records about how this worked when people were trying to find sustainable food sources, and I do wonder if legends of culture heroes introducing "they gave us X food" are about that - the people who found the way over decades to plant/prepare/cook the food so that it was no longer poisonous.
Consider dose-response curves. If you can eat a tiny shaving of something and not die, maybe it'll add flavor (e.g. nutmeg) and micronutrients to a larger meal. Incremental progress on detoxification makes the tolerable dose larger. Toxicity often has observable symptoms short of death, so relative severity of "close calls" could reveal what's working and what isn't.
Consider also the possibility that making safe food wasn't really the original plan at all. Maybe it was a botched murder attempt, and the target's baffling, Rasputin-like persistence inspired meticulous imitators.
>Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF.
Precisely mirrors Scott's artist friend when asked about one of the entries from the AI art Turing test:
>Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it's so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake.
"The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches." In other words, just like the U.S. military dominance built on "shit on a shingle" before MREs.
SOS - my career military dad introduced this surprisingly tasty dish to the family. Basically, home made in civilian conditions, it is comprised of packaged dried beef, added to a gravy made of flour, butter, milk and seasonings. In lieu of dried beef, fresh cooked ground beef can be substituted.
Yes . . . but if cooked ground beef is substituted, it is no longer SOS, even though tasty. I grew up in a home where cream gravy was a beverage. We put all sorts of things in gravy, and all was good. It's not hard to make actual SOS . . . but the dried chipped beef at Walmart is $28 per pound.
😳 I haven't purchased chipped beef in probably 50 years, but oh my goodness, $28/pound? I suppose if the math is done that cost isn't prohibitively expensive but still...yes, cream gravy makes almost everything better.
Well, the chipped beef is dehydrated, so one does not need to use much by weight for the gravy. It plumps back up from the milk (even better with whole milk and a slurp or two of actual cream).
This is why I’m making the switch to listening to music on vinyl records. Not as “real” as live music; still industrially chopped and screwed; but better than Spotify.
Also they sound better. Not because of analog vs digital; because the sound engineers know they can’t be played in the car, or through earbuds while jogging. So they’re mixed to sound good through real speakers in your living room. Whereas Spotify tracks are mixed to sound “good” literally anywhere on Earth, through any speakers, no matter how crappy. Lots of compression.
That's very interesting; I can't deny the appeal of a good soundsystem.
Not all music is mixed for the car, though (I agree, some genres do), and spotify doesn't have any mandate about what music is uploaded. It would not make sense for DnB producers to master for the car — it would be mastered for the club (and then uploaded to Spotify in the same state) or for headphones.
Compression is inherent to the codec, and should only affect the very highest frequencies. (Or were you talking about use of a compressor in music production?)
Yeah, music production compression, not digital compression. I’ve noticed a really clear difference between the compression on rock albums from the 70s and 80s and the compression on the same album on CD from the 90s. I’m just guessing about the reason.
I am not sure about CD vs vinyl compression situation, it is possible that it was driven by availability of portable and in-car CD players.
But there's no question about compression for streaming: the ability to play never-ending mixes everywhere makes it very tempting to mix your tracks louder. There was a period, roughly in the 'teens, when a loudness war broke out, with producers competing to mix as loud as possible, with predictable compressed awfulness. Thankfully, it subsided, but you still don't want your song to sound significantly quieter than others in the mix.
And yes, you absolutely want to master for the car, at least if you want to reach a wide American audience (and, more broadly, big city dwellers around the world, listening in a subway car is not that different from listening in a car).
I personally master to -12 dB LUFS-i, seems to be a decent compromise between still having some dynamics left and keeping up with the others.
Classical music is the real loser in this wonderful nowadays.
You aren't kidding about classical music — I have to turn it up a good 40% (in my perceived loudness) from my usual baseline just to hear all the voicing.
I found found the best of both worlds with a sound server. A Raspberry PI with a memory card loaded with high-bitrate mp3's or FLACs, running mpd, with a hi-fi quality USB DAC, connected to an old skool hi-fi amp and speakers. Control from any phone on the same WiFi using an app called M.A.L.P. It's like having your own spotify at home, but with high audio quality, no algorithm to take your choices away, and bring your own audio files.
There are sometimes subgenres of music that try to be as compressed as possible, deliberately adding distortion or bitcrush-gunk. I wonder if this is a way to get around the constraint of sounding 'good' literally anywhere on earth, or if the ACX commentariat would consider it a kind of Stockholm syndrome built out of nostalgia for crunchy low-quality sound.
It’s like French toast - originally designed as a way to make a bad thing palatable, but actually pretty good when done with good ingredients (though still not as great as some of the things you can do in better conditions).
Excellent review. I feel like I have had a new meme installed (IMP).
> Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
> Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
> Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
> Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.
As a thesis I think this has some merit but it also seems easy to over-generalise. Think about, say, milk as an example. Pasteurised, homogenised milk is raw milk that's been mucked about with and re-formed. But generally it seems like this kind of milk isn't meaningfully worse than raw milk, and certainly better in the sense that it isn't lumpy and isn't full of bacteria. Is pasteurised milk IMP?
Another example: the YouTube recommendation algorithm. You might have mixed opinions on it, but is it IMP? It certainly has some of the qualities of chopping-up-and-reconstituting that we're talking about, but it's also hard to compare it to the alternative (only ever seeing YouTube videos that individual people send you?).
Yes, but that's still liquid milk. Think about powdered milk: if that was served up in a jug or bottle or litre container as "real milk" well yes, technically it is, but you'll know the difference between that and even pasteurised, homogenised milk.
Or take the non-dairy coffee creamers: not cream, not milk (though they may include casein from milk) and thus an inferior substitute for the real thing. I imagine a lot of people routinely use these, not milk, in their coffee and would find coffee with milk strange to their taste if they tried it.
I think the real question is how much the thing stands on its own, and how much it relies on the cultural memory of the thing it is an imitation of. Things like ikea bookcases and homogenized milk work fine on their own terms. There is absolutely some appeal to having real wood bookcases and raw milk, but those are doing something a bit different. But the kind of faux traditional design elements on McMansions are really only appealing because they suggest something that they aren’t.
I'd never have guessed how much I would enjoy reading about the history behind fake mashed potatoes! Honestly, without reading a single other review, I'd vote for this one.
Potatoes from Peru are adapted to even days of 12 hours from being close to the equator and did not adapt so well to the longer European summer day. Most modern varieties can be traced to the Chilean island of Chiloé, which displaced the Peruvian potato after the blight of the 1840s. Coming from further south, they fared better in temperate climates.
In both the Greek and Roman alphabet the letter “s” has had a different form inside a word than as the last letter. In Greek, the familiar lower case and upper case sigma are only in the middle of words, and the lower case one at the end of a word looks like “s” and hole the upper case one at the end of a word looks like “C”.
Nice piece. I too had this revelation when I stopped eating the instant potatoes and ate the proper mash.
It’s interesting that the writer doesn’t mention instant soup. Over here in Britain, anyway, most soup was instant and the king of instant soup was the miserable Oxtail soup. The taste? Not very beefy, sort of sweet, sort of… brown. It didn’t taste like actual oxtail stew, more like watered down beef gravy that had aspirations of being a meal, if you added gravy. I think we can assert with confidence that no oxen were harmed in the making of the soup. My God, it was rubbish.
I had the reputation chez Defeel of being a fussy eater, what with me refusing nourishing soup.
But it turns out that I wasn’t. I actually love proper soup.
Arguably, potatoes themselves are an IMPish form of starch. They reached fixation in cultures that didn't have enough grain. And yet we still eat them...
You say that the reason you can't enjoy a pale facsimile of stuff that used to be good is because you have no memories of having enjoyed the real thing that the simulation could conjure up.
That doesn't have to be this sad thing. Not being able to properly associate the fake thing with the real thing can also leave your mind free to make different associations, to enjoy the thing as a thing in itself instead of just an imitation.
For example, powdered milk can be used as an ingredient in some desserts without re-hydrating it at all. Like it's not a pale substitute of milk, but it's own thing with it's own texture that can compliment the soft textures of a cup of frozen açaí with banana slices. Gives it a nice crunch. It can also enhance some homemade cheese recipes to make a cheese that is not store-bought and also not fully home-made but something else that trascends those conceptual limitations.
You have to take ownership of the industrially processed stuff. Use them for your own purposes, not just for the approved corporate profit-maximizing purpose of the manufacturer. Use powdered milk to make weird home-made cheese. Use instant mashed potatoes to make gnocchi. Put a knor cube into your pasta water. Don't be a slave to preconceptions of a previous generation.
Not to lie, I start the day with a strong mug of tea, then I take a shower and then have a mug of instant coffee from Aldi. It doesn't fill the room with the great aroma of coffee, but it is also not bitter and it gives me the caffeine hit I need.
Once had dinner with a friends family as a kid. They were somewhat strict and conservative when it came to family matters like dinner. I love mashed potatoes. Asked for a double helping not realizing or even being aware of instant mashed potatoes. Refused to eat it and it created some tension that was apparent. I was not invited to dinner again.
Yeah, I think he has a reasonable point about instant mashed potatoes specifically, but the rest of the analogies seem weak, about the same as "No, it's not REAL champagne, just sparkling wine."
This is an excellent examination of the way technological change impacts our cultural identity and how we think about ourselves. It is both well-researched and heartfelt. It makes me think of an art exhibition by modern Chinese artists. The theme was their reaction to technological change in their culture, which was even more rapid than it was for us. These types of changes can leave us somewhat bewildered and disappointed, which creates an impetus for a search for historical connection and authenticity, just like this writer has successfully gone through.
Also the deadline for contest submissions was way back in May so some OpenAI employee would have had to have been using an unreleased GPT5 instance to pretend to have memories about mashed potatoes.
"Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato."
There's *slightly* more to it than that, but let's not refight The Eight Hundred Years on here right now 😁
Tip for next time you're making real mashed potatoes (courtesy of my late father, who cooked them this way): when steaming the potatoes at the end to dry them out (or, if you boiled them in their jackets, when you've peeled them and put them back into the saucepan over a low heat), add in some chopped raw onion. Let it cook (though that's a generous term) in the steam/heat for a minute or so, then mash the potatoes as usual (with the salt, white pepper - or black if we're being fancy and modern - butter and milk).
Depending on whether you like onions or not, this is *delicious*. It's a variant on what is called "champ", where at the end of cooking before serving you add in chopped green onions/scallions. There is also colcannon, where boiled kale (or nowadays green cabbage) is mixed in with the mashed potato. I've seen this called "bubble and squeak" but that's traditionally when you fry left-over potatoes and cabbage in bacon fat (if you have left-over bacon from the dinner the day before, fry that up and then with the rendered fat fry the potatoes and cabbage). It's *not* the same thing as colcannon, though some try and make the equivalence; it's more akin to hash browns:
Also, you can substitute cream (or 'the top of the milk' as it was in the far-off days of yore when milk came in glass bottles and was not homogenised and so the cream rose to the top) instead of some/all of the milk to make the potatoes even smoother and creamier.
Yum.
The big selling point of instant mashed potatoes is, as you say, convenience. Sometimes I want mashed potatoes but I want them *now* so instead of peeling, boiling, etc. a pot of spuds I get the (shame, shame!) packet of Knorr instant mash out of the cupboard. They never taste right, so instead now there are proper, but microwaveable, portions of mashed potato available.
Not advertising any brand, but something like this:
But nothing tastes as good as the ones you make yourself the old-fashioned way. Okay, where was I? Well done on this, excellent post, and you developed the point very appropriately into our modern world where the fake has replaced the original and become the original for many people.
Well written, but I'm 99% sure the premise (of fundamentally inferior IMP) is wrong, which makes it miss the landing.
The description of the father's IMP indicates that the flakes were placed directly in boiling water, which indeed makes them foul (gritty). The example at the end is overly thick and under creamed, and likely suffers from the same issue.
Instructions say but people normally don't realize that you MUST place the desiccated flakes in warm but not boiling water, the usual method is boiling the water, then removing from heat and adding the same quantity of milk. The flakes are then added to the lukewarm result.
If prepared correctly, IMP are properly competitive with all but the hautest of mashed potatoes.
Oh god, now I feel compelled to buy a high quality instant mashed and try this. Just to be fair. Also to be able to properly support my mashed-potato snobbery, if possible.
At least I can add the leftover instant mashed flakes à little at a time to bread dough. If you’re making any bread that should be soft and squishy, like Japanese milk bread or brioche or challah, a little potato (leftover real mashed also works) works wonders.
I'm very tempted to nitpick on mcnuggets (they're not made of mechanically recovered meat, and in fact mechanically recovered chicken meat is not legal for human food in the UK, might be different in the US) but the whole text is brilliant, both substantively and in writing quality.
I've learned a lot, and while it was enjoyable as a piece of personalized social/economic history, it reached another plane with plasterboard/MDF and LLM slop.
I so hope it wins (tho I fear the commentariat not-review will, because meta and very long).
I'd like to add a point to the "cultural products" and the LLM angle. I think phone screen technology (material and social) is a huge contributor to smashification (using the UK brand name) of culture and social interaction, to large extent because of scale/size. People think THEY GET TO SEE (or otherwise "consume", experience) art but they get 3×5 inches Smashified facsimile.
Anecdote:
I bought a thing on eBay once which was advertised as "linen", having found it by specifically searching for "linen thing". When it arrived it turned out to be polyester and viscose blend "linen look". And the seller GENUINELY didn't get what my complaint was about -- it looked like linen, especially on screen. I was even told "and it will not crumple as much". I feel this is quite indicative of a similar thing.
Oh, sure it’s a bit faster to go with instant potatoes but sitting on a kitchen chair, with a trash bag between my feet, peeling potatoes is a very soothing Zen-like activity. I sometimes forget myself and prepare too many because I’m enjoying the process so much.
Part of the post-WWII fascination with processed foods was a general attitude of "better living through science." There had been so many dramatic advances in science and technology in the first half of the 20th century (internal combustion engines, radio, radar, antibiotics, etc.) that people were primed to accept any new product as a big improvement over the old-fashioned version. There was also a concerted marketing effort by the food companies; all those hilariously disgusting 1950's recipes based on processed foods came from brand-specific cookbooks published by the manufacturers, in an effort to convince people that the hip, modern way to eat involved tuna-and-Jello pie or hot dog loaves.
Remember - processed and canned foods had been rationed during the war, so they seemed like luxury items to post-war Americans. Also, in many cases the original food item *had* been a legit luxury available only to the rich, so the processed version was very exciting for normal people. For example, aspics and gelatin molds were very popular amongst the wealthy in the early 1900s, but making gelatin involved boiling hooves, hides and tendons for hours and hours and hours, plus then you had to purchase a large quantity of ice in order to chill it and solidify it - so it was mainly something that rich people with cooks and kitchen staff served. It was not something that a busy housewife who didn't have the means to refrigerate it was going to be able to make. However, with the combination of Jell-O and home refrigeration becoming widely available in the mid-20th century, ordinary people could now eat "fancy" gelatin desserts and they went nuts for them.
My mom used to tell me how during WWII, Spam (invented in 1937) was rationed and hard to get, as most of it was used by the military. When my uncle was discharged from the Army in 1945, my mom's family wanted to welcome him back with an extravagant feast - the centerpiece of which was a Spam "roast." They all thought this was the absolute fanciest meal they could possibly make, and were shocked and rather upset by my uncle's "uh...thanks..." reaction. He had to explain that Spam was the only meat he had eaten in the past three years, and he had been rather hoping for a roast chicken or something.
You can still see the legacy of spam in a bunch of Pacific islands that US troops introduced it to in WWII. Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines all now have spam as a huge part of the food culture.
In 1955, the doctor told my mother that formula was better than breast milk, and implied that breast feeding would be poor parenting! (Also lazy, since breast feeding doesn’t require all that bottle washing and nipple sterilizing and mixing …). ‘More scientific’ = ‘better’.
My mother was told the same; and was rather concerned for the health of her grandchildren when she found out I was breastfeeding them.
It's kind of understandable, when you think about the enormous advances that were made in sanitation, food preservation and medicine in the first part of the 20th century. Things like antibiotics were so much more effective than older treatments for disease and infection that they truly seemed miraculous. My mom used to tell me how her older sister, who was a nurse, would bring home penicillin to dose family members for pretty much every cold or ailment.
To my grandparents, born in the late 1880s, having indoor plumbing, electricity and a refrigerator in their house, and listening to people thousands of miles away on the radio, and going from horse carts to automobiles within their lifetime must have been just...crazy! There was very much an attitude of "will wonders never cease?" No wonder that many people in the 1950s thought we'd all be living on the moon by now.
Great article! I found the brief mention of AI unnecessary, as I could and already had drawn that conclusion myself from the preceding potato discussion, and think it would have been a stronger article without it, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Yes, but if he'd left it out, most of the comments here would be criticizing that exclusion. A superfluous brief mention is a small price to pay to head that off.
This for me is exactly what blogging is about - a writer having space to start with a fun family observation that evolves into a fresh and genuine reflection on broader culture. I greatly enjoyed this also because it engaged with the idea of 'enshittification' and the Baudriallard-an notion of hyperreality but didn't namedrop these (which is what many blogs do) and instead explored exactly what the consequences of creating a simulacra of potato dishes are, and what this means for the meme of the original thing.
Now reflecting on the other IMPs in my life and I think one could be nightclubbing. Something that shot into the mainstream through its associations with ecstasy / MDMA and exciting subcultures (queer, ravers, jamaican dancehall etc) that then was adapted for the more legal (but less euphoric) alcohol, which was fine for a generation until young people today question whether the version they've been introduced to has any intrinsic merit.
Modern party music sounds 100% IMP to me. In Spanish we call it "chumba-chumba", from the terrible cheap and exaggerated electronic ersatz-drums, which is the only thing you even hear from a distance.
Not the same but related: songs largely made out of sampled bits from other artists' records.
Funny, I was also thinking about sample-based music. A lot of music I listen to now is churned up somehow: slowed and reverbed, or sped up, or covered in a different genre, or with the instrumentals isolated, or with ambient SFX added, etc, etc. Is this "real"? Is it hyperreal?
I feel like this is a well-written defense of "little c" conservativism. It's interesting how these sorts of ideas resonate even with a crowd that is not typically very conservative!
I see parallels to the Ballad of White Horse review from last year, which most everybody seemed to enjoy yet didn't make the top 3, compared to Two Arms and a Head, which seemed to have a much more mixed reception but eventually won first place. I wonder if this will suffer the same fate; a momentary appeal to universal conservative sentiment, all but forgotten when compared to a middling appeal to shock value and novelty with a thesis closer to the typical ACX commentariat worldview.
I feel like I strongly associate this kind of “Chesterton’s fence” and small c conservatism with this blog. It’s certainly where I learned of Henrich’s “The Secret of Our Success”, which changed the way I think about a lot of things.
But a lot of Scott’s recent posts attacking modern art in favor of ersatz McMansion aesthetic does go against this.
I wonder what the reviewer would think of, say, Neil Cicierega's "Mouth Moods" mashup album. Or sample-based music in general, or collage art. Are these IMPish? On some level they must be - simulacra built from decontextualized fragments which used to mean something else. But they lean into it, and find something aesthetically compelling there anyway. The absurd fakeness seems like part of the charm, somehow.
Fun fact: I've made wallpaper paste from potatoes in the (distant) past. This pretty much involves boiling them for a very long time then straining through cheesecloth.
In 2025 this is no longer a cost-effective way of obtaining wallpaper paste.
It does, however, bring back some visceral memories when considering the soupy starchy gloop IMP makes when too much water is added.
My thought - the IMPish is only bad to the extent that it uses deception to mislead us. Some of the IMPish are good, actually - IKEA furniture gives young people the ability to furnish a household as they want, rather than having to wait until their parents die or until their income reaches the level of buying real wood that will last decades. Same with Sheetrock and 5-over-1’s.
When you try to pass these things off as fancy heirlooms or luxury apartments, a lot ends up going wrong. But when you accept them as affordable goods for the youthful masses, they have their place.
But when I moved to Texas and ordered Caprese at Italian restaurants there, I didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Why would anyone want wet industrial tomatoes on bland mozzarella? The only reason is because Caprese is thought of as a Thing and they need to have it on their menu, even though the thing they are serving has none of the sensory joys of Caprese.
This was fun but I basically aesthetically disagree with the entire premise. I'm more or less on board with the idea that microwavable foods are not as good as the foods they're imitating. But I don't think that you have to have nostalgia for the original to enjoy the microwave version. I don't like *any* form of mashed potatoes, so I can't speak to those in particular, but your thesis would sort of imply that microwave mac & cheese requires having liked "real" mac & cheese to enjoy, and I just don't think that's true.
To be fair, you do walk this back a bit in the end. Which is perhaps not that powerful rhetorically ("RETVRN... except actually things are fine") but does make it easier to defend against this criticism.
Anyway. I think it's incredibly awesome that I can buy frozen mac & cheese that takes 5 minutes and almost no effort to make and is, like, 80% as good as the fresh made that takes me 40 minutes. I think it's awesome that I can get chipboard furniture that's not especially beautiful but is incredibly cheap and will arrive at my door within a couple days.
In general I agree that, to reframe your point somewhat, there are a lot of examples of some kind of efficiently-produceable artifact that's less good than the best exemplar of its category taking up a lot of market space. But I think that this is great! I love being able to buy cheap particle board furniture. If I couldn't, I would have to either spend a ton of money on artisanal stuff, or go without entirely, and I definitely prefer having access to the cheap stuff. I certainly don't think that my desire to have a particle board dresser requires some nostalgia for the concept of oaken armoires.
I think there's a general pattern where - whatever you particularly value, you notice that the ersatz version kinda sucks. And then you're like "damn if only everybody produced tons of really beautiful artisanal furniture [or whatever]," while happily going about reaping the benefits of living in a world of insane material abundance, because you're not bothered by the existence of 80%-quality goods in other domains.
The "real" vs "simulacra" distinction seems related to the qualities being optimized, and what virtues or vices they're appealing to. Convenience, in some sense, is appealing to the vice of laziness, and we are choosing to sacrifice the quality of experience to a vice.
What if you use the potato flakes but with butter and milk, instead of margarine and lying water? That'll probably get you most of the time saving, and I suspect most of the taste.
This article reads to me as an effort to launder a broad sociopolitical claim via an arbitrary aesthetic preference. Sure, you insist that you're not saying all so-called IMPish things are worse than the "originals", but you imply they usually are. I disagree.
Instant mashed potatoes are delicious, often preferable to homemade mashed potatoes, and a great choice for backpack hiking trips. Try getting some that aren't pre-seasoned and mixing your own seasoning blends to your taste. I find some garlic powder and mushroom/MSG seasoning goes a long way.
It seems like the category here is "stuff where we make a cheap substitute for a real thing that is inferior, but it works with two groups:
a. Folks who miss the real thing but find this an adequate substitute
b. Folks who never had the real thing so don't know this is not an adequate substitute
Sometimes, the new thing becomes its own thing that's better in important ways than the original. There are aspects of a mall (back when malls were doing well) that are better than the experience of, say, a busy shopping district. Listening to recorded music instead of live music is a different experience, inferior in some ways, but superior in others. In some sense you can think of movies as being a kind of IMP version of plays, but also movies are their own thing that have plusses and minuses that are different from those of live plays.
"I deny that the big shop is the best shop; and I especially deny that people go there because it is the best shop...I know it is not merely a matter of business, for the simple reason that the business men themselves tell me it is merely a matter of bluff. It is they who say that nothing succeeds like a mere appearance of success. It is they who say that publicity influences us without our will or knowledge. It is they who say that “It Pays to Advertise”; that is, to tell people in a bullying way that they must “Do It Now,” when they need not do it at all."
That was a very enjoyable piece of writing.
UK readers of A Certain Age will recall the TV advertisement of the 1970s where a brand of instant mashed potato was promoted under the slogan "For Mash, get Smash". A group of metallic, springy aliens reflected on their most recent trip to earth, and chortled at the memory of women (yes, it was exclusively women) laboriously preparing, cooking, and, um, mashing potatoes, rather than pouring boiled water onto the contents of a packet.
Needless to say, the stuff tasted, as we would say round these parts, shite.
For mashed potatoes with sausages and perhaps other meats, mustard is your friend.
English mustard?
American mustard is pretty funny. Extremely bland.
I prefer German mustard, but I can appreciate that English mustard at least has character.
Currently, both English mustard and French Dijjon mustard are popular in the UK. You can usually find a small selection of "French" mustard (ironically, there is very little Frenchness about it, and is "particular to the UK" according to Google), which is milder and runnier, and sold, apart from to the occasional connoisseur, primarily as a condiment to hotdogs. There is also whle-grain mustard, of course, but that's a cooking spice, not a condiment. It seems like at some point other radish-based condiments were popular, but today I can only see them sold in tiny 50g jars right next to the tiny 50g jars of mint sauce. I haven't actually seen any german brands of mustard. Overall, I would say that the popularity of mustard is falling in the UK.
Are you referring to the brand, "French's"? Because that is an American brand
While "french mustard" is a thing, I think I confused it with French's yellow mustard; thanks for catching that. English french mustard has caramel colouring (maybe once they used real caramelised onions), and has other spices in it (oregano, garlic, chilli) https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/essential-french-mustard/007636-3576-3577
Colman's "French" Mustard is no more, thanks to the EU, which deemed it un-French. I believe Waitrose make an equivalent still. In the 1970's when steak houses opened up all over England (such as the Berni Inn chain, or Trust House Forte) there was always Colman's French mustard on the table. I sometimes make a simulacrum with English mustard powder, vinegar and maple syrup.
Another condiment of similar style that is still available is horseradish sauce. Excellent with roast beef.
Whole grain mustard is absolutely a condiment. Dried mustard seeds (which have not been pickled, as in whole grain mustard) are an ingredient.
Also, this piece was excellent.
It’s funny that English mustard is the strong one, isn’t it, we are mostly bland.
English would be my choice.
I'm equally partial to English and Dijon for something on the side of the plate, but English would work better when the mustard is somewhat muffled by the potato.
French dijon mustard is the way to go. In the spirit of this post, a lot of mustard is IMPy.
I remember that ad! Years later, I tried a packet of Smash. It wasn't horrible, but yes, it was not the same as real mashed potato.
A few years back I tried another packet of Smash, but whatever they did to the formula in the meantime, it was disgusting.
Some brands of instant mash are the same as wallpaper paste and would be better used for that purpose. Out of curiosity, I've tried the American Idaho brand when I saw it offered online for the grocery shopping and again, not horrible, but not the same as the real thing.
Although Smash's trump card was ease of execution, no product is so simple that it will never be misused. I recall wading through a particularly gruesome example at a friend's house. Bad practice included the use of hot rather than boiling liquid; and failure to eliminate lumps (the latter no doubt made more likely by the former). A large dish of tepid lumpy ersatz potato; perhaps not surprising I can remember that from 1977.
All that said, the ad of course was great; that you and I can both remember it would be proof enough of that. The words were adopted for our own uses in the school playground. In these benighted times, it would surely have become a meme.
The ad was way more fun than the end product. We were cheated of the promised future! Flying cars and instant mash indistinguishable from the real thing!
On failing to prepare an edible bowl of a different food, a sibling of mine once thundered "Easy Mac!? It should be called Impossible Mac!"
I knew somebody would recall this before I posted, but here is an ad: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=smash%20ad%20youtube&mid=417CF75EC8180706B09E417CF75EC8180706B09E&ajaxhist=0
In the day I sometimes used to get instant mash (always in flake form, I think) and add black pepper and peas (frozen peas, thawed in a mug with water from the kettle). It was a bit glutinous but edible. Now I am old and only eat real spuds.
As someone who loves real mashed potatoes and does not like instant, you can get the instant stuff (Idahoan at least) to be pretty good. You just have really make sure it all mixes well, and usually even dehydrate it a bit after mixing in water.
I've found that too; if you put in the amount of water on the packet of whatever brand it is, the mash turns out a sludgy mess. It's tricky, because too little water and there is always that crust of dried flakes at the bottom, too much and it's a slurry. A little less than the packet amount, and if it's too dry you can always adjust by adding a little more. You can't undo "too much".
The brands that turn out best are the ones that recommend you substitute milk-and-water for all water, and to add some butter.
It's decades since I ate it, but I recall coming to the same conclusion.
sublime. printing this out.
Lovely review, and I appreciated the well executed title bait-and-switch. I'm surprised that LLM slop warranted a single paragraph, when it seems tailor made for comparisons to IMP. But then again one grows tired of hearing about this sad development.
The piece might have been stronger without any explicit mention of LLM. Lets the reader think it's their own idea, even if it's clearly implied.
I would have called out the author, had they left it out. It is really all too obvious for ACX readers to be much of a surprise anyway.
I thought the otherwise-great essay fell apart once the author started trying to point out specific instances of IMP-isms. I get why that part is there, that sort of thing is sort of expected in ACX contest entries, the equivalent of the mandatory love-interest subplot in every Hollywood movie, but I would have preferred a more open-ended conclusion that left the door open for other interpretations (I was heading down the “late 20th century American society sucked actually” interpretive path myself).
THIS is my objection to the charity folks standing by the metro entrance with clipboards, warmly saying “Hi!”
They’ve desiccated and reconstituted parts of conviviality and neighborliness and aimed them at your wallet.
I do sometimes run into friends on the street but my instinctive response to a bright “Hi!” Is to speed up.
Being unfamiliar with American products, am I supposed to imagine something similar to Mousline? Mousline is pretty good. The prose in this piece is very enjoyable but whatever deeper message there is hinges entirely on disliking the instant mashed potato product --- it's very much a piece in the "products I don't like are a manifestation of postmodern degeneracy" genre.
I like the article overall, but Scott and Aporia have pointed out a number of studies indicating that humans either can't tell the difference between real and AI art or actively prefer the latter, when the latter is given appropriate prompts. I'm not sure how well that really maps to instant mashed potatoes.
Always preferred my spuds roasted, personally.
The comparison only works if satisfaction is the primary metric. If I grow up only tasting IMP, I might be satisfied because I’ve never encountered the thing they’re simulating. There’s no contrast left to train the appetite.
With AI art too, the question isn’t just whether it's pleasing, but whether it hollows out the experience it imitates. When you lose the reference point but keep the name, the name becomes the thing.
Which it isn't.
Well, our author grew up on IMP and was NOT satisfied. But their dad, who had the real deal WAS satisfied. (Because they could imagie the real thing that was being imitated or so..)
That's directly in contrast to what you are suggesting here.
I didn’t mean that everyone always prefers the fake if they’ve never known the real. I meant that without contrast, preference formation becomes unmoored. Sometimes you’re disappointed without even knowing why. Sometimes you’re content, but only because you’re remembering something that’s no longer there.
AI art in those tests is the better art, picked out by the people running the contest to go up against selected human artworks. The slop that is the cartoony, oversaturated yellow-tinted, mass product on the top of every article and post online is dreadful.
That's the comparison here: cardboard flakes reconstituted with water and margarine, not 'we used the best potatoes, carefully dried them, remixed them with full-fat milk and butter' versus the traditional mashed potato.
Your AI comparison is just Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." You're now comparing the best human art (since you never encounter most it) to the perhaps the median AI art.
I strongly reject Scott's conclusion on the AI art thing. In reality, he proved that if you pick a sampling of random genres that a person has barely experienced and never given much thought to, they won't be able to tell the difference between manmade slop and AI slop.
I was very confident, and correct, in discerning between manmade and AI art in genres that I was actually used to looking at, and judging by the comments on that article I was far from alone. Sure I struggled to differentiate between manmade and AI impressionist scribblings but I don't consider either of them real art, so I don't think it was fair for that to be scored against me.
On first sip, people prefer Pepsi over Coke. On first walkthrough, people prefer the new Sheetrock and particle board “luxury apartments” to the well-built older one. When picking things out at the supermarket, people preferred the bright colored Red Delicious over other varietals that never looked quite as pretty.
The question is what people actually like more when they engage with the product long term, as it is actually used.
For ephemeral illustrations in a post to be read once, superficially appealing AI slop can be great, especially since it’s cheap and easy to tailor it to the topic at hand. But for actual prolonged engagement with art, it doesn’t compete.
I recently read a piece on Coke vs Pepsi. I think they said that Pepsi gets generally gets the nod in a blind test but if the subject knows the brands they lean Coke.
Yeah the claim that "The memory of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work" seems very suspect to me. The review mentions chicken McNuggets as an example of IMPism but I'm quite confident there are millions of kids out there who love McNuggets despite no particular attachment to real chicken.
Their parents, who buy the McNuggets in the end, might have more of that attachment. When the intended consumer of a product are not the people who buy it, ads have to either choose who to target, or try to entice both. See this 2016 ad, found on google images:
https://www.mystateline.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2016/08/McDonald27s20New20Chicken20McNuggets_1470686003227_10127124_ver1.0.png?strip=1
And whatever your target demographic is, you certainly won't show the real process of producing McNuggets, because it's exactly as the author says: the real process grinds up chicken meat into a paste, then flavors and reshapes it into the final product that has only the most tenuous of connections to actual chicken meat.
I just don't think the "how it was made" matters much to most people. The process of producing "real" chicken meat is pretty ugly as well but for the most part we're happy to ignore that because we enjoy the final product.
The reviewer allowed for this as well. When the economics of buying McNuggets clearly overwhelm those of raising and processing your own chickens, then McNuggets it is. The reviewer also doesn't fundamentally reject this, but wants to remind us that the conflict does exist.
>Nowadays, I do not judge people for making use of instant mashed potatoes. I certainly take plenty of other prepared food culinary shortcuts myself. In the modern world we all make compromises for the sake of convenience. If we didn’t, we’d still be stomping on chuño to survive the winter.
The point is what we become accustomed to. If you've eaten nothing but chicken McNuggets as a kid, when you grow up, then for you chicken *is* McNuggets and you may well not even like a proper roasted chicken because your tastes have been formed and set.
Like this video, about a guy who has been trying for ten years to cook the perfect roast chicken, and he gets a recipe he's finally happy with.
Then he admits it's not as good as his memories, when every weekend when he was a kid his mother bought a rotisserie chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOE0afv46I
Because for him, *that* is what roast chicken is. He's eating the memories as much as the real chicken, and I'm sure the commercial product is nowhere near as elaborate as the ones he's tried to cook. HIs tastes were formed when he was a kid, and now that's the ideal against which all others are judged. He can't be objective about it, no matter what he tries.
(I'm the same around black and white pudding: I prefer the ones with more meal in them because those are the brands I grew up eating, not the 100% pork meat ones that are now in my price range).
If people become accustomed to AI art and fake mashed potato and ersatz community via lovebots and plastic exruded product then they grow up on that, and prefer it to the real thing in the long run, but that's a genuine loss.
Formative experiences are certainly a factor; the issue is about memory and how it gets hijacked by modern advertisers, after all. But it can't explain everything. Do you, adult-Deisach, eat exactly as child-Deisach did, nothing more and nothing less? Among the things I loved as a kid were canned ravioli and frozen spinach-sludge, and I hated olives. Now I love olives, and can't stand canned ravioli and frozen spinach-sludge on account of having eaten much better versions. So I certainly don't eat as child-Engine did, and I'd be surprised if anyone did.
It's weird, because I do! I've branched out and tried more things, but I do recognise that even Irish cooking has become more adventurous in recent years, but I stick to the tried-and-trusted recipes I've grown up with.
I'm willing to *try* a lot of things, but when it comes to cooking them *myself*, I don't adventure very far.
I didn't grow up on Mac'n'Cheese, but I understand very well why people will always prefer the box of commercial product to the 'made with real pasta and real cheese' version 😀
> even Irish cooking has become more adventurous in recent years
I’ve seen that. My in laws are putting more pepper on the spuds these days.
The "most tenuous of connections" being that it IS actual chicken meat that has been ground up, flavored and shaped?
Yes, but it lacks the SOUL of a chicken.
That's the question at hand, isn't it? Is the inside of a McNugget still chicken meat? The process of making a McNugget starts with killing and deboning a chicken for its meat. If you then proceed to grind that meat into finer and finer components, then eventually you'll end up with sub-atomic particles, which nobody could positively identify as having originated from chicken meat; it's no longer chicken meat. At some point between "fresh chicken breast" and "sub-atomic particles", there has to have been a transition between "chicken meat" to "not chicken meat". The transition is gradual, or you could make up enough discrete phase changes as to call it practically gradual.
Where exactly one places the binary distinction of meat/non-meat is arbitrary and up for debate, but undoubtedly you have to draw it somewhere, and that's the larger point the review makes.
I'm not sure you picked up the main point in the piece: instant mash is a simulacrum of the real thing that people mistake for the real thing. You can prefer the fake, like the author's father does, by all means, but it's all too possible to not know that it's an imitation to begin with.
That’d be true if the point were just “these flakes taste bad.” But I took it more as: we don’t know what we’re missing. It’s the fact that it pretends to be something it’s not, and people who've never had the real deal won't notice.
> it's very much a piece in the "products I don't like are a manifestation of postmodern degeneracy" genre.
Well-said. Instant mashed potatoes are great, you should try them. Don't add too much water, and mix your own seasoning.
Karl Marx isn't exactly favored in these parts, but he had a term for the process by which products are separated from the choices of the people producing them: alienation.
Larger systems demand that people make and distribute products that the workers making them would not generally choose to make or use themselves.
Marx ideas spread like wildfire because he correctly identified major contemporary sources of problems. Alienation is imo a very valuable term to understand modern unhappiness. Ironically, it also is, if anything, more applicable to communist systems than to capitalist systems, due to the latter having at least some mechanism of correction both on the consumer side as well as on the provider side, albeit imperfectly.
But it's somewhat unfair to blame Marx himself, since finding good ways of dealing with new problems is a lot of trial and error, and the analytical theories underlying his favored solutions and predictions for the future had multiple errors only later proven empirically wrong.
Marx was a good journalist. Good in the sense of being able to produce the equivalent of clickbait.
That's why some of his ideas spread.
The communist manifesto reads like something from 100 years later. Like a newsreel.
I think it was mostly the Bolshevik Revolution that caused his ideas to spread https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/das-karl-marx-problem/ Of course, it did have to spread at least to Russia in order for the Bolshevik Revolution to happen, but most of its spread has happened since then.
>finding good ways of dealing with new problems is a lot of trial and error, and the analytical theories underlying his favored solutions and predictions for the future had multiple errors only later proven empirically wrong
Did he highlight these concerns in the Communist Manifesto, or elsewhere?
Karl Marx also ate potatoes. Oh, lovely potatoes. Doesn't mean potatoes are bad, or that Marx is good
As others have said that’s hardly unique to capitalism. Most workers throughout history are working on stuff they don’t really want to do, what choice did slaves have, do servants really want to slop out a commode, or cook for ten people everyday, do factory workers in socialism have any control in what is produced (or any ownership after).
Marx’s alienation isn’t really just ”doing things you don’t wanna do” and more specifically about the great abstraction of production in industrialised capitalism that’d be pretty top-of-mind in his time
Well he said that people were alienated from what they produce. The only people who aren’t are self employed.
You have discovered something about Marx though. He was uncomfortable with the modern world, if hardly alone in that. This harping back to a primitive era, this flawed idea
of early primitive communism, along with theories of alienation are all a cry against the world.
That's not something you have to dig very deep into Marx to find though -- just the manifesto is basically all about modernity/capitalism/the ascendant bourgeoisie sweeping away everything old in very grim and gothic terms.
Still, I think it's way too reductive to frame Marx as just some primitivist sentimental opponent of modernity -- he pretty explicitly criticises this tendency (including a whole section of the manifesto on "reactionary socialism") and is pretty clearly opposed to pre-modern power structures and mores. His day-to-day politics was pretty whiggish and often practically positioned as a radical wing of the liberalism of his day. Modernity as not good and bad in itself fundamentally, but necessary to both implement and overcome.
Remember: in his view the proletariat, his heroic revolutionary subject, is just as much a product of the industrial, modern capitalism of his time as is their bourgeois antagonists!
The sort of complicated view on modernity makes sense in terms of his hegelianism -- history as a force unto itself working through internal contradictions. It doesn't really make sense in his framework to wanna harken "back". The only way is through.
On alienation: yes, and pre-capitalist production involved modes of organising production much closer to modern self-employment for professional craftsmen and farmers.
Furthermore, estrangement from the product is only one part of Marx's alienation, there's also stuff like how work itself is sub-organised (repetetive sub-assembly etc), from work itself in that it is abstracted away as a special sphere apart from being human, from other workers, etc etc etc etc. I think many of these are fairly specific to industrial production, and some specifically to capitalist organisation therein.
I really miss <a href="https://vancedyoutube.org/">youtube vanced</a>—it was perfect for how I like to watch videos. Lately I’ve been trying ReVanced and NewPipe, and they’re actually pretty great. Not exactly the same, but close enough to feel familiar. Love that people keep finding ways to bring back the features we all enjoyed.
Instead of AI Slop, I propose: Processed Prose
My favourite review yet!
There's an interesting argument as to why potatoes seem to have such a important place in many traditional Old World cultures, from Cork to Hokkaido to Guizhou, despite being far more recent introductions than wheat, millet, barley and rice etc.
Potatoes are a pretty good source of calories, but generally not as efficient as wheat or rice per hectare of quality arable land. But, 1) they can be planted almost anywhere with little effort, so mobile agriculturalists the world over could plant them on a non-irrigated mountainside, and come back and dig them up a few months later; 2) they can be eaten in a pretty wide timespan, from 10-25 weeks after planting, which is perfect for mixed-strategy, mobile livelihoods; 3) a very "James C. Scott" argument - potato crops aren't very visible, so they can be hidden from the nefarious state, so your British-Irish or Qing China landlords won't tax your agricultural produce!
I'd always thought that compared to wheat, potatoes are also much easier to eat. Wheat needs to be ground into flour and baked into bread, which is a relatively labour-intensive and technical process; potatoes can be cooked easily or even just eaten raw. Do you think that's part of the picture too?
I’m not him but absolutely. No extra processing, just cooking.
You can cook wheat grains like you cook rice, whole grain. Milling them into flour is obviously the much preferred solution, but in a pinch you don't strictly have to.
Wheat needs to at least be threshed and winnowed, even to cook as we do rice. Potato, in a pinch, just stick it in the coals, don’t even need to wash it.
If you're *really* in a pinch, don't even need coals. It's possible to eat raw, like an apple, straight out of the ground and into your mouth. Less efficient to digest, but somebody half-dead from starvation, or concerned that any fire would be noticed by an enemy army's foraging scouts, https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/ may not care quite so much about efficiency.
Never tried that with a raw potato but i have been known to take a leftover baked potato out of the refrigerator and eat it like an apple.
I used to eat raw potatoes while walking the family dog around the neighborhood. People kept telling me they were poisonous, but I didn't die even once, which is how I'm able to write this comment.
You can't really eat them raw - I mean, you can eat a bit and you will not die and probably even get some nourishment, but there are resistant starches and maybe toxins that are easily eliminated by cooking (which can be as simple as a few minutes in the microwave).
They're also more filling. In fact, potatoes are one of the most satiating foods. Plus, you can just dig them up and boil or bake them, vs. threshing/winnowing/milling wheat.
Max Miller has a great episode on potatoes (and introducing them as a food for the people in Europe):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaTjWWJSei0
There is an argument that places like New Guinea didn't develop civilization because they relied on root crops that a state couldn't effectively tax.
Isn't that just another instance of enshittification, just made large and applied to progress in general?
Don't think so. Enshittification is a steady decline in quality in order to increasingly cash out and rent-seek. While that certainly exists in the food industry and others about as much as in software, the author admits that current IMPs are better than WW2 IMPs, which are better than chuño.
It's more about the contrast between advertisement and reality, such as when on TV you see a smiling young maid slowly stirring a bowl of strawberry yoghurt in a rural kitchen when the reality is huge steel tanks, electric motors, and genetically engineered bacteria producing the flavor molecules. It's about press-ganging images of the past into service for today's efficiency.
The author didn't say WW2 style IMPs are better than chuño.
Not in those exact words, I wrote that for simplification. Consider:
> The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.
Clearly even the awful WW2 IMPs must have had the overall advantage over chuño, or the US army would have used chuño.
Conceivably the WWII version was worse to eat, just easier to produce. US army had different logistical tools and schedule constraints than the Inca.
Yes, by "advantage" I did not mean any singular quality such as taste or cost, but the overall fitness for purpose, i.e. the weighted sum of all properties. Obviously, WW2 IMPs have different requirements than mashed potatoes in a fancy restaurant, and even though the fancy mash tastes infinitely better than the IMP, you wouldn't use it mash as a ration for soldiers; both are valid for their purpose and not the other. Maybe chuño also has some qualities that are superior to IMPs, but overall, IMPs were considered overall better than chuño for feeding US army soldiers in WW2.
Like the other response says, enshittification doesn't apply to many IMPish foods as they have mostly gotten considerably better since their inventions.
Enshittification is better applied to foods like chocolate, where many popular consumer brands are known for substituting lower quality ingredients and shrinking sizes
enslopification
edit: oh, someone already got the domain https://enslopification.com/
I recently bought some boxed macaroni and cheese for my toddlers to keep in the pantry as emergency food. The first time I went to make it I discovered they've further "optimised" boxed mac and cheese from my childhood to simply microwaved in 3 minutes then mix in a packet of something. Presumably the pasta is parcooked in someway already? I don't know. My toddlers have no taste buds so think it equivalent to the home made mac and cheese I sometimes make, which honestly isn't even that hard to make. I wonder if this new variant will displace the old version in 20-30 years.
Kraft mac and cheese is the direction to go in. I actually love it, and don’t really enjoy “real” Mac and cheese. Is the blue box the anti-IMP?
For what it is worth "modern" homemade mac and cheese recipes use sodium citrate to recreate the smoothness of boxed mac & cheese.
mmmm, sodium citrate. Good for preventing blood from clotting in a tube or cheese from clotting in your mac
Wow, this was lovely. I love it when a banal topic transitions to broader philosophizing. Well done!
I feel this way about modern parenting. We feel this Herculean effort is necessary to shape and mold our children because we simply don’t raise people the way we used to. The nuclear family is a historical irregularly, but is very convenient to optimizing the broader economy for maximum GDP growth to have a worker able to move anywhere to be maximally productive. It makes me wonder if the declining fertility rate is an example of how we’ve lost the desire for the simulacra because it’s gotten so far from the original good it represented.
It’s not just convenient for the broader GDP - it’s convenient for the family at every moment to be able to make their own decisions on things without having to consult all their extended friends and family who are tied up in their house. I sometimes think about getting a big residence with a bunch of friends, and then realize how many of those people move in a five or ten year period, and how annoying it would be to find a new roommate each time that happens, rather than just being able to treat the whole household as a single unit.
Probably people move in 5-10 years because of jobs, and those jobs pay more than there jobs at home--that is the convenience to the gdp, because moving made those people more productive. People didn't move so much before the modern economy
Yes, but they're choosing to do it. They aren't acting out of some devotion to GDP - they're acting out of their own interests.
One of the things I was thinking about a lot in response to the post the other day about deep communities is that having deep community relations with people really does get in the way of convenience. Doing things in the convenient way is how we all get rich, and once you're rich enough, you can afford some of the inconveniences that enable community, but all the conveniences that we each independently adopted on the way towards wealth did damage the communities along the way.
A terrifically well done piece of writing. I haven't enjoyed one of these this much in... ever?
Keep writing.
Yes, the line "The only things that are really real on the Altiplano are nightshade and hunger" is particularly brilliant.
Potato "origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins." How in heaven's name did some prehistorical person figure this out, "must eat clay with potatoes"? For another example, my hillbilly family was so poor they had to eat poke sallet (just like Annie), which has to be boiled twice before it is non-lethal poisonous. Did one person in prehistory eat raw pokeweed and died, so the next person said, "I bet if I boil it, I will not die," then when that person died, the third person said, "Well, if I boil it twice, I won't die." I am becoming skeptical of all history.
Reminds me of the manioc discussion in The Secret of Our Success (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/#:~:text=way%20to%20go.-,And%20then%20there%E2%80%99s%20manioc,-.%20This%20is%20a)
> In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten.
> Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work.
Yes, exactly.
I suspect that poke sallet is a like actual mannioc.
If you try eating manioc is poisonous and it tastes bad. If you eat enough of it, you throw up. If you boil it, it tastes less bad and you need to eat more before you throw up. It does not actually take a genius to realize: "Hey, if we boil this more, maybe it might taste better!", even if you don't know that boiling is one of the most common ways to remove poison from food.
The manioc story might be a convenient Fable, but it's rooted in the idea that black people couldn't possibly notice that a poisonous version of a food tastes bad and makes you throw up.
If you slice manioc (aka cassava aka tapioca) up like a potato and deep fry it, the result is a very tasty french fry substitute - which gives you pretty bad stomach cramps a few hours later. If you slice it up, soak it overnight, then drain and deep fry, it is a very tasty french fry substitute with no side effects. I've done both, the first time by accident. So it's not that big a deal. It's only if you want to make flour that you can store for longer term use that there is a lot of work involved.
Some parts of the answer probably are:
* Finding new edible things actually mattered to them, for real. Sometimes they would be close to starving to death. When not starving to death, finding food and preparing it was a large chunk of anything they did, period. They didn't have physics, literature or latest TV show to worry about - search for food occupied a large part of everyone's mind, including that of the very smart or very reckless people. If somebody discovered something - a way to preserve food, to make something inedible edible - it would be huge for their culture and they would hold onto it. Maybe the discoverer would gain status. At any rate, he or she probably wouldn't starve as easily as others.
We know and understand the world where kids are dreaming about launching a startup and making a billion dollars, or becoming celebrity athletes or youtubers. Imagine a world where all the intellectual energies by necessity are focused on not starving to death. What crazy things might people try then?
* They had timescales of tens of thousands or years to figure things out. Even though there were much fewer people trying things, on the other hand they would all be working on similar problems.
* You might naturally eat some potatoes covered in clay because they are coming from the dirty ground and you don't always have the opportunity to wash everything. Then you might notice that washing = upset stomach and sickness, and not do it. You may notice the general idea that boiling food = less sickness, and get adventurous and try boiling something normally poisonous. Try boiling something mildly poisonous when boiled extra hard to make it safe. You wouldn't get this creative when not starving to death, but conveniently very often you would be starving to death.
Excellent addition to the discussion, many thanks
> You wouldn't get this creative when not starving to death, but conveniently very often you would be starving to death.
My guess is a lot of the early-stage experimentation would actually happen in times of plenty: people get bored with whatever they have enough of, while elaborately prepared, rare, and/or risky "delicacies" become prestigious. Marginal case of food poisoning is easier to recover from for someone otherwise healthy. Once acceptably safe preparation methods have been prototyped, iterative refinement continues as a niche hobby, ready to scale up if all the better options are exhausted during a famine.
It was probably the same guy that figured out the nixtamalization of corn!
Honestly, when you see the amount of processing some foods require in order not to kill you ded the second you bite into them, it's astounding how anyone ever figured it out and survived.
Who, for example, ever thought "hey, I bet if I put in the stuff for boiling with clothes when doing the laundry, it'll be perfectly fine to produce an edible foodstuff?" for bagels. That one does sound more like discovery by accident, e.g. "help! I used the laundry water by mistake, if I dump it out fast maybe the dough is still usable?"
Other processes really sound too extreme to have worked. It's like the mystery of evolution, except even more mysterious, because how on earth do you get from "we tried eating this and it killed us" to "we cooked it as normal and it killed us" to "we figured out that if you grind it this one particular way, then cook it with this particular mineral in this particular way, then do this other particular step in this particular way, eventually it won't kill you"? That sounds like a lot of people died along the way, and it's really only "it's a choice between this and starvation, and at least if this kills us, it might do it faster than starvation" desperation at work there.
"It's like the mystery of evolution." Exactly. Like how get from a one-cell primordial organism to a blue whale. I am starting to doubt evolution in all forms. Maybe solipsism is the only explanation of the universe I perceive . . . that or an actual Creator of the universe whose wonders to perform are miraculous indeed.
Evolution at least is understandable because "over millions of years tiny changes in every generation got winnowed out until the ones that benefited stayed", but when you're talking about a population of humans relying on foodstuffs not to die, it goes:
Step 1 - it killed us
Step 1 and 2 - it killed us
Step 1, 2 and 3 - still killed us, but slower this time
Step 1, 2, 3 and 4 - not dead yet, let's see if this works. Hang on, it killed us really slowly this time
Step 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 - okay this time not dead yet, seems like we have a winner!
There's no amount of processing will save you from the mushrooms in this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leongatha_mushroom_murders
So it does seem that "eating this will kill you" and keeping going by trial and error even in the face of "it killed us, it still killed us, it keeps killing us" is something incredible. For some foods it will work, for others it won't ever work. Clearly there are some gaps in the records about how this worked when people were trying to find sustainable food sources, and I do wonder if legends of culture heroes introducing "they gave us X food" are about that - the people who found the way over decades to plant/prepare/cook the food so that it was no longer poisonous.
Consider dose-response curves. If you can eat a tiny shaving of something and not die, maybe it'll add flavor (e.g. nutmeg) and micronutrients to a larger meal. Incremental progress on detoxification makes the tolerable dose larger. Toxicity often has observable symptoms short of death, so relative severity of "close calls" could reveal what's working and what isn't.
Consider also the possibility that making safe food wasn't really the original plan at all. Maybe it was a botched murder attempt, and the target's baffling, Rasputin-like persistence inspired meticulous imitators.
Maybe they ate a little and felt a bit sick, then tried another way and it felt better, then took it from there.
>Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF.
Precisely mirrors Scott's artist friend when asked about one of the entries from the AI art Turing test:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/151145038/but-others-might-genuinely-be-on-a-higher-plane-than-the-rest-of-us
>Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it's so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake.
"The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches." In other words, just like the U.S. military dominance built on "shit on a shingle" before MREs.
SOS - my career military dad introduced this surprisingly tasty dish to the family. Basically, home made in civilian conditions, it is comprised of packaged dried beef, added to a gravy made of flour, butter, milk and seasonings. In lieu of dried beef, fresh cooked ground beef can be substituted.
Yes . . . but if cooked ground beef is substituted, it is no longer SOS, even though tasty. I grew up in a home where cream gravy was a beverage. We put all sorts of things in gravy, and all was good. It's not hard to make actual SOS . . . but the dried chipped beef at Walmart is $28 per pound.
😳 I haven't purchased chipped beef in probably 50 years, but oh my goodness, $28/pound? I suppose if the math is done that cost isn't prohibitively expensive but still...yes, cream gravy makes almost everything better.
Well, the chipped beef is dehydrated, so one does not need to use much by weight for the gravy. It plumps back up from the milk (even better with whole milk and a slurp or two of actual cream).
I'm presuming this refers to this recipe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5Du60WPGU
This is why I’m making the switch to listening to music on vinyl records. Not as “real” as live music; still industrially chopped and screwed; but better than Spotify.
Also they sound better. Not because of analog vs digital; because the sound engineers know they can’t be played in the car, or through earbuds while jogging. So they’re mixed to sound good through real speakers in your living room. Whereas Spotify tracks are mixed to sound “good” literally anywhere on Earth, through any speakers, no matter how crappy. Lots of compression.
This might only be true for records from the 60s-80s.
That's very interesting; I can't deny the appeal of a good soundsystem.
Not all music is mixed for the car, though (I agree, some genres do), and spotify doesn't have any mandate about what music is uploaded. It would not make sense for DnB producers to master for the car — it would be mastered for the club (and then uploaded to Spotify in the same state) or for headphones.
Compression is inherent to the codec, and should only affect the very highest frequencies. (Or were you talking about use of a compressor in music production?)
Yeah, music production compression, not digital compression. I’ve noticed a really clear difference between the compression on rock albums from the 70s and 80s and the compression on the same album on CD from the 90s. I’m just guessing about the reason.
I am not sure about CD vs vinyl compression situation, it is possible that it was driven by availability of portable and in-car CD players.
But there's no question about compression for streaming: the ability to play never-ending mixes everywhere makes it very tempting to mix your tracks louder. There was a period, roughly in the 'teens, when a loudness war broke out, with producers competing to mix as loud as possible, with predictable compressed awfulness. Thankfully, it subsided, but you still don't want your song to sound significantly quieter than others in the mix.
And yes, you absolutely want to master for the car, at least if you want to reach a wide American audience (and, more broadly, big city dwellers around the world, listening in a subway car is not that different from listening in a car).
I personally master to -12 dB LUFS-i, seems to be a decent compromise between still having some dynamics left and keeping up with the others.
Classical music is the real loser in this wonderful nowadays.
You aren't kidding about classical music — I have to turn it up a good 40% (in my perceived loudness) from my usual baseline just to hear all the voicing.
I found found the best of both worlds with a sound server. A Raspberry PI with a memory card loaded with high-bitrate mp3's or FLACs, running mpd, with a hi-fi quality USB DAC, connected to an old skool hi-fi amp and speakers. Control from any phone on the same WiFi using an app called M.A.L.P. It's like having your own spotify at home, but with high audio quality, no algorithm to take your choices away, and bring your own audio files.
There are sometimes subgenres of music that try to be as compressed as possible, deliberately adding distortion or bitcrush-gunk. I wonder if this is a way to get around the constraint of sounding 'good' literally anywhere on earth, or if the ACX commentariat would consider it a kind of Stockholm syndrome built out of nostalgia for crunchy low-quality sound.
It’s like French toast - originally designed as a way to make a bad thing palatable, but actually pretty good when done with good ingredients (though still not as great as some of the things you can do in better conditions).
Excellent review. I feel like I have had a new meme installed (IMP).
> Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
> Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
> Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
> Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.
As a thesis I think this has some merit but it also seems easy to over-generalise. Think about, say, milk as an example. Pasteurised, homogenised milk is raw milk that's been mucked about with and re-formed. But generally it seems like this kind of milk isn't meaningfully worse than raw milk, and certainly better in the sense that it isn't lumpy and isn't full of bacteria. Is pasteurised milk IMP?
Another example: the YouTube recommendation algorithm. You might have mixed opinions on it, but is it IMP? It certainly has some of the qualities of chopping-up-and-reconstituting that we're talking about, but it's also hard to compare it to the alternative (only ever seeing YouTube videos that individual people send you?).
Yes, but that's still liquid milk. Think about powdered milk: if that was served up in a jug or bottle or litre container as "real milk" well yes, technically it is, but you'll know the difference between that and even pasteurised, homogenised milk.
Or take the non-dairy coffee creamers: not cream, not milk (though they may include casein from milk) and thus an inferior substitute for the real thing. I imagine a lot of people routinely use these, not milk, in their coffee and would find coffee with milk strange to their taste if they tried it.
I think the real question is how much the thing stands on its own, and how much it relies on the cultural memory of the thing it is an imitation of. Things like ikea bookcases and homogenized milk work fine on their own terms. There is absolutely some appeal to having real wood bookcases and raw milk, but those are doing something a bit different. But the kind of faux traditional design elements on McMansions are really only appealing because they suggest something that they aren’t.
You also don't really need any equipment to enjoy potatoes. No need to thresh or mill.
So even today any old city dweller with no metis can very easily get started growing some potatoes on any old strip of land they have access to.
Or even a man on Mars.
I'd never have guessed how much I would enjoy reading about the history behind fake mashed potatoes! Honestly, without reading a single other review, I'd vote for this one.
Chatgpt told me 10%to 15%. And more common in institutional settings.
Fun fact I feel like sharing:
Potatoes from Peru are adapted to even days of 12 hours from being close to the equator and did not adapt so well to the longer European summer day. Most modern varieties can be traced to the Chilean island of Chiloé, which displaced the Peruvian potato after the blight of the 1840s. Coming from further south, they fared better in temperate climates.
I asked Gemini about the "ſ" character and it says it's called the "long s" or "medial s."
Also, I love IMPs.
Probably most familiar in America from the "Congrefs" on the top of the Bill of Rights.
In both the Greek and Roman alphabet the letter “s” has had a different form inside a word than as the last letter. In Greek, the familiar lower case and upper case sigma are only in the middle of words, and the lower case one at the end of a word looks like “s” and hole the upper case one at the end of a word looks like “C”.
Greek: lowercase "σ", vs. the final "ς". (I can't find the symbol for the final uppercase Σ; are you sure there's a different symbol for it?)
Nice piece. I too had this revelation when I stopped eating the instant potatoes and ate the proper mash.
It’s interesting that the writer doesn’t mention instant soup. Over here in Britain, anyway, most soup was instant and the king of instant soup was the miserable Oxtail soup. The taste? Not very beefy, sort of sweet, sort of… brown. It didn’t taste like actual oxtail stew, more like watered down beef gravy that had aspirations of being a meal, if you added gravy. I think we can assert with confidence that no oxen were harmed in the making of the soup. My God, it was rubbish.
I had the reputation chez Defeel of being a fussy eater, what with me refusing nourishing soup.
But it turns out that I wasn’t. I actually love proper soup.
(Great review).
This was amazing, the best kind of bait and switch.
Arguably, potatoes themselves are an IMPish form of starch. They reached fixation in cultures that didn't have enough grain. And yet we still eat them...
You say that the reason you can't enjoy a pale facsimile of stuff that used to be good is because you have no memories of having enjoyed the real thing that the simulation could conjure up.
That doesn't have to be this sad thing. Not being able to properly associate the fake thing with the real thing can also leave your mind free to make different associations, to enjoy the thing as a thing in itself instead of just an imitation.
For example, powdered milk can be used as an ingredient in some desserts without re-hydrating it at all. Like it's not a pale substitute of milk, but it's own thing with it's own texture that can compliment the soft textures of a cup of frozen açaí with banana slices. Gives it a nice crunch. It can also enhance some homemade cheese recipes to make a cheese that is not store-bought and also not fully home-made but something else that trascends those conceptual limitations.
You have to take ownership of the industrially processed stuff. Use them for your own purposes, not just for the approved corporate profit-maximizing purpose of the manufacturer. Use powdered milk to make weird home-made cheese. Use instant mashed potatoes to make gnocchi. Put a knor cube into your pasta water. Don't be a slave to preconceptions of a previous generation.
Some of these products have those uses that stand on their own. But some don’t. Tofurkey doesn’t.
Instant coffee can be used to make Dalgona coffee. Trendy a few years back, but worth the hype.
Not to lie, I start the day with a strong mug of tea, then I take a shower and then have a mug of instant coffee from Aldi. It doesn't fill the room with the great aroma of coffee, but it is also not bitter and it gives me the caffeine hit I need.
Once had dinner with a friends family as a kid. They were somewhat strict and conservative when it came to family matters like dinner. I love mashed potatoes. Asked for a double helping not realizing or even being aware of instant mashed potatoes. Refused to eat it and it created some tension that was apparent. I was not invited to dinner again.
"The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime,"
False, bordering on libel.
"American cheese product,"
False. The addition of one ingredient does not an abomination make and I am *so tired* of process cheese discourse.
"instant coffee,"
Possibly true, but coffee sucks anyway.
"deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs"
Both true in a way that undermines the entire premise of the essay because they are simply superior products in ways other than mere convenience.
I enjoy processed ham as well. However it’s not great as a food.
Yeah, I think he has a reasonable point about instant mashed potatoes specifically, but the rest of the analogies seem weak, about the same as "No, it's not REAL champagne, just sparkling wine."
I have always interpreted Gene Wolfe's novel Peace as an apology for his part in the creation of the abomination known as Pringles.
This is an excellent examination of the way technological change impacts our cultural identity and how we think about ourselves. It is both well-researched and heartfelt. It makes me think of an art exhibition by modern Chinese artists. The theme was their reaction to technological change in their culture, which was even more rapid than it was for us. These types of changes can leave us somewhat bewildered and disappointed, which creates an impetus for a search for historical connection and authenticity, just like this writer has successfully gone through.
I am only halfway through this but I want to call it as having been written by GPT5.
It cannot possible have been, if you look at the median GPT-5 output, it's extreme slop recognizable instantly on sight.
Also the deadline for contest submissions was way back in May so some OpenAI employee would have had to have been using an unreleased GPT5 instance to pretend to have memories about mashed potatoes.
Here, here! Potatoes are indeed important!
"Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato."
There's *slightly* more to it than that, but let's not refight The Eight Hundred Years on here right now 😁
Tip for next time you're making real mashed potatoes (courtesy of my late father, who cooked them this way): when steaming the potatoes at the end to dry them out (or, if you boiled them in their jackets, when you've peeled them and put them back into the saucepan over a low heat), add in some chopped raw onion. Let it cook (though that's a generous term) in the steam/heat for a minute or so, then mash the potatoes as usual (with the salt, white pepper - or black if we're being fancy and modern - butter and milk).
Depending on whether you like onions or not, this is *delicious*. It's a variant on what is called "champ", where at the end of cooking before serving you add in chopped green onions/scallions. There is also colcannon, where boiled kale (or nowadays green cabbage) is mixed in with the mashed potato. I've seen this called "bubble and squeak" but that's traditionally when you fry left-over potatoes and cabbage in bacon fat (if you have left-over bacon from the dinner the day before, fry that up and then with the rendered fat fry the potatoes and cabbage). It's *not* the same thing as colcannon, though some try and make the equivalence; it's more akin to hash browns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_and_squeak
Also, you can substitute cream (or 'the top of the milk' as it was in the far-off days of yore when milk came in glass bottles and was not homogenised and so the cream rose to the top) instead of some/all of the milk to make the potatoes even smoother and creamier.
Yum.
The big selling point of instant mashed potatoes is, as you say, convenience. Sometimes I want mashed potatoes but I want them *now* so instead of peeling, boiling, etc. a pot of spuds I get the (shame, shame!) packet of Knorr instant mash out of the cupboard. They never taste right, so instead now there are proper, but microwaveable, portions of mashed potato available.
Not advertising any brand, but something like this:
https://www.mashdirect.com/range/mashed-potato/
But nothing tastes as good as the ones you make yourself the old-fashioned way. Okay, where was I? Well done on this, excellent post, and you developed the point very appropriately into our modern world where the fake has replaced the original and become the original for many people.
Where do you come from?
Donegal
How's your potatoes?
Big and small.
How do you eat them?
Skins and all.
Do they not choke you?
Not at all !
Well written, but I'm 99% sure the premise (of fundamentally inferior IMP) is wrong, which makes it miss the landing.
The description of the father's IMP indicates that the flakes were placed directly in boiling water, which indeed makes them foul (gritty). The example at the end is overly thick and under creamed, and likely suffers from the same issue.
Instructions say but people normally don't realize that you MUST place the desiccated flakes in warm but not boiling water, the usual method is boiling the water, then removing from heat and adding the same quantity of milk. The flakes are then added to the lukewarm result.
If prepared correctly, IMP are properly competitive with all but the hautest of mashed potatoes.
Oh god, now I feel compelled to buy a high quality instant mashed and try this. Just to be fair. Also to be able to properly support my mashed-potato snobbery, if possible.
At least I can add the leftover instant mashed flakes à little at a time to bread dough. If you’re making any bread that should be soft and squishy, like Japanese milk bread or brioche or challah, a little potato (leftover real mashed also works) works wonders.
This is so good.
I'm very tempted to nitpick on mcnuggets (they're not made of mechanically recovered meat, and in fact mechanically recovered chicken meat is not legal for human food in the UK, might be different in the US) but the whole text is brilliant, both substantively and in writing quality.
I've learned a lot, and while it was enjoyable as a piece of personalized social/economic history, it reached another plane with plasterboard/MDF and LLM slop.
I so hope it wins (tho I fear the commentariat not-review will, because meta and very long).
I'd like to add a point to the "cultural products" and the LLM angle. I think phone screen technology (material and social) is a huge contributor to smashification (using the UK brand name) of culture and social interaction, to large extent because of scale/size. People think THEY GET TO SEE (or otherwise "consume", experience) art but they get 3×5 inches Smashified facsimile.
Anecdote:
I bought a thing on eBay once which was advertised as "linen", having found it by specifically searching for "linen thing". When it arrived it turned out to be polyester and viscose blend "linen look". And the seller GENUINELY didn't get what my complaint was about -- it looked like linen, especially on screen. I was even told "and it will not crumple as much". I feel this is quite indicative of a similar thing.
Oh, sure it’s a bit faster to go with instant potatoes but sitting on a kitchen chair, with a trash bag between my feet, peeling potatoes is a very soothing Zen-like activity. I sometimes forget myself and prepare too many because I’m enjoying the process so much.
I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘too many mashed potatoes’. How else can we make Shepherd’s Pie? Or just reheat and enjoy at 3 am?
Part of the post-WWII fascination with processed foods was a general attitude of "better living through science." There had been so many dramatic advances in science and technology in the first half of the 20th century (internal combustion engines, radio, radar, antibiotics, etc.) that people were primed to accept any new product as a big improvement over the old-fashioned version. There was also a concerted marketing effort by the food companies; all those hilariously disgusting 1950's recipes based on processed foods came from brand-specific cookbooks published by the manufacturers, in an effort to convince people that the hip, modern way to eat involved tuna-and-Jello pie or hot dog loaves.
Remember - processed and canned foods had been rationed during the war, so they seemed like luxury items to post-war Americans. Also, in many cases the original food item *had* been a legit luxury available only to the rich, so the processed version was very exciting for normal people. For example, aspics and gelatin molds were very popular amongst the wealthy in the early 1900s, but making gelatin involved boiling hooves, hides and tendons for hours and hours and hours, plus then you had to purchase a large quantity of ice in order to chill it and solidify it - so it was mainly something that rich people with cooks and kitchen staff served. It was not something that a busy housewife who didn't have the means to refrigerate it was going to be able to make. However, with the combination of Jell-O and home refrigeration becoming widely available in the mid-20th century, ordinary people could now eat "fancy" gelatin desserts and they went nuts for them.
My mom used to tell me how during WWII, Spam (invented in 1937) was rationed and hard to get, as most of it was used by the military. When my uncle was discharged from the Army in 1945, my mom's family wanted to welcome him back with an extravagant feast - the centerpiece of which was a Spam "roast." They all thought this was the absolute fanciest meal they could possibly make, and were shocked and rather upset by my uncle's "uh...thanks..." reaction. He had to explain that Spam was the only meat he had eaten in the past three years, and he had been rather hoping for a roast chicken or something.
You can still see the legacy of spam in a bunch of Pacific islands that US troops introduced it to in WWII. Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines all now have spam as a huge part of the food culture.
In 1955, the doctor told my mother that formula was better than breast milk, and implied that breast feeding would be poor parenting! (Also lazy, since breast feeding doesn’t require all that bottle washing and nipple sterilizing and mixing …). ‘More scientific’ = ‘better’.
My mother was told the same; and was rather concerned for the health of her grandchildren when she found out I was breastfeeding them.
It's kind of understandable, when you think about the enormous advances that were made in sanitation, food preservation and medicine in the first part of the 20th century. Things like antibiotics were so much more effective than older treatments for disease and infection that they truly seemed miraculous. My mom used to tell me how her older sister, who was a nurse, would bring home penicillin to dose family members for pretty much every cold or ailment.
To my grandparents, born in the late 1880s, having indoor plumbing, electricity and a refrigerator in their house, and listening to people thousands of miles away on the radio, and going from horse carts to automobiles within their lifetime must have been just...crazy! There was very much an attitude of "will wonders never cease?" No wonder that many people in the 1950s thought we'd all be living on the moon by now.
I keep linking to Max Miller for this post, but here's his video on Spam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdYjy4RENtI
I like instant coffee more than espresso which gives me jitters. Sometimes the ersatz is better than the original.
Earthenware is a type of pottery not of ovens.
Great essay.
And let us not forget the wonder that is marshmallow bananas!
That was great, thank you
Great article! I found the brief mention of AI unnecessary, as I could and already had drawn that conclusion myself from the preceding potato discussion, and think it would have been a stronger article without it, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Yes, but if he'd left it out, most of the comments here would be criticizing that exclusion. A superfluous brief mention is a small price to pay to head that off.
This for me is exactly what blogging is about - a writer having space to start with a fun family observation that evolves into a fresh and genuine reflection on broader culture. I greatly enjoyed this also because it engaged with the idea of 'enshittification' and the Baudriallard-an notion of hyperreality but didn't namedrop these (which is what many blogs do) and instead explored exactly what the consequences of creating a simulacra of potato dishes are, and what this means for the meme of the original thing.
Now reflecting on the other IMPs in my life and I think one could be nightclubbing. Something that shot into the mainstream through its associations with ecstasy / MDMA and exciting subcultures (queer, ravers, jamaican dancehall etc) that then was adapted for the more legal (but less euphoric) alcohol, which was fine for a generation until young people today question whether the version they've been introduced to has any intrinsic merit.
Modern party music sounds 100% IMP to me. In Spanish we call it "chumba-chumba", from the terrible cheap and exaggerated electronic ersatz-drums, which is the only thing you even hear from a distance.
Not the same but related: songs largely made out of sampled bits from other artists' records.
Funny, I was also thinking about sample-based music. A lot of music I listen to now is churned up somehow: slowed and reverbed, or sped up, or covered in a different genre, or with the instrumentals isolated, or with ambient SFX added, etc, etc. Is this "real"? Is it hyperreal?
For you and your dad - a song about colcannon, also known as "the little skillet pot" (and seems to have several versions of the lyrics):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VGRnE2Y3e0
Thank you for this well written essay, I enjoyed reading it. A few thoughts:
I'm glad to hear your father is still alive, I hope you get to spend time with him often.
American Lager beer is IMPish. I am thankful that much better alternatives are widely available.
I too was exposed to instant mashed potatoes in my youth, but I haven't had them in years. I am surprised to hear they are still available.
I'd vaguely heard of chuño, but now I know there's no point in seeking it out!
I feel like this is a well-written defense of "little c" conservativism. It's interesting how these sorts of ideas resonate even with a crowd that is not typically very conservative!
I see parallels to the Ballad of White Horse review from last year, which most everybody seemed to enjoy yet didn't make the top 3, compared to Two Arms and a Head, which seemed to have a much more mixed reception but eventually won first place. I wonder if this will suffer the same fate; a momentary appeal to universal conservative sentiment, all but forgotten when compared to a middling appeal to shock value and novelty with a thesis closer to the typical ACX commentariat worldview.
I feel like I strongly associate this kind of “Chesterton’s fence” and small c conservatism with this blog. It’s certainly where I learned of Henrich’s “The Secret of Our Success”, which changed the way I think about a lot of things.
But a lot of Scott’s recent posts attacking modern art in favor of ersatz McMansion aesthetic does go against this.
I loved this one.
I wonder what the reviewer would think of, say, Neil Cicierega's "Mouth Moods" mashup album. Or sample-based music in general, or collage art. Are these IMPish? On some level they must be - simulacra built from decontextualized fragments which used to mean something else. But they lean into it, and find something aesthetically compelling there anyway. The absurd fakeness seems like part of the charm, somehow.
> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process
Potatoes do not contain gluten. I suppose it might be added, though?
Last I checked potatoes don't have gluten
I imagine the reviewer meant starch.
Fun fact: I've made wallpaper paste from potatoes in the (distant) past. This pretty much involves boiling them for a very long time then straining through cheesecloth.
In 2025 this is no longer a cost-effective way of obtaining wallpaper paste.
It does, however, bring back some visceral memories when considering the soupy starchy gloop IMP makes when too much water is added.
Short for 'glutinous gunk' I guess...
My thought - the IMPish is only bad to the extent that it uses deception to mislead us. Some of the IMPish are good, actually - IKEA furniture gives young people the ability to furnish a household as they want, rather than having to wait until their parents die or until their income reaches the level of buying real wood that will last decades. Same with Sheetrock and 5-over-1’s.
When you try to pass these things off as fancy heirlooms or luxury apartments, a lot ends up going wrong. But when you accept them as affordable goods for the youthful masses, they have their place.
But when I moved to Texas and ordered Caprese at Italian restaurants there, I didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Why would anyone want wet industrial tomatoes on bland mozzarella? The only reason is because Caprese is thought of as a Thing and they need to have it on their menu, even though the thing they are serving has none of the sensory joys of Caprese.
This was fun but I basically aesthetically disagree with the entire premise. I'm more or less on board with the idea that microwavable foods are not as good as the foods they're imitating. But I don't think that you have to have nostalgia for the original to enjoy the microwave version. I don't like *any* form of mashed potatoes, so I can't speak to those in particular, but your thesis would sort of imply that microwave mac & cheese requires having liked "real" mac & cheese to enjoy, and I just don't think that's true.
To be fair, you do walk this back a bit in the end. Which is perhaps not that powerful rhetorically ("RETVRN... except actually things are fine") but does make it easier to defend against this criticism.
Anyway. I think it's incredibly awesome that I can buy frozen mac & cheese that takes 5 minutes and almost no effort to make and is, like, 80% as good as the fresh made that takes me 40 minutes. I think it's awesome that I can get chipboard furniture that's not especially beautiful but is incredibly cheap and will arrive at my door within a couple days.
In general I agree that, to reframe your point somewhat, there are a lot of examples of some kind of efficiently-produceable artifact that's less good than the best exemplar of its category taking up a lot of market space. But I think that this is great! I love being able to buy cheap particle board furniture. If I couldn't, I would have to either spend a ton of money on artisanal stuff, or go without entirely, and I definitely prefer having access to the cheap stuff. I certainly don't think that my desire to have a particle board dresser requires some nostalgia for the concept of oaken armoires.
I think there's a general pattern where - whatever you particularly value, you notice that the ersatz version kinda sucks. And then you're like "damn if only everybody produced tons of really beautiful artisanal furniture [or whatever]," while happily going about reaping the benefits of living in a world of insane material abundance, because you're not bothered by the existence of 80%-quality goods in other domains.
The "real" vs "simulacra" distinction seems related to the qualities being optimized, and what virtues or vices they're appealing to. Convenience, in some sense, is appealing to the vice of laziness, and we are choosing to sacrifice the quality of experience to a vice.
What if you use the potato flakes but with butter and milk, instead of margarine and lying water? That'll probably get you most of the time saving, and I suspect most of the taste.
This article reads to me as an effort to launder a broad sociopolitical claim via an arbitrary aesthetic preference. Sure, you insist that you're not saying all so-called IMPish things are worse than the "originals", but you imply they usually are. I disagree.
Instant mashed potatoes are delicious, often preferable to homemade mashed potatoes, and a great choice for backpack hiking trips. Try getting some that aren't pre-seasoned and mixing your own seasoning blends to your taste. I find some garlic powder and mushroom/MSG seasoning goes a long way.
It seems like the category here is "stuff where we make a cheap substitute for a real thing that is inferior, but it works with two groups:
a. Folks who miss the real thing but find this an adequate substitute
b. Folks who never had the real thing so don't know this is not an adequate substitute
Sometimes, the new thing becomes its own thing that's better in important ways than the original. There are aspects of a mall (back when malls were doing well) that are better than the experience of, say, a busy shopping district. Listening to recorded music instead of live music is a different experience, inferior in some ways, but superior in others. In some sense you can think of movies as being a kind of IMP version of plays, but also movies are their own thing that have plusses and minuses that are different from those of live plays.
> We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods”
The big deal about them is that people eating them tend to consume more total calories, because they are very appetizing. https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/p/new-upf-study-critics-are-missing Which sounds like the opposite of your dad's instant "mashed" potatoes.
> Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest
Said to be a more reliable-than-average source of info on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
> But as far as I’m concerned, at least some of the fruits of civilization are real too.
You need to define what "real" means.
This was very beautiful. Thank you.
This is brilliant - real ChesterBelloc energy.
"I deny that the big shop is the best shop; and I especially deny that people go there because it is the best shop...I know it is not merely a matter of business, for the simple reason that the business men themselves tell me it is merely a matter of bluff. It is they who say that nothing succeeds like a mere appearance of success. It is they who say that publicity influences us without our will or knowledge. It is they who say that “It Pays to Advertise”; that is, to tell people in a bullying way that they must “Do It Now,” when they need not do it at all."