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.
You broadly speaking cannot use such brands inside the EU.
Funnily enough, this is one of the big reasons why the free trade deal between US and Europe failed. It was a completely non-negotiable demand from EU that all US brands and product names that directly referred to places in Europe would have to be rebranded, unless they were actually made in that place. And yes, this included all the things that were so generic in the US that people might not even know their name referred to a place, like Parmesan.
I have learned recently that a little whole grain mustard is a great addition to tuna salad for sandwiches. Had not previously put mustard in tuna. But I would never use French’s bright yellow mustard for same; that’s reserved only for putting on red beans and rice. All mustards have their uses. Cranberry mustard is another favorite though I’ve not been able to duplicate a brand called Weber’s that I once had.
Germany has a lot of interesting culinary options that are almost unknown outside.
Outside of Germany, people mostly talk about German beer and German sausages.
But we have excellent baked goods and cakes. (Much better than the French.) Bienenstich and Butterkuchen are simple to make and worth a try for example.
Germany has great food! Himmel and Erde is a charming dish, and I love some pinked cabbage -- and then there's natural sauerkraut (uncooked, do not buy from stores, those are pasteurized mostly, and that makes it uncrunchy). And then there's sauerbraten, and jagershnitzel(sp?)...
I've never made Bienenstich, do you have a recipe?
Strudel is a very fine german tradition (runs away from the Austrians).
And Ausbach Uralt makes the finest chocolate covered cherries, which apparently the german diplomats don't actually eat (the english do, though).
There's quite a few recipes online. It's a fairly simple yeasted cake with almonds on top and some filling, like custard or pudding, in the middle. There's a few different variations, and I like most of them.
Firstly, the issue with English food has a lot to do with the style of preparation: in particular, many things are boiled or stewed that would taste much better if prepared differently.
Secondly, I've known great cooks who can do a lot with very little in terms of ingredients; rationing is a challenge, but it doesn't destroy a national cuisine.
Thirdly, Omar Sharif's mother reportedly chose a British boarding school for him because she wanted him to lose weight and thought British food was the ticket; so apparently the perception of British food was no better then than today.
I think you’re missing the specific nature of the post-WW2 decline. It wasn’t just “doing a lot with very little,” it was doing the best you could with actively poor substitutes—margarine instead of butter, powdered eggs, evaporated milk, instant potatoes, tinned vegetables. No cook, however skilled, can conjure real depth or texture from ersatz fat or reconstituted eggs. Prolonged rationing into the early 50s meant that a whole generation’s palate adjusted downward, and by the time the real ingredients returned, so much of the pre-war tradition had been broken.
And English food isn’t all boiled and stewed—classics like steak and kidney pudding, potted shrimps, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, kedgeree, Devonshire cream teas, game pies, and the kind of robust soups and breads you find in Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, or Arabella Boxer show there’s a rich tradition there. The trouble is, wartime scarcity warped the raw materials, and the reputation never recovered.
Think of our poor cheeses, which didn’t properly start recovering from wartime rationing and control of the dairy market until the 1990s, with the Agriculture Act 1993 defanging the Milk Marketing Board. Imagine a world where the only cheese you can buy is a consistent government cheddar. No other cheese manufacturers can get deliveries of milk.
Oh, weird! Yes, I misunderstood the nature of the rationing; in other times and places, rationing has limited how much people can buy, or limited when they could buy it, but didn't just impose different ingredients. Thanks for clarifying!
My wife and I have speculated that the lavish spreads of fresh delicious food in The Chronicles Of Narnia and in Enid Blyton's Famous Five series, were, in part, a reaction to the scarcity and poor quality of food available in postwar (till 1955) England.
That’s a good point. The picnics were a big draw of Famous Five, always left me craving ginger beer, even though I’d never tasted it.
Turkish delight was a bust in real life. A friend who shopped in the Mediterranean store gave it to me. We were sitting outside watching our kids; when she came back out she could just tell. “You threw it in the the shrubbery, didn’t you?”
I've had very good Turkish delight. It needs to be fresh and most-- a firm gelatin flavored with sugar and rose water. Pistachios are optional. Powdered sugar on the surface.
In his letters it's clear that CS Lewis was absolutely not a fan of the post war rationing, and frequently he mentioned the poor quality of food. Often to an American correspondent who sent him food parcels (apparently not uncommon).
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.
There’s no single “French Dijon” --- the quality runs from sublime to outright sad, just like English or German. Freshness is the real driver: very fresh mustard will have that nose-clearing heat, a few months’ storage will mellow it. After that it’s just a matter of craft, which vinegar or wine you use, what (if any) other flavors you add, whether you age it before jarring.
Honestly, once you’ve got a small grinder and some mustard seeds, you can make exactly what you want and probably never buy mustard again.
Huh, It didn't really occur to me but I guess dijon mustard is not protected, so it can be anything, really. All the ones I've tasted have been excellent though - guess I dodged the bad ones.
English mustard, and (Colman's) horseradish sauce, are the only varieties with a pleasingly fiery taste. Overdo either and flames will roar up your nose and issue forth from your nostils, like a dragon. Or that's what it feels like!
Regarding the Irish starting to grow potatoes prior to the famine, I understood this was mostly because, with its damp climate due to Atlantic weather, Ireland is unsuitable for growing wheat, or at least the harvest is unreliable.
I'm a Ukrainian by birth. They have a national favourite conditement, called "hrin", which is a horseradish and beetroot paste. It's very strong — the colloquial language my grandpa uses is that it "turns the nose". Eating it gives a similar reaction to getting a faceful of carbon dioxide. I recommend! Just checkout how hardcore this recipe is: http://ukrainian-easter.20m.com/hrin.html.
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.
People these days need to make more bread from dough so they know what glutenous actually means. It's a very cohesive sort of stickiness, stretchy yet easily rounded, with quite different character from what the starch from potatoes does.
(That's my one complaint on an otherwise excellent piece of writing.)
The non-technical meaning of 'glutinous' is just 'gluey', which is what its precursor word meant in Latin. Connecting it to what we call gluten in food would have to be a more recent development (though traditional methods relied on what we now know to be gluten, apparently it wasn't till the 18th century when gluten _per se_ was discovered, by Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari).
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.
Also, potatoes in whatever form should not be (re)heated in a microwave. That is because the sudden heat causes the water in the cells to turn to steam and burst them, which results in the slimy texture.
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).
I loved that part, in part because he gave urban planning examples that really hit home for me as an urban planner. (And I wouldn’t have made the connection).
This was my exact impression. Loved the first half, then as soon as "IMP" gets abbreviated, the review itself becomes a chopped up rapid-fire mess. I was hoping it'd expand on the same process happening to other foods.
I very nearly gave a rude response to someone doing this the other day, because yes they were abusing my social instincts. “Hey, can I just quickly check something?”, like they need a quick hand with something. You’re not supposed to do that if you don’t really need it! It’s like spam email.
Instead of the rude response about abuse of social conventions, I told them that I vet my charities which seemed to absolutely knock them out of their patter as they loudly repeated it, aghast, while I escaped down the road. I don’t think vetting my charities is actually that unusual? But perhaps it is, for people doing that job.
I also did this on Friday! I said, "No, I prefer to research charities on my own time, and I don't like being scolded for not responding or told to smile" (which they've done).
And they were like "Whoa! Whoa lady, cool down" as though I'd slapped them or taken off all my clothes.
A perfect occasion for “let it be awkward”. They are the ones breaking the rules and making it awkward: let them feel awkward about it.
Although I do feel a bit bad for them, because they’re all so young, and I’ve known bright young things out of university get sucked into the companies that hire them on commission to sell various things like that, and they big them up about how you can make loads of money with a bit of hustle and hard work (if you’re not making money you must be stupid or lazy) but it’s structured so that it’s pretty much impossible to make anything. The sooner they quit, the happier they’ll be: it preys on the young and inexperienced.
But at what point am I excusing them for ‘just doing their job’ when their job is immoral?
Someone I know worked for a large national environmental organization at the state chapter level in the capital, downtown in a cool old building. The group was in that way, visibly a player, as they were in reality insofar as any enviro group is anymore. (They eventually gave up that real estate as a retrenchment measure.) Once a year or so, they would realize with a groan that the “canvassers” were down on the street below. Not even really because of the presence of their office. Not sure they were even aware of it. They didn’t have anything to do with it, and were not known to the staff. Given the group’s stature, locally, and the kind of funds they operated on - it was only embarrassing, and they would often beg then them to go away and stop bothering professional people going about their day. It’s just not how it’s done.
You can’t survive on those tiny donations. It’s very inefficient.
Now building a genuinely large member base is worthwhile.
Obviously, somebody somewhere up the chain had signed a contract that involved canvassers, stopping people on the street. But it was absolutely not helpful in this atmosphere. Now I always would say well you know, you get somebody’s email. You can send them an email or mail them a solicitation or something. And I always thought it was worthwhile to have a table in the park on festival days, etc.
Anyway, just to let you know that whatever the charity was, it may have been scarcely aware of its role in this scheme.
Can’t I get a smile? just inside the threshold - as I’m nearsightedly moving past into the grocery store ; or the variant to my receding back - you don’t *want* $100?: these for me are tantamount to assault, in a sort of imaginary parallel mind-world where I’m more sensitive.
(The idea is you’re going to switch to cable* or something based on meeting a young person at the store and maybe feeling sorry for them having such a terrible job. I mean, the fact it’s being so improbable! - I live in an apartment, many people around here do, and it’s just one of those hassles of moving in that you’re not looking to redo - makes it seem even more hopeless a “job”. *Well, the internet anyway; I don’t have TV of any kind but got forbid I would admit that.)
The charity ones camp outside Walmart (dogs or kids or teen suicide) and are avoidable by virtue of the wide entrance, and by the fact that they are a convivial lot - I think the same set actually only varying their ask - get to chatting together, so you can slip in under cover of not interrupting.
I guess there are a lot of people not so lost in thought, for whom the intrusion - the voice from the periphery - is a welcome stimulus. Otherwise none of it makes sense.
If they are polite, I stay fly and just smile and say “Nope, not interested.” - I’ve perfected the response from opening my front door to Jehovah’s Witnesses - If I run into someone like an aggressive panhandler, a completely different thing, I may offer them a gruff “Out of my face, asshole.”
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.
This is a blind-taste-test truism; the industry insists it's true.
If so, it's interesting, because to me because pepsi tastes mildly but persistently of chlorine and chalk, and coke tastes mildly and less persistently of cloves and lime-the-fruit.
I don't like either of them, but also to me they are scarcely equivalent because they taste so different.
Which in turn makes me wonder about other people's taste buds.
That was an interesting read, thank you. It's also recent, which means previous findings are still holding up.
Here, all non-diet softdrink (soda) is sweetened with sugar, and I really noticed the difference when I lived in the US for a while.
The author found they preferred pepsi made with corn syrup - but preference can be influenced by familiarity.
Objectivity is hard, and 'flavour' is quite emotive!
Personally I prefer sugar-sweetened coke (environmental influences again? who knows), but not particularly strongly since I'm not really a soda drinker anyhow.
Ok but the thing is, in places with sane zoning policies, you can get a furnished 1br in one of those cardboard-and-drywall complexes for like 1300$. It comes with free gym and a pool! The apt comparison is not some Empire style apartment you get to see once, it's what you could afford for the same price if you had to pay masons, carpenters, etc. 1300/month (or the equivalent capitalization if you're buying) would cover what, a tiny corner with one piece of forniture?
Same with AI slop images: the realistic equivalent is not "what if they paid a couple thousand for an artist to do it or spent a dozen hours doing it", it's no illustration at all.
Mashed potatoes are a cheap and quick enough dish that fair, you probably are just lazy if you buy the instant version, but... That's a free choice millions make! The IMP-ed version at the end wins out despite a lifetime of exposure! And for a lot of other dishes, those requiring literally weeks (eg a proper pudding), the authentic version was eaten only of major holidays for a reason. The "real" alternative to pudding on a random Tuesday is no pudding at all.
That's my issue with the whole RETVRN thing, being a 1%er was nice, sure, and so were the few occasions when commoners splurged a lot of time and resources to have something special, it still is, but please let's keep it real and compare apples to apples.
IIRC, the conclusion of Scott's study is that art experts COULD tell the difference, it was only laymen who couldn't. AI will presumably continue progressing over time and it may not always be the case, but as it is, people can tell.
Incidentally, I'd bet that the average person can't tell the difference between real Korean and Korean-sounding gibberish either.
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 😀
How is it different than, say, a pate or a farce? McDonald's is certainly not the culinary origin of turning meat into a paste and then reforming it and cooking and eating it.
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.
It is not true that McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are made from "pink slime". Instead of using a chemical process to extract the final bits of meat from bone and carcass, they are just grinding up actual boneless skinless breast. Maybe more like a sausage, and it is processed, but not the same as pink slime.
Pulling two of them, and getting dramatically different compositions says something. But it doesn't really say that "you're always eating nerve tissue" (I'm taking it that whatever tests they're doing, "muscular nerves" are not triggering "nerve tissue -- which upon thinking, probably means chicken brains").
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.
Karl Marx isn't exactly read in these parts, so the fact that he's not favored is rather meaningless.
Anyways, alienation (as far as I understand it - this calls for a disclaimer, I have not read Marx either other than doing spot-checks on what he or his terminology actually means, so I may be missing some bigger picture here) as a concept is something quite different and more general, a separation of a person from the underlying material and social reality of human life sensu generali. Some of which is an unavoidable consequence of division of labor alone (or, more generally, of the increasing complexity of civilization and technology and institutions), of course, but capitalism greatly aggravates the issue - you sell your work without (a need for) understanding what it produces, then buy ready-made commodity products without (a need for) understanding what it took to produce them. It's not merely that you're deprived of choice, you're deprived of epistemic means to meaningfully make one (and of much, much more).
Why would you need to read Marx for not favouring him to be meaningful? Marx's theories and their practice are quite well known without having to read him
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.
I forget how anthropic arguments work, but I think I have to believe that they're actually incredibly poisonous but you're in the only universe where you miraculously survived, or else I have to admit that an omnipotent god exists.
The poisons are mostly in the black and esp. the green spots, I was told. A fresh potato has less of those. - Kids often react negatively to potatoes even when cooked, unless they are fried or baked (the potatoes), temperature over 150C break those poisons. - Ethanol is a poison; I am still alive, thus super-human, too?
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.
Is hiding your crops really a useful strategy against taxation? I would think the taxman could just be like "well, I don't see any potatoes, but I do see that you have a potato farm, and obviously you're eating *something,* so you can either hand over some potatoes or go to jail for tax evasion."
Like, you don't need a person to physically go through everyone's cellar and count the number of potatoes in storage to calculate your tax demands. You can get by with an estimate.
That's how you end up with farmers starving to death while unused food rots in warehouses. Some years you get less crops. If you aren't willing to reduce taxes, "obviously you're eating something" will cease to be true.
Two main reasons, I think. 1) It’s just physically easier to hide, so you might secretly plant a bunch of potatoes in the forest on top of your normal crops, and only dig them up in secret (in the 1950s Chinese great famine, this was an essential survival strategy); 2) The laws are shaped around grain, so it's perfectly legal tax avoidance rather than evasion. In 18th century Ireland most of the laws (e.g. tithe composition act) had a list of taxable crops which didn't include potatoes.
Besides other responses, it’s just hard to collect the tax. The soldiers don’t want to come back twice; grain taxes are easily collected right at harvest time when exactly all the wealth is lying around on the fields. And there’s no such thing as jail for tax evasion if you’re a pre-modern peasant. Nobody is going to put up the potatoes to let you not work!
It wasn't about hiding your crops from taxation as such, it was about hiding them from literal invading armies. The thing that drove the adoption of the potato in Europe was *war* - because potatoes grew underground, they were harder for a roaming army to steal from farmers.
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.
Most versions of boxed M&C where you still cook the pasta normally, in boiling water on the stove. The microwaved version seems to be different and more expensive...
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.
I think this perfectly sums up the troubles of developing deep community and our current culture. We all move way too often, and space is too expensive. And then we build a culture around moving often and space being expensive, because we develop culture around any repetitive pattern and there we are - later deep community is impossible
Luckily this desire has been solved with housing. You get the god-honest daily human connection, but you all have your own unit that you can sell when you want to leave. (I assume there’s an application process for buyers). My mind was positively blown to see two neighbours looking after two toddlers in the courtyard of one cohousing building with the parents nowhere in sight.
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.
>> They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work.
Hard disagree with Scott, here. Sure, they would rarely have seen a lethal cyanide poisoning.
But cyanide is not a poison which is unnoticeable until it kills you. Mild poisonings will cause headaches.
So it is less "we must follow these arcane food preparation instructions passed down from our ancestors precisely lest we offend the gods and they strike us down" and more "random chance variations in food preparations will often lead to more headaches and rarely to less headaches. This gives us a loss function to minimize."
* 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.
Lye or another alkalai is used in a lot of foods in different cultures (bagels, pretzels, ramen noodles, moon cakes, hominy) so I suspect it wasn't an accident but more a general principle people were experimenting with - weak acids and bases will break down food and make it more digestible, and eventually someone thought "what if I do that but with a stronger base?"
For bagels in particular, the lye is more of a nice-to-have - it breaks down the starch on the outside to give you a brown and tasty crust, but you still get edible food without it. I can't find a clear source on when that step was added but I suspect it's significantly more modern than "ring shaped baked good" is.
Or some baker used the local water that was significantly more basic than the water one village over. Reduce it by boiling and you get an even stronger lye.
Darker bagles = better sales.
Doesn't take a genius to work from there. A lot of professions from medieval times knew about acids and bases. They just didn't understand what they knew.
As others have pointed out, most poisons will give you negative feedback long before they kill you. And even slightly poisonous plants might be net positive for survival if you eat them in small doses.
So rather than operating with a binary "that is poisonous, don't eat it" vs "that is fine to eat" feedback, there is a continuous scale feedback.
I imagine mostly it was a process along the lines of "for dinner, we ate meat with berries and nuts and a single bite of cooked bitter tubers. Only one stupid guy ate three bites of them instead, which would cause bad stomach cramps. For some reason, he was fine. Through more experimentation, we learned that it was the clay sticking to the tubers."
>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.
My issue with this analogy is the implicit assumption that the "imitation" product is crowding out much higher quality (but slightly less convenient) traditional products.
"Mostly nutritionally adequate" food would be a huge step up for most people (in most contexts), especially if it can be mass produceed cheaply. Dinner parties feel like a straw man, because they're the least likely use case for "mostly nutritionally adequate" slop.
I probably wouldn't read an AI-generated novel, because it wouldn't be up to the level of quality I expect in that context. But I would much rather read an AI-generated work email or used car ad, because it will be better than the stream of consciousness word vomit I'm used to in those contexts.
This seems like focusing on the bad 5% at the expense of the good 95%.
I’ve noticed that I really love AI art - not as a replacement for traditional art, but as an additional source of delight. I like it best when I can tell it’s not human, especially when it has some obvious tell, like house with a fireplace facing outdoors. It has this whole different type of creativity, like, for example, videos of Victorian women getting off a floating art deco train. Most people with a budget to create video aren’t going to create that, so I love it.
I think a lot of the hate comes from the fear of what comes next, when we can’t tell anymore, and it just replaces humans. I’m hoping ai art stays flawed so I can keep loving it as its own thing.
I agree with this take on AI art. The flawed stuff is flawed in ways we just don't think of.
I particularly liked one of a big happy family sitting down to a celebratory feast, maybe a sunday lunch - and at second glance not one bowl or platter on the table contained anything identifiable as a food, it all just gestured towards 'stuff in a dish'. It made their anticipatory joy contextless and somehow amusing at the same time.
>This seems like focusing on the bad 5% at the expense of the good 95%.
I'm a big fan of the 80-20 principle. Getting 80% of the work done with 20% of the effort is great. But it also means that the top 20%, those that require 80% of the work, are those that really count. I have an issue with content that pretends to be the top 20% with only 5%, or 1%, of the work. Sometimes, high effort is (part of) the point - if only to prove that you mean it.
"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've had to stop listening to classical musical because it's always so much quieter than everything else in the playlist and it's annoying to have to crank volume up and down all the time. I'm surprised streaming services don't have a way to automatically normalize volume.
They do! Spotify normalises things by default by decreasing loud pieces down to "normal volume. They also have "quiet" and "loud". "loud" volume increases loudness so slightly affects audio quality. I have kept it on the default "normal" for now, because inaction is easiest.
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.
For what it's worth, raw milk tastes pretty bad - it has a strong 'essence of cow' character to it.
Especially if it's warm from the cow. I grew up milking our house cow and the milk was always much more palatable once it had been chilled (at a minimum).
These days I buy homogenized milk by preference; it's a better product.
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”.
The shape described seems to be U+03F9 Greek capital lunate sigma symbol, "Ϲ". But I'm not familiar with lunate sigma (or any such) being used positionally in the way described, just as an alternate form of the letter that was more common in certain time periods.
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.
A number of people outside OpenAI were permitted to try out GPT-5 under NDA in advance of its public release, but I don't know whether it would have been in a ready state for that in May. Probably not, AI moves too fast.
It didn't make the finals, but the entry that really gave me "noticeably GPT but slightly better than usual" vibes during the initial voting round was the Teeth one. I do wonder whether that was generated by some sort of frontier model, or just good prompting of an existing consumer model.
"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.
"Sure, not at all" is such a weird language quirk. It's about as weird as double negatives (though I think I'm more inured to double negatives, as they occur in lots of "non-standard" dialects).
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.
That's because Spam is amazing and the hedonistically adapted island cultures knew a good thing when they tasted it. As a salt fiend I go absolutely feral for fried Spam.
(/s, American colonialism and wartime depravation probably played a much larger part)
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.
It fits in with a lot of other things. Things that are difficult and expensive have high status, while things that are cheap and easy are low.
Canned food was the only way you were getting fruit that hadn't been dried in the winter. It was expensive and thus high status.
Then long-distance shipping made fresh fruit possible in winter. Meanwhile canned fruit became really cheap. Result, canned became lower status.
Tanning was low class because you had to be high class to stay out of the sun. Then air travel meant that you could now go south to tan, and it became high status. Now air travel is cheap and tanning is low status again.
Breast feeding was the method that had been used by everyone not rich for a long time. Formula was expensive, but scientific. High status.
Formula became ubiquitous, and so its status was lowered.
Similarly for disposable diapers.
Some of this is due to scientists publishing studies showing bad effects for various things. But I do wonder how much of this was following the urge to declare certain things low status, and so finding out that those very things were bad for you.
There was a big "futuristic/clean/modern" crase in the 1950s. Then there were the crunchy con "hippies" of the 1960s, the back to nature folk. Stuff swings.
An espresso is about 1/6 the size of a mug of coffee (40ml vs 230ml). The process of making espresso does not extract six times the caffeine that brewing does.
So it's not the amount of caffeine that's giving you jitters.
Generally, instant coffee has less caffeine than brewed coffee and espresso. Plus it takes me longer to drink a mug than a tiny cup so the impact of caffeine is lessened. I don't get jitters from an iced americano even if it has an espresso in it.
I'm not sure if instant has all that much less caffeine than brewed, though Google suggests about 2/3. I suspect there's more variance in brewed, since there's more types and preparations.
Yes it takes longer to drink a mug than an espresso. An iced coffee, particularly if you put cream or syrup in it, will take even longer.
But the effect of caffeine takes hours to wear off, far longer than any reasonable time to drink it.
Unless you're drinking three or four espressos in the place of one mug of instant I still think there's a psychological effect. Espresso is marketed as being strong, and it's generally drunk black. So it *tastes* strong.
Suggestion is a powerful thing.
Some people drink black tea before sleep because it helps them settle down. And then drink coffee in the morning to wake up. That black tea contains a fair amount of caffeine seems irrelevant.
"In essence, if you're sensitive to caffeine, consuming the same amount in the form of espresso (which you're likely to drink quickly) might lead to more noticeable jitters than if you consumed it as a large mug of brewed coffee (which you'll likely sip over a longer period). " Dilution reduces the risk of jitters.
I always thought it's funny when in movies people drink hot chocolate to help them sleep when a hot beverage with lots of sugar and a small amount of caffeine would be a pretty effective energy drink to keep one alert. Hot chocolate was used on U Boats for exactly that.
Following your suggestion suggestion I suggest that this practice is a form of auto-suggestion.
Nah, you're missing it. Like Ritalin, caffiene is a stimulant. Autists and other non-neuro-typicals use coffee right before bed as a way to relax and drift off to sleep.
Robusta versus arabica, sipping versus tossing back, French press versus drip.
I doubt most of these make a difference next to simple quantity.
A mug is *six times as much* coffee as an espresso. The mug preparation has to have less than one-sixth of the caffeine per milliliter, or you're still getting more in the mug.
And the measured caffeine concentration in the different coffees just doesn't show that.
Testing of samples from different regions has shown that:
● Arabica coffee beans range from .8 to 1.4% caffeine concentration
● Robusta beans range from 1.7 to 4% caffeine concentration
So, if we take "large swing", you're looking at 4 times as much caffeine for robusta as for arabica.
Now, to do a decent "which is larger" it's really quite simple: gram per gram of input coffee. 14-18 grams per double espresso (does anyone really do a single shot?)
Okay, but what about the extraction? (Caffeine extracts through water, it's about the easiest thing to extract -- espresso is deliberately designed to extract less caffeine).
"One shot of Espresso contains between 29 to 100mg per serving, while that of a French Press is between 80-135mg of caffeine per cuppa."
Again, there's your variability. See the swing in "robusta versus arabica". You're not looking at a volumetric difference, of "six times as much" in the bigger cup. I know my espresso is on the low side, caffeine wise (it's home roasted arabica). So I'm maybe getting 60 mg per double.
In terms of absorption, milk versus not milk is probably your key (second to "eat something with it").
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.
"The Secret of Our Success" review was great! If you haven't read Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World," I highly recommend it. It explains so much!
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.
No, I don't think mashups (of the Cicerega/DJ Cummerbund/Willliam Marancini variety) are anything like this. They're more of a musical joke, putting unrelated things together as a means of commentary.
Sometimes it's just a dumb joke (as in Revolution #5) which mashes together Revolution 9 and Mambo Number 5 purely because both of them contain a spoken number, but sometimes it gives genuinely musically fun results like in Tiger or Wallspin.
The culinary equivalent of Mouth Moods is sushi tacos. The musical equivalent of instant mashed potatoes is whatever crap you get when you search on youtube for "relaxing piano music" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NycM9lYdRI)
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 is a reasonable view. A possible counter-argument would be something like tennis and pickleball, where no-one is saying pickleball is tennis but it's so similar that in reality it's a rival to tennis and likely to eclipse it.
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.
Yeah, agree strongly with this, both the specific objection to the "IMPs rely on nostalgia for the original thing" point (I'd guess more often the opposite is true") and just generally the "applications to society" section was a big miss for me.
I feel like it's already popular to complain that cheap and convenient stuff exists, or worse, is somehow some sort of a moral failing of civilization, rather than just a reality that people have limited resources and are going to prioritize different things.
Like McDonalds is a poster-child for this - tons of people have a very snobbish, verging on moralistic outlook on McDonalds. Yes, we all saw SuperSize Me, nobody thinks it's a health option... but people act as if if McDonalds didn't exist all the people having fast food would suddenly go home and cook nutritionally balanced and delicious home-cooked meals, and I just don't think that's the case.
And people have been complaining about this stuff forever, I don't think we really need a catchy name it, and it feels like this comment section is already trending towards "IMP" meaning "anything I don't like". (Maybe in a week someone can go through and compile the full list of "things the Commentariat thinks are IMPish")
I remember being about 15 and someone told us all about how his dad had a home-brew kit, and we all had a good laugh because it sounded like the oldest thing ever. This was c. 1999. Shortly afterwards we started going to pubs, and there was a wide variety of lagers but not many bitters or ales. And I feel since then ale has just gone crazy, IPAs left right and centre and even chain pubs are doing real ale festivals, and it happened thanks to sad old gits like my friends dad keeping real ale alive in the 80s/90s. Similar story with bread, I remember very boring bread in the 80s, now all sorts of sourdough etc because hippy health food shops and hobbyists kept it going. Convenience will take care of itself so we don't need to pay attention to it, but paying attention to awesome, relatively inconvenient things that are in danger of being lost may actually preserve some of them in a form that is genuinely popular.
You haven't met a homebrewer until you've met one that's forgotten to put the rootbeer in the refrigerator (Kaboom! 24 bottles of glass shards everywhere).
I agree completely. This reviewer may be correct that they personally do not like instant mashed potatoes as much as the the "real" thing. But an individual chooses to have thing A over thing B for many reasons. Maybe some people value convenience over texture (the authors description of the texture in the article was particularly alienating to me. I have never understood what that means.)
Or maybe people chose instant mashed potatoes because they are bad at making the real ones.
I didn't know that I liked mashed potatoes until my wife made the instant kind for dinner when I was in my 20s. Prior to that, I had only ever had "real" mashed potatoes made by my mom or grandmother. Both made them from scratch with real boiled potatoes, real butter, etc. Their mashed potatoes are gross. I still avoid eating them every Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I never ordered them at restaurants because I assumed they would taste like my mom's.
I literally did not know that mashed potatoes could taste good until I had the instant stuff. Now I am happy to have instant mashed potatoes, and I am happy to order them at a nice restaurant. But I don't think the ones at a restaurant are significantly better than the instant ones. More like a slightly different version of the same thing--like Coke is to Pepsi.
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.
I don't really understand the question. Are we using the same definition of the word "arbitrary"? For a choice to be arbitrary it would have to *not* be based on the merits of the two sides. Whether you think instant mashed potatoes tastes good obviously has a lot to do with (1) how they taste and (2) your culinary standards. Two decidedly non-arbitrary things. It's not like everyone rolls a dice when they taste something to decide whether they like it or not. It's certainly possible that somebody does that, but most people do not; most people's food preferences seem based on actual facts about the food.
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."
1) I detest the taste of potatoes of all kinds. This is a very rare disability; I've met only one other person who had it, and she's now deceased. But now I understand why, when I tell hosts that I don't eat potatoes, they insist that their potatoes are good. I ask, "Are they made of potato?" Yes. "Then I won't like them."
2) It's possible for inferior foods to take over the ecosystem without being fully IMPish. For instance, the things that Noah's calls bagels. As a member of the relevant ethnicity, I can state will full authority that they're not bagels. They're perfectly good for what they are, which is bread in the shape of a doughnut, and I actually like them sliced in half and toasted, at which they work better than bagels do. But they're not bagels. I am distressed at the idea of uninformed people eating Noah's and thinking they've had a bagel.
3) It is also possible, as noted by others, to like the IMPish food better than the original, if that's what you're used to. Example: I grew up on canned pineapple. The first time I had fresh pineapple, I was repelled. Though later I learned to prefer it.
I enjoyed reading this review, it's quite apPEALING. It reminds me of a MASH-UP of Douglas Hofstadter and Michael Pollan. It does borrow rather heavily of the chapter in Botany of Desire, which means it's similar to the writing style of a great modern food anthropologist.
Also if this is published anywhere else, can I suggest a new title? "Tuber or not tuber"???
> The problem with this, of course, is the problem I had with my father’s instant mashed potatoes: the substitute is only able to satisfy a craving if you have the craving in the first place, and that requires direct experience with that which it is meant to replace. The memory of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work, the mental spell that allows the transmutation from IMPish Thing to Thing (original).
One claim I have heard is that the original postmoderns all had modernist training, and assumed their audiences did as well, and then things started to go off the rails when they had students that skipped the modernist training and went straight to postmodernist works.
This feels like a pretty different mechanism than the one you're describing here--a cousin instead of a sibling--but I think there's something interesting about sophisticated processes that falsify their assumptions as part of their action.
Reminds me of Baudrillard's simulacrum stages. At stage 1 you have real mashed potatoes. At stage 2 you have instant mashed potatoes, whose merits are dependent on the notion of real mashed potatoes from which it copies. At stage 3, you've never tried real mashed potatoes so you only know mashed potatoes as unappetizing slop. Presumably at stage 4, you wouldn't even know non-instant mashed potatoes existed.
My favorite example of this is how a huge number of people love comic book characters without having ever read a comic book. The movies and tv shows can just steal the best stories, crush them into a quick episode or movie, and that's what people experience.
Were the comic books themselves much better? Maybe not, even Stan Lee admitted that lots of those stories were just "we need to sell something fast to pay the bills". But in the Infinity War comics, the surviving villains teamed up with the surviving heroes which sounds awesome.
Sadly, this review resonated with me less than most readers here.
First, because I despise mashed potatoes of every kind. I have no idea how many instant or real ones I've eaten, but I never intend to find out. (Funnily enough, I adore potatoes in all other forms - but that makes mashed potatoes even more offensive to me. Why ruin such delicious food?)
Luckily, my life partner agrees with me on this - our children will never eat mashed potatoes at home. (or any other mashed food really. We both hate food with that kind of texture.)
Second, because the premise is on very shaky ground. While it's true that human agriculture has bred for taste, it has always also bred for size, speed of growth and convenience. Some ancient vegetables and fruits have become only good through agriculture, others have become much worse taste-wise. (Especially size, taste and nutrients are often straight up opposites. Bigger size usually just means more water - and less nutrients per unit of mass. The article suggests the opposite as a general rule.) This problem ofc got much worse in the modern time, but is has nothing to do with Imp-substitution. In fact Imp-substitution is just another step of that process, not the beginning.
The process is also not that bad (which the review acknowledges, but too little in my opinion.) Wild strawberries are tastier, but also very, very small and not fit for mass production.
I would also say that while the analogies to LLMs are obvious I don't find it that clever. All human thought is just a mishmash of random imputs anyway. The LLM just mashes more stuff together, but it's all a mash in the end.
Nothing about frozen instant mashed potatoes? I used to get them at Trader Joe's until they stopped carrying them - disc shaped microwavable things that with generous amounts of butter and milk were almost as good as the real thing.
Separate rant about TJ's stopping carrying things that I loved and bought all the time...
I was in Bolivia last month, and was surprised to see groups of potatoes on the ground in the villages. But we then learned about chuños — frozen at night, dried by the intense sun at 13,000 feet, and walked on in bare feet to squeeze out moisture without tearing up the skins too much. And we ate them often. They were quite delicious in a soup or stew. Maybe not so much by themselves. But a brilliant idea for storing a staple food.
> What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted with desiccated flakes, real milk with a thin byproduct, real butter with refined vegetable oil, real mashing with the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame with microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained.
This potato-esque abomination is properly referred to as "smashed potatoes," because it's had all of the goodness smashed out of it through food processing and alterations to the actual recipe.
I'm sorry to be critical, but this review just doesn't engage enough with its own thesis. It says, in a nutshell, "This is not a pipe." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images). It says, "Sometimes the replica grows so popular it replaces even the memory of the real thing, so we don't even remember what we've lost." And to this, it (almost but lacks the courage to) says, "RETVRN" -- just with a medieval ſ instead of a Roman V.
The trouble is, it lacks the courage to stand up for its own thesis because it *knows* it hasn't done a good job defending it. What of bread, for example? What of the times when chopping a Thing into tiny bits and then gluing them back together into a slurry (e.g. grain into flour into dough), is actually a *good* thing? Bread has almost completely displaced the original way we ate wheat & other grains, where you'd boil the grains into a gruel and eat the resulting "wallpaper paste". Bread has so completely replaced that, that people mostly don't even remember that that was ever a thing; grain now means bread to people, not porridge, and the closest people get (making oatmeal) still has been "corrupted" by the modern way (using rolled/steel-cut/chopped/etc. oats, rather than whole kernels). Is this a problem? Or is it a problem to the thesis, because it's not a problem where it should be?
Once you start looking, there are so many counterexamples like that, of "the student replacing the master". E.g. pickling, which started as a way to preserve vegetables into a fascimile of themselves, but is now enjoyed for its own sake. Or cheese. Or smoked meat. Or jam. Or bacon.
I mean seriously, look at the "signs things have gone wrong" list from the review:
1. Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
2. Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
3. Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
4. 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.
You know what fits the bill? The author's point about instant mashed potatoes, fair enough. But you know what also fits the bill? Smoothies. Concrete. Sausages. All of these get used as replacements for the original thing (whole fruits, whole rocks, whole meat). But I fail to see what the problem is.
I will grant that the review's thesis is definitely sometimes true. Just look at margarine for example. Horrible stuff. (... but even that points to a possible problem with the review's thesis: perhaps the problem with their dad's awful mashed potatoes, wasn't the instant potato flakes. Perhaps it was substituting butter for margarine, which is a bit like substituting herbs & spices for sawdust just because they look similar.
But overall, I'm just not convinced. Is synthetic diamond bad because it's replacing the real thing, or is it good precisely *because* it is? Because it's replacing blood diamonds? Is lab grown meat bad because one day it'll replace the real thing, or good because one day it will? There's an interesting debate to be had about this, e.g. red states pre-emptively banning lab-grown meat (https://sentientmedia.org/texas-banned-lab-grown-meat/) precisely *because* it's trying to pressure the original thing out of business. But this review doesn't even engage enough with its own ideas to spot the possibility, and tout the sheer relevance of those ideas to our lives.
There are so, *so* many missed opportunities here. E.g. Matzah/Passover bread, and how the original Thing can survive in a world of superior replacements, precisely because people make a deliberate effort to remember who they were, not just who they are, and preserve history in a world defined by fleeting convenience. Or, on the other side of the fence, how the sheer performativity of your family's efforts to connect with their Irish heritage (Guinness! Potatoes! Corned beef & cabbage!), doomed the entire effort right from the start to only replicating the *appearance* of the original thing, never the reality. How we're all just 'plastic paddies', doomed to chase the shadows of the past the moment we throw them away, a modern Tantalus of our own making unable to reach the fruit we threw away.
(And, as one final note, good Concept Handles [https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3b7sidNrEkNaY9qfGwZjwz] are important. And, sadly, "IMP" isn't that catchy a Concept Handle. Something like "Doppelgangers", "Evil Twins", "Skin Suits", "Bodysnatchers", "Changelings", or "Counterfeits", could have gotten the point across better.)
TL;DR: This review needed more time in the oven. The argument is good; the polish is lacking.
This was a really interesting reply. In my view there's a difference between supplanting and supplementing. Bacon is an awesome thing, roast pork is a different awesome thing. Cucumbers - not awesome but pleasant enough, gherkins: awesome. Concrete performs a totally different function to rocks, functionally and aesthetically. The article in my view is talking about something more insidious and totalizing.
> You know what fits the bill? The author's point about instant mashed potatoes, fair enough. But you know what also fits the bill? Smoothies. Concrete. Sausages. All of these get used as replacements for the original thing (whole fruits, whole rocks, whole meat). But I fail to see what the problem is.
They really aren’t though. These are all different products not reconstituted rocks pretending to be rocks etc. If the author has an issue is in not making that distinction well enough in his other examples of IMP (the doctors surgery which has multiple practitioners in no way fits the theory, in my view. That’s just more useful).
A number of years ago I ordered a meal at a moderately expensive restaurant. It came elegantly plated, and it tasted fine except for the mashed potatoes. I was thinking, ”How is it even possible to screw up mashed potatoes?“ Eventually I concluded they must have been instant mashed potatoes.
Depends on the screw up. It’s perfectly easy to mess up the real ones too, too lumpy or too smooth, too much salt or butter or not enough. It’s actually hard to get right.
Then replace vichysoisse with potage Parmentier (or gratin Dauphinois, or pommes Anna, or tourte aux pommes de terre, or even tartiflette) and the OP’s point still stands. A lack of familiarity with iconic French potato dishes doesn’t invalidate the rest of the analysis.
Excellent article .Informative ;enlightening even .And the wordcraft was exemplary and enjoyable.So jealous ! I'm going to steal "..continued existence of Idaho and Target." ,but probably edit to Walmart to reinforce my humbler ,working class bonafides.
Growing up, I always thought garlic bread was meh, ok. Then when I was 30 or so, my friend made it for me. I was absolutely delighted! I said, "It's almost like there are real chunks of garlic on it!" She looked at me in confusion. "That's what garlic bread is," she said.
I went home and asked my mother why her "garlic bread" was just bread toasted with margarine and garlic salt. She said, "because that's how your father likes it."
My mother must have done some things right, though, because once a kid came over to our house, and she made him a grilled cheese. The normally quite reticent kid exclaimed, "This is the best grilled cheese I've ever had!"
Upon further discussion, we determined that the kid's mom made him "grilled cheese" by sticking american cheese between two pieces of bread and microwaving it.
I forgot about TV dinners! All of the IMP foods segregated into little squares on your tray with the IMP brownie square saved for last. What a wild time!
Brilliant article. Exactly the sort of article for which I read ACT! I read the headline and lead and was like, “what the hell?” And then I kept reading and finished the whole article. Bravo.
My addition to this conversation is a 1980s phenomenon known as “powdered milk.” Yes, the IMP version of milk. Just add water and stir. For some reason, we used a whisk? This was the era of Tang, which we also drank, and I recall it had something perhaps to do with astronauts? It was a strange time.
Anyway, I grew up drinking fake OJ and pouring fake milk over my cereal, which was weird because my parents were also granola hippies about other matters. For instance, we could never buy “sugar bomb” cereals like the other kids. It had to be bland grains or whatever. Yet we smothered our grains in IMP milk? It makes no sense in retrospect.
There was also some kind of fake cheese? And I struggle to enjoy even the finest fish to this day because our fish came frozen in a rectangle that was then pressure cooked into oblivion. It was definitely about convenience as we were latchkey kids. I digress.
What I really wanted to share is the first time I tasted real cow’s milk at a friend’s house, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. My face must have looked like when you give a baby ice cream for the first time. This was actual milk?!
And fresh-squeezed orange juice? Don’t get me started….
I mean to throw no shade on this essay—it’s a good one—but isn’t Substack itself, the Instant Blog Post platform, with its business model of turning everyone’s random synaptic discharges into something at least superficially resembling the physical magazine articles of the not-very-distant past (with manuscript inboxes and experienced editors skilled in the art of selecting the great or at least good essay or short fiction), a prime example of IMP?
They pan for a few nuggets of monetizable gold from a very large mass of overburden with which they can turn an easy dollar without all the overhead.
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.
You hear this a lot, but it's wrong. There was no problem recovering.
The initial wave of emigration created pathways for future Irish to emigrate in turn. They continued to do that. After the famine, Ireland recovered in whole, and thrived, but it distributed its larger population over a larger area.
Well written and the first finalist essay to be Scott-like in first taking a close look at something then stepping back to think about big picture implications and isomorphisms.
Of course the author’s right about the AI-instant mashed potatoes isomorphism, as well as the ones between the IMP’s and lots of other parts of modern life. And I don’t think they’re just being cute and clever here, either. I think they’re onto something, and am now ruminating about this trend and what to make of it. I expect the writer is too, and would be interested to hear their thoughts.
AI is an absolute cornucopia of IMP isomorphisms. My favorite: idea of nanobots dissecting us into our molecular components to make more nanobots.
I appreciate the “anti-massing rules as an IMPish simulation of a varied block.” I’m working on proposing protections for a small town main street’s small lots to preserve its visual variety, and one source of pushback is people saying that you can achieve the same thing on large buildings with articulation. Next time this comes up I’ll say that’s the instant mashed potato version of variety.
I had quiche (which Iʻd always thought was disgusting but tried because the waitress/chef/owner told me to try it) at a French restaurant and realized what I thought was quiche was so different that using the name quiche was a lie. One of the best things I ever tasted.
More recently i had a similar experiece with bread. The bread was similar enough that I’d say I had simply never experienced good bread. The quiche was so different that I believed I’d never before eaten quiche.
Makes you wonder what else you’ll never experience because the pseudo version crowded out the real.
"Judge things on their own merits, and not on the merits of the class they supposedly belong to"
Which I think is better point than "maintain proximity to the real". I think it's a well written post, but the part about "if you really think about it, I guess nothing that we interact with is real (even the original mashed potatoes)" gets hand waved really easily considering it's one of the thesis points
A quibble: I first learned of ramen in it's instant form and to this day I prefer instant ramen over the real deal from either the trendiest restaurant or street foodiest stall. Sometimes the IMP lands better than the real.
Great writing! And thought provoking. Another way I see a similar concept as “IMPish-ness” (it might actually be getting at the same thing) is whether the primary intention behind the creation of something essentially boils down to “love” or “instrumentalization”. Preserved Andean potatoes? To not starve during the winter. Homemade mashed potatoes? To feed the family with something tasty. Instant mashed potatoes? To profit from a market opportunity (by making mashed potatoes IMPish). I’m no expert but it doesn’t seem like instant mashed potatoes became a thing because some people really wanted to share their love of mashed potatoes with the masses.
Through this lens products like the iPhone and arguably ChatGPT are more “real” than TikTok. The former seemed to have been created through passion and intellectual curiosity for how humans and technology can work together to do something useful. The latter seems to have been created to maximize engagement metrics.
I am a super healthy - and happy, eating is one of the great pleasures of life - eater and my friends find it strange that I have at times indulged in preparing fish sticks. In their mind that food is industrial and not compatible with what I would normally eat and I have to convince them that even though it is definitely "industrial", it's mostly (not very tasty) fish with a thin crust to enhance the taste. The process is more additive than deeply transformative to the original product - cod.
Chicken McNuggets are actual chicken. Yes, they are mechanically-separated chicken that would otherwise be thrown away, but how is that bad? When we're told that the noble Native American used every bit of the buffalo (which is a lie, but bear with me), we're told that in order to emphasize how harmoniously in-tune with nature they were, but when we use every part of the chicken, that's an ultra-processed food and an example of our spiritual bankruptcy. The war on nuggets is bizarre, as illustrated in great length by Dan Olson:
McNuggets take what would otherwise be a waste product and turn it into a useful and valuable product. And they taste good.
Plywood and MDF are also being unfairly maligned in the OP. Plywood has many advantages over solid wood, chief among them being that it is dimensionally stable. The plys have grain running in different directions, which makes it expand and contract and warp less. It's stiff in multiple directions. You can build things with plywood that you couldn't build with solid wood, like some of the best aircraft in WW2. Even high-end cabinetry often uses plywood, specifically because of its strength and stability. MDF has some similar advantages, with the added one that you can make it out of absolute crap wood that you couldn't do anything else with. No, it's not suitable for all applications, but neither is buffalo tongue, that doesn't make it bad.
Have you ever lived in or done any work on a house with plaster and lathe walls? I have, sheetrock is superior in every way. Oh, you 'dinged' it? It takes 30 seconds to fix a ding. It takes a couple of minutes to fix a hole.
These things are entirely unlike instant mashed potatoes, which take the original product, break it down into constituent parts, and then process those parts to produce something which attempts to duplicate the function of the original but is inferior. Putting sheetrock and McNuggets and plywood into the same category is an enormous error.
This is as good time as any to warn our non-middle-eastern brothers and sisters: the thing sold in supermarket under the name "Hummus" isn't Hummus. Real Hummus has inconveniently short shelf time, so that abomination is sold instead
When we were poor and married in college, my husband once accidentally substituted the butter measurement for the salt measurement. We were having my grad advisor and his wife over for dinner, of course. Turns out that two T of salt is a bit too much for instant potatoes.
Making mashed potatoes from scratch is not a culinary achievement. Any ten year old should be able to do it, you just have to have the correct potato type.
Fantastic review, beginning with the highly particular and opening out to the full scope of modern life itself. Adding the IMP metaphor to my general perceptual framework
"My world is made up of lies." You mean advertising? Then yes, it is, and has been since the advent of mass produced TV's.
Here's a simple rule: if the brand depends on a lie, then it isn't "real" in any meaningful sense. Those Europeans eating potatoes in the 16th century knew exactly what they were eating--American households in the late 20th/early 21st century generally do not. What you see on the box is a lie, and everyone knows it.
Marketing was basically invented on Wall Street in the 1920's. I sometimes think that all of history since was entirely predictable once you know that fact. How much of WWI and WWII came out of propaganda? How much of the Great Depression was a result of investor hype? The Cold War? The Algorithm? It goes on and on...
This is called Commodity Fetishism. Individuals relate to complex systems of production and distribution through the dimensionally reduced output of their personal perspective.
Profit seeking, without malice, inevitably solves for situations where radically different processes cast the same shadow as what is remembered in compressed form by the person considering the transaction.
Imagine the relationship between asterisms and the perceived celestial sphere, the learned behavior of holding your "big fish" closer to the camera, or any other seeming.
The radically over-catalyzed facility of organizing central production and transcending all restraint, combined with exhausted individuals and radically under-resourced watchdog mechanisms (so weak they are often captured by capital holders: n.b.: amazon reviews, follower counts, testimonials, etc.) make this a foregone conclusion until there is radical reorganization or replacement of markets in transactional contexts at almost any scale.
It's been interesting to watch over the last few years how "social media" has transformed from something that was actually kind of social (I'm thinking Facebook circa 2010, when the majority of your feed was actual, real-life friends posting updates about their lives and talking to each other) to today's more parasocial media landscape, where people spend most of their time following and shallowly engaging with professional content creators (think modern TikTok). I think we can all relate to the idea that the internet churns out IMPish communities by distilling down the essence of social interaction and then feeding it back to us in bits; this was always the concern, even when Facebook was "good". And yes, everyone knows that the enshittification of Facebook and other social media is largely explained by the fact that those companies eventually felt the squeeze to turn a profit and tweaked their algorithms accordingly. But I think there's another piece of the puzzle: is it possible that this transformation is also driven by a loss of the "nostalgia" aspect that is required for one to enjoy instant mashed potatoes, that is, the idea that a memory of the original thing is a necessary ingredient for one to enjoy the cheap facsimile? If pre-social media human interaction is the true masſed potatoes, and ca. 2010 Facebook is its instant mashed potato counterpart, perhaps the younger generation who can't remember a pre-social media era simply never acquired enough taste for genuine human interaction to care whether their social media offers even a hint of it?
Hmmm. I've made plenty of reconstituted potato product, and it's quite possible to make something out of them that has a decent texture, but yeah, ending up with paste happens too. A lot seems to depend on the exact way you add the water and butter and then stir it.
Lemonade. It isn't a fizzy drink that tastes vaguely of sweetness and lemon juice. The first time I had real lemonade made from fresh lemons, it was unrecognisable
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.
You broadly speaking cannot use such brands inside the EU.
Funnily enough, this is one of the big reasons why the free trade deal between US and Europe failed. It was a completely non-negotiable demand from EU that all US brands and product names that directly referred to places in Europe would have to be rebranded, unless they were actually made in that place. And yes, this included all the things that were so generic in the US that people might not even know their name referred to a place, like Parmesan.
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.
I have learned recently that a little whole grain mustard is a great addition to tuna salad for sandwiches. Had not previously put mustard in tuna. But I would never use French’s bright yellow mustard for same; that’s reserved only for putting on red beans and rice. All mustards have their uses. Cranberry mustard is another favorite though I’ve not been able to duplicate a brand called Weber’s that I once had.
Germany has a lot of interesting culinary options that are almost unknown outside.
Outside of Germany, people mostly talk about German beer and German sausages.
But we have excellent baked goods and cakes. (Much better than the French.) Bienenstich and Butterkuchen are simple to make and worth a try for example.
Germany has great food! Himmel and Erde is a charming dish, and I love some pinked cabbage -- and then there's natural sauerkraut (uncooked, do not buy from stores, those are pasteurized mostly, and that makes it uncrunchy). And then there's sauerbraten, and jagershnitzel(sp?)...
I've never made Bienenstich, do you have a recipe?
Strudel is a very fine german tradition (runs away from the Austrians).
And Ausbach Uralt makes the finest chocolate covered cherries, which apparently the german diplomats don't actually eat (the english do, though).
There's quite a few recipes online. It's a fairly simple yeasted cake with almonds on top and some filling, like custard or pudding, in the middle. There's a few different variations, and I like most of them.
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/bee-sting-cake-recipe-5705238 or https://morethanbeerandschnitzel.com/why-bienenstich-is-called-bienenstich-maybe/ look like good introductions.
Btw, I find it weird that in most countries fresh yeast is a bit of a specialty item. In Germany every supermarket will have it, even the small ones.
> And then there's sauerbraten, and jagershnitzel(sp?)...
Jägerschnitzel
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4gerschnitzel
I also quite like Gose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gose), and recently went to Goslar were Gose originated.
I've quite enjoyed the pickle gose we have around here. It's refreshing and light (I generally like dark beer).
We have red star yeast (active dry yeast), which seems to work well, and doesn't really expire. I've never seen "fresh yeast" for sale...
It’s funny that English mustard is the strong one, isn’t it, we are mostly bland.
English mustard is just very spicy. Taste wise it's not all that strong.
In any case, English cuisine only got so bad and bland after around WW2. I blame the continued rationing well into the 1950s.
Old English cuisine was actually pretty tasty. You can still get something like it at eg St John's restaurant in London.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
Firstly, the issue with English food has a lot to do with the style of preparation: in particular, many things are boiled or stewed that would taste much better if prepared differently.
Secondly, I've known great cooks who can do a lot with very little in terms of ingredients; rationing is a challenge, but it doesn't destroy a national cuisine.
Thirdly, Omar Sharif's mother reportedly chose a British boarding school for him because she wanted him to lose weight and thought British food was the ticket; so apparently the perception of British food was no better then than today.
I think you’re missing the specific nature of the post-WW2 decline. It wasn’t just “doing a lot with very little,” it was doing the best you could with actively poor substitutes—margarine instead of butter, powdered eggs, evaporated milk, instant potatoes, tinned vegetables. No cook, however skilled, can conjure real depth or texture from ersatz fat or reconstituted eggs. Prolonged rationing into the early 50s meant that a whole generation’s palate adjusted downward, and by the time the real ingredients returned, so much of the pre-war tradition had been broken.
And English food isn’t all boiled and stewed—classics like steak and kidney pudding, potted shrimps, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, kedgeree, Devonshire cream teas, game pies, and the kind of robust soups and breads you find in Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, or Arabella Boxer show there’s a rich tradition there. The trouble is, wartime scarcity warped the raw materials, and the reputation never recovered.
Think of our poor cheeses, which didn’t properly start recovering from wartime rationing and control of the dairy market until the 1990s, with the Agriculture Act 1993 defanging the Milk Marketing Board. Imagine a world where the only cheese you can buy is a consistent government cheddar. No other cheese manufacturers can get deliveries of milk.
And look at this lovely government advice about how to make your fat ration go further: https://the1940sexperiment.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mof-19-making-the-fat-ration-go-further.pdf Mmm mmm mmm, whip your margarine with thickened milk, except where will you get the milk? Perhaps you’ll be using powdered National Milk. https://www.futuremuseum.co.uk/collections/people/lives-in-key-periods/war-decline/the-home-front/tin-of-national-dried-milk
Oh, weird! Yes, I misunderstood the nature of the rationing; in other times and places, rationing has limited how much people can buy, or limited when they could buy it, but didn't just impose different ingredients. Thanks for clarifying!
But wartime scarcity could hardly be peculiar to Britain.
My wife and I have speculated that the lavish spreads of fresh delicious food in The Chronicles Of Narnia and in Enid Blyton's Famous Five series, were, in part, a reaction to the scarcity and poor quality of food available in postwar (till 1955) England.
That’s a good point. The picnics were a big draw of Famous Five, always left me craving ginger beer, even though I’d never tasted it.
Turkish delight was a bust in real life. A friend who shopped in the Mediterranean store gave it to me. We were sitting outside watching our kids; when she came back out she could just tell. “You threw it in the the shrubbery, didn’t you?”
I've had very good Turkish delight. It needs to be fresh and most-- a firm gelatin flavored with sugar and rose water. Pistachios are optional. Powdered sugar on the surface.
In his letters it's clear that CS Lewis was absolutely not a fan of the post war rationing, and frequently he mentioned the poor quality of food. Often to an American correspondent who sent him food parcels (apparently not uncommon).
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 really like Bautzener Senf.
Dijon Style mustard is ok for what it is. I would probably like it more, if it weren't so mainstream.
There’s no single “French Dijon” --- the quality runs from sublime to outright sad, just like English or German. Freshness is the real driver: very fresh mustard will have that nose-clearing heat, a few months’ storage will mellow it. After that it’s just a matter of craft, which vinegar or wine you use, what (if any) other flavors you add, whether you age it before jarring.
Honestly, once you’ve got a small grinder and some mustard seeds, you can make exactly what you want and probably never buy mustard again.
Huh, It didn't really occur to me but I guess dijon mustard is not protected, so it can be anything, really. All the ones I've tasted have been excellent though - guess I dodged the bad ones.
English mustard, and (Colman's) horseradish sauce, are the only varieties with a pleasingly fiery taste. Overdo either and flames will roar up your nose and issue forth from your nostils, like a dragon. Or that's what it feels like!
Regarding the Irish starting to grow potatoes prior to the famine, I understood this was mostly because, with its damp climate due to Atlantic weather, Ireland is unsuitable for growing wheat, or at least the harvest is unreliable.
I'm a Ukrainian by birth. They have a national favourite conditement, called "hrin", which is a horseradish and beetroot paste. It's very strong — the colloquial language my grandpa uses is that it "turns the nose". Eating it gives a similar reaction to getting a faceful of carbon dioxide. I recommend! Just checkout how hardcore this recipe is: http://ukrainian-easter.20m.com/hrin.html.
I've seen Jews making this during Passover.
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.
People these days need to make more bread from dough so they know what glutenous actually means. It's a very cohesive sort of stickiness, stretchy yet easily rounded, with quite different character from what the starch from potatoes does.
(That's my one complaint on an otherwise excellent piece of writing.)
The non-technical meaning of 'glutinous' is just 'gluey', which is what its precursor word meant in Latin. Connecting it to what we call gluten in food would have to be a more recent development (though traditional methods relied on what we now know to be gluten, apparently it wasn't till the 18th century when gluten _per se_ was discovered, by Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari).
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.
Also, potatoes in whatever form should not be (re)heated in a microwave. That is because the sudden heat causes the water in the cells to turn to steam and burst them, which results in the slimy texture.
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).
+1. I found the first half interesting and then started skimming once they went on the IMP rant.
I loved that part, in part because he gave urban planning examples that really hit home for me as an urban planner. (And I wouldn’t have made the connection).
Some of them worked well (particleboard) others not so well (dating websites).
This was my exact impression. Loved the first half, then as soon as "IMP" gets abbreviated, the review itself becomes a chopped up rapid-fire mess. I was hoping it'd expand on the same process happening to other foods.
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.
I very nearly gave a rude response to someone doing this the other day, because yes they were abusing my social instincts. “Hey, can I just quickly check something?”, like they need a quick hand with something. You’re not supposed to do that if you don’t really need it! It’s like spam email.
Instead of the rude response about abuse of social conventions, I told them that I vet my charities which seemed to absolutely knock them out of their patter as they loudly repeated it, aghast, while I escaped down the road. I don’t think vetting my charities is actually that unusual? But perhaps it is, for people doing that job.
I also did this on Friday! I said, "No, I prefer to research charities on my own time, and I don't like being scolded for not responding or told to smile" (which they've done).
And they were like "Whoa! Whoa lady, cool down" as though I'd slapped them or taken off all my clothes.
A perfect occasion for “let it be awkward”. They are the ones breaking the rules and making it awkward: let them feel awkward about it.
Although I do feel a bit bad for them, because they’re all so young, and I’ve known bright young things out of university get sucked into the companies that hire them on commission to sell various things like that, and they big them up about how you can make loads of money with a bit of hustle and hard work (if you’re not making money you must be stupid or lazy) but it’s structured so that it’s pretty much impossible to make anything. The sooner they quit, the happier they’ll be: it preys on the young and inexperienced.
But at what point am I excusing them for ‘just doing their job’ when their job is immoral?
Someone I know worked for a large national environmental organization at the state chapter level in the capital, downtown in a cool old building. The group was in that way, visibly a player, as they were in reality insofar as any enviro group is anymore. (They eventually gave up that real estate as a retrenchment measure.) Once a year or so, they would realize with a groan that the “canvassers” were down on the street below. Not even really because of the presence of their office. Not sure they were even aware of it. They didn’t have anything to do with it, and were not known to the staff. Given the group’s stature, locally, and the kind of funds they operated on - it was only embarrassing, and they would often beg then them to go away and stop bothering professional people going about their day. It’s just not how it’s done.
You can’t survive on those tiny donations. It’s very inefficient.
Now building a genuinely large member base is worthwhile.
Obviously, somebody somewhere up the chain had signed a contract that involved canvassers, stopping people on the street. But it was absolutely not helpful in this atmosphere. Now I always would say well you know, you get somebody’s email. You can send them an email or mail them a solicitation or something. And I always thought it was worthwhile to have a table in the park on festival days, etc.
Anyway, just to let you know that whatever the charity was, it may have been scarcely aware of its role in this scheme.
Can’t I get a smile? just inside the threshold - as I’m nearsightedly moving past into the grocery store ; or the variant to my receding back - you don’t *want* $100?: these for me are tantamount to assault, in a sort of imaginary parallel mind-world where I’m more sensitive.
(The idea is you’re going to switch to cable* or something based on meeting a young person at the store and maybe feeling sorry for them having such a terrible job. I mean, the fact it’s being so improbable! - I live in an apartment, many people around here do, and it’s just one of those hassles of moving in that you’re not looking to redo - makes it seem even more hopeless a “job”. *Well, the internet anyway; I don’t have TV of any kind but got forbid I would admit that.)
The charity ones camp outside Walmart (dogs or kids or teen suicide) and are avoidable by virtue of the wide entrance, and by the fact that they are a convivial lot - I think the same set actually only varying their ask - get to chatting together, so you can slip in under cover of not interrupting.
I guess there are a lot of people not so lost in thought, for whom the intrusion - the voice from the periphery - is a welcome stimulus. Otherwise none of it makes sense.
If they are polite, I stay fly and just smile and say “Nope, not interested.” - I’ve perfected the response from opening my front door to Jehovah’s Witnesses - If I run into someone like an aggressive panhandler, a completely different thing, I may offer them a gruff “Out of my face, asshole.”
Thank you.
Anyone know whether the folks with the clipboards are being paid on commission?
In a few countries in Europe and China (where I lived or have friends that told me) - yes.
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.
Actual AI art by AIs that pass the Turing Test will be fascinating. Naturally, you won't be able to figure out that it's done by an AI.
What you're looking at is slop versus slop. AI art (as you're capable of interacting with) was designed to get better content.
"Art is for God, and God is a harsh critic."
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.
This is a blind-taste-test truism; the industry insists it's true.
If so, it's interesting, because to me because pepsi tastes mildly but persistently of chlorine and chalk, and coke tastes mildly and less persistently of cloves and lime-the-fruit.
I don't like either of them, but also to me they are scarcely equivalent because they taste so different.
Which in turn makes me wonder about other people's taste buds.
Found the article. Make of it what you will.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/dining/cola-cane-sugar-taste-test.html?unlocked_article_code=1.c08.eZvi.S3tNgolpGLEc&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
That was an interesting read, thank you. It's also recent, which means previous findings are still holding up.
Here, all non-diet softdrink (soda) is sweetened with sugar, and I really noticed the difference when I lived in the US for a while.
The author found they preferred pepsi made with corn syrup - but preference can be influenced by familiarity.
Objectivity is hard, and 'flavour' is quite emotive!
Personally I prefer sugar-sweetened coke (environmental influences again? who knows), but not particularly strongly since I'm not really a soda drinker anyhow.
Ok but the thing is, in places with sane zoning policies, you can get a furnished 1br in one of those cardboard-and-drywall complexes for like 1300$. It comes with free gym and a pool! The apt comparison is not some Empire style apartment you get to see once, it's what you could afford for the same price if you had to pay masons, carpenters, etc. 1300/month (or the equivalent capitalization if you're buying) would cover what, a tiny corner with one piece of forniture?
Same with AI slop images: the realistic equivalent is not "what if they paid a couple thousand for an artist to do it or spent a dozen hours doing it", it's no illustration at all.
Mashed potatoes are a cheap and quick enough dish that fair, you probably are just lazy if you buy the instant version, but... That's a free choice millions make! The IMP-ed version at the end wins out despite a lifetime of exposure! And for a lot of other dishes, those requiring literally weeks (eg a proper pudding), the authentic version was eaten only of major holidays for a reason. The "real" alternative to pudding on a random Tuesday is no pudding at all.
That's my issue with the whole RETVRN thing, being a 1%er was nice, sure, and so were the few occasions when commoners splurged a lot of time and resources to have something special, it still is, but please let's keep it real and compare apples to apples.
IIRC, the conclusion of Scott's study is that art experts COULD tell the difference, it was only laymen who couldn't. AI will presumably continue progressing over time and it may not always be the case, but as it is, people can tell.
Incidentally, I'd bet that the average person can't tell the difference between real Korean and Korean-sounding gibberish either.
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.
But black pudding is ~supposed~ to to be full of bits of fat and random cereals!
The "most tenuous of connections" being that it IS actual chicken meat that has been ground up, flavored and shaped?
How is it different than, say, a pate or a farce? McDonald's is certainly not the culinary origin of turning meat into a paste and then reforming it and cooking and eating it.
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.
It is not true that McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are made from "pink slime". Instead of using a chemical process to extract the final bits of meat from bone and carcass, they are just grinding up actual boneless skinless breast. Maybe more like a sausage, and it is processed, but not the same as pink slime.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/mcdonalds-shows-how-its-mcnuggets-are-made-no-pink-slime-n23706
Fair enough, I wasn't aware that "pink slime" is a technical term implying a certain process, rather than just a figure of speech.
Nuggets made of reclaimed meat certainly are being made (and eaten) under other brand names, however.
You can recognise them by the homogenous texture and slight bounce to the bite.
There's substantial amounts of neurological tissue in chicken mcnuggets, unless they actually changed the recipe.
There's substantial amounts of neurological tissue in all meat you eat. We're not denervating muscles when we butcher animals.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-chicken-nuggets-not-just-meat-but-blood-vessels-nerve-cells/
Pulling two of them, and getting dramatically different compositions says something. But it doesn't really say that "you're always eating nerve tissue" (I'm taking it that whatever tests they're doing, "muscular nerves" are not triggering "nerve tissue -- which upon thinking, probably means chicken brains").
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?
The Communist Manifesto was basically a pamphlet. Most of his analysis is in 'Capital. A Critique of Political Economy'.
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.
Karl Marx isn't exactly read in these parts, so the fact that he's not favored is rather meaningless.
Anyways, alienation (as far as I understand it - this calls for a disclaimer, I have not read Marx either other than doing spot-checks on what he or his terminology actually means, so I may be missing some bigger picture here) as a concept is something quite different and more general, a separation of a person from the underlying material and social reality of human life sensu generali. Some of which is an unavoidable consequence of division of labor alone (or, more generally, of the increasing complexity of civilization and technology and institutions), of course, but capitalism greatly aggravates the issue - you sell your work without (a need for) understanding what it produces, then buy ready-made commodity products without (a need for) understanding what it took to produce them. It's not merely that you're deprived of choice, you're deprived of epistemic means to meaningfully make one (and of much, much more).
On that first point: It’d be pretty interesting to see what Scott would say about some Marxist literature
His main/only post I know of on Marxist literature is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/
Also there's this that Scott claims is recommended to him when he wants to read leftist literature
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/book-review-inventing-the-future
Why would you need to read Marx for not favouring him to be meaningful? Marx's theories and their practice are quite well known without having to read him
In my experience the average person who thinks that is completely wrong about what Marx actually said.
In your experience, What are the errors?
"What are these beans for?"
"Bullets?"
Rwanda, everyone.
(Those were coffee beans, generally given in trade to resellers who would give them guns and ammo back.)
Instead of AI Slop, I propose: Processed Prose
How about ultra 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.
I forget how anthropic arguments work, but I think I have to believe that they're actually incredibly poisonous but you're in the only universe where you miraculously survived, or else I have to admit that an omnipotent god exists.
The poison effect is cumulative; it usually takes 70-80 years.
The poisons are mostly in the black and esp. the green spots, I was told. A fresh potato has less of those. - Kids often react negatively to potatoes even when cooked, unless they are fried or baked (the potatoes), temperature over 150C break those poisons. - Ethanol is a poison; I am still alive, thus super-human, too?
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.
They should have got a Stalin.
Is hiding your crops really a useful strategy against taxation? I would think the taxman could just be like "well, I don't see any potatoes, but I do see that you have a potato farm, and obviously you're eating *something,* so you can either hand over some potatoes or go to jail for tax evasion."
Like, you don't need a person to physically go through everyone's cellar and count the number of potatoes in storage to calculate your tax demands. You can get by with an estimate.
That's how you end up with farmers starving to death while unused food rots in warehouses. Some years you get less crops. If you aren't willing to reduce taxes, "obviously you're eating something" will cease to be true.
Two main reasons, I think. 1) It’s just physically easier to hide, so you might secretly plant a bunch of potatoes in the forest on top of your normal crops, and only dig them up in secret (in the 1950s Chinese great famine, this was an essential survival strategy); 2) The laws are shaped around grain, so it's perfectly legal tax avoidance rather than evasion. In 18th century Ireland most of the laws (e.g. tithe composition act) had a list of taxable crops which didn't include potatoes.
Besides other responses, it’s just hard to collect the tax. The soldiers don’t want to come back twice; grain taxes are easily collected right at harvest time when exactly all the wealth is lying around on the fields. And there’s no such thing as jail for tax evasion if you’re a pre-modern peasant. Nobody is going to put up the potatoes to let you not work!
Potatoes have less anti-nutrients than grains.
It wasn't about hiding your crops from taxation as such, it was about hiding them from literal invading armies. The thing that drove the adoption of the potato in Europe was *war* - because potatoes grew underground, they were harder for a roaming army to steal from farmers.
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
Most versions of boxed M&C where you still cook the pasta normally, in boiling water on the stove. The microwaved version seems to be different and more expensive...
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.
This.
"Sometimes the cheapest way to pay is with money."
I think this perfectly sums up the troubles of developing deep community and our current culture. We all move way too often, and space is too expensive. And then we build a culture around moving often and space being expensive, because we develop culture around any repetitive pattern and there we are - later deep community is impossible
Luckily this desire has been solved with housing. You get the god-honest daily human connection, but you all have your own unit that you can sell when you want to leave. (I assume there’s an application process for buyers). My mind was positively blown to see two neighbours looking after two toddlers in the courtyard of one cohousing building with the parents nowhere in sight.
Though, one could say the nuclear family was at its peak precisely during the Baby Boom years!
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.
>> They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work.
Hard disagree with Scott, here. Sure, they would rarely have seen a lethal cyanide poisoning.
But cyanide is not a poison which is unnoticeable until it kills you. Mild poisonings will cause headaches.
So it is less "we must follow these arcane food preparation instructions passed down from our ancestors precisely lest we offend the gods and they strike us down" and more "random chance variations in food preparations will often lead to more headaches and rarely to less headaches. This gives us a loss function to minimize."
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.
Lye or another alkalai is used in a lot of foods in different cultures (bagels, pretzels, ramen noodles, moon cakes, hominy) so I suspect it wasn't an accident but more a general principle people were experimenting with - weak acids and bases will break down food and make it more digestible, and eventually someone thought "what if I do that but with a stronger base?"
For bagels in particular, the lye is more of a nice-to-have - it breaks down the starch on the outside to give you a brown and tasty crust, but you still get edible food without it. I can't find a clear source on when that step was added but I suspect it's significantly more modern than "ring shaped baked good" is.
Or some baker used the local water that was significantly more basic than the water one village over. Reduce it by boiling and you get an even stronger lye.
Darker bagles = better sales.
Doesn't take a genius to work from there. A lot of professions from medieval times knew about acids and bases. They just didn't understand what they knew.
As others have pointed out, most poisons will give you negative feedback long before they kill you. And even slightly poisonous plants might be net positive for survival if you eat them in small doses.
So rather than operating with a binary "that is poisonous, don't eat it" vs "that is fine to eat" feedback, there is a continuous scale feedback.
I imagine mostly it was a process along the lines of "for dinner, we ate meat with berries and nuts and a single bite of cooked bitter tubers. Only one stupid guy ate three bites of them instead, which would cause bad stomach cramps. For some reason, he was fine. Through more experimentation, we learned that it was the clay sticking to the tubers."
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.
My issue with this analogy is the implicit assumption that the "imitation" product is crowding out much higher quality (but slightly less convenient) traditional products.
"Mostly nutritionally adequate" food would be a huge step up for most people (in most contexts), especially if it can be mass produceed cheaply. Dinner parties feel like a straw man, because they're the least likely use case for "mostly nutritionally adequate" slop.
I probably wouldn't read an AI-generated novel, because it wouldn't be up to the level of quality I expect in that context. But I would much rather read an AI-generated work email or used car ad, because it will be better than the stream of consciousness word vomit I'm used to in those contexts.
This seems like focusing on the bad 5% at the expense of the good 95%.
I’ve noticed that I really love AI art - not as a replacement for traditional art, but as an additional source of delight. I like it best when I can tell it’s not human, especially when it has some obvious tell, like house with a fireplace facing outdoors. It has this whole different type of creativity, like, for example, videos of Victorian women getting off a floating art deco train. Most people with a budget to create video aren’t going to create that, so I love it.
I think a lot of the hate comes from the fear of what comes next, when we can’t tell anymore, and it just replaces humans. I’m hoping ai art stays flawed so I can keep loving it as its own thing.
I agree with this take on AI art. The flawed stuff is flawed in ways we just don't think of.
I particularly liked one of a big happy family sitting down to a celebratory feast, maybe a sunday lunch - and at second glance not one bowl or platter on the table contained anything identifiable as a food, it all just gestured towards 'stuff in a dish'. It made their anticipatory joy contextless and somehow amusing at the same time.
>This seems like focusing on the bad 5% at the expense of the good 95%.
I'm a big fan of the 80-20 principle. Getting 80% of the work done with 20% of the effort is great. But it also means that the top 20%, those that require 80% of the work, are those that really count. I have an issue with content that pretends to be the top 20% with only 5%, or 1%, of the work. Sometimes, high effort is (part of) the point - if only to prove that you mean it.
"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've had to stop listening to classical musical because it's always so much quieter than everything else in the playlist and it's annoying to have to crank volume up and down all the time. I'm surprised streaming services don't have a way to automatically normalize volume.
They do! Spotify normalises things by default by decreasing loud pieces down to "normal volume. They also have "quiet" and "loud". "loud" volume increases loudness so slightly affects audio quality. I have kept it on the default "normal" for now, because inaction is easiest.
Thanks. It’s nice to have my rough sense of things confirmed by somebody with much more experience.
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).
“Chopped and screwed” is an aesthetic that very deliberately embraces the cutting-up and rearrangement procedure described in the article.
Vinyl records were played in Laurel & Hardy's car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-2R2D7a_ww although I suppose that could be pre-vinyl
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.
For what it's worth, raw milk tastes pretty bad - it has a strong 'essence of cow' character to it.
Especially if it's warm from the cow. I grew up milking our house cow and the milk was always much more palatable once it had been chilled (at a minimum).
These days I buy homogenized milk by preference; it's a better product.
Yeah one of the example is chicken nuggets and I can confirm that I like both chicken nuggets and chicken meats, albeit for different reason.
Old people and people who've grown up drinking raw milk (e.g. in a farm) *do* complain about homogeneized/pasteurized milk.
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.
crufty is the most modern of usages, from the latest neologism.
Brought to you by dusty old gardening books where aphids fuck the juices out of plants.
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?)
The shape described seems to be U+03F9 Greek capital lunate sigma symbol, "Ϲ". But I'm not familiar with lunate sigma (or any such) being used positionally in the way described, just as an alternate form of the letter that was more common in certain time periods.
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).
Canned oxtail.seems to have bits in it.
Anyway tomato is the king of British soups. My grandmother use to make it from scratch. Maybe she was be last person to do so.
Canned is better than powder. Here’s the knorr oxtail powdered soup ingredient list.
• Wheat flour, potato starch, palm fat, salt
• Tomato puree powder (~4%), onion powder (~3.5%), yeast extract, maltodextrin, sugar
• Beef powder (~1.8%) and a tiny bit of Oxtail meat powder (~0.3%)
So that is now after stricter labelling laws. Back when I was a kid the oxtail component was probably even less if at all.
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.
For someone making such a contrarian point `coffee sucks' sure is a weak argument
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.
A number of people outside OpenAI were permitted to try out GPT-5 under NDA in advance of its public release, but I don't know whether it would have been in a ready state for that in May. Probably not, AI moves too fast.
It didn't make the finals, but the entry that really gave me "noticeably GPT but slightly better than usual" vibes during the initial voting round was the Teeth one. I do wonder whether that was generated by some sort of frontier model, or just good prompting of an existing consumer model.
I highly doubt it. Not a single em-dash, as far as I can tell. No hedging.
And then you have sentences like this:
> The only things that are really real on the Altiplano are nightshade and hunger.
This sentence is very much not IMP, in my opinion.
Of course, you could easily prove your claim by prompting a LLM into writing a different article about some instant food which will be just as good.
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 !
A variant on that I heard a long time ago is:
Aroo ["are you"] from Cork? I am an' all!
D'ya ate potatoes? Big an' small!
How d'ya ate 'em? Skins an' all!
Do they taste bad? Sure, not at all!
"Sure, not at all" is such a weird language quirk. It's about as weird as double negatives (though I think I'm more inured to double negatives, as they occur in lots of "non-standard" dialects).
I'm American and in my dialect it's fairly common to say "yeah, no" in informal contexts.
Irish guy mentions colcannon.
American guy (presumably distracted) hears "the brilliant idea" and starts drafting plans for "coal cannon."
Irish guy was rather confused when he was thanked for the idea.
Coal Cannons, needless to say, are not terribly effective.
(Ukraine has more spare coal than spare iron, however, so it was worth a try.)
Huh. Apparently I live in the "far off days of yore" where the milk comes in glass bottles and isn't homogenized.
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.
That's because Spam is amazing and the hedonistically adapted island cultures knew a good thing when they tasted it. As a salt fiend I go absolutely feral for fried Spam.
(/s, American colonialism and wartime depravation probably played a much larger part)
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.
It fits in with a lot of other things. Things that are difficult and expensive have high status, while things that are cheap and easy are low.
Canned food was the only way you were getting fruit that hadn't been dried in the winter. It was expensive and thus high status.
Then long-distance shipping made fresh fruit possible in winter. Meanwhile canned fruit became really cheap. Result, canned became lower status.
Tanning was low class because you had to be high class to stay out of the sun. Then air travel meant that you could now go south to tan, and it became high status. Now air travel is cheap and tanning is low status again.
Breast feeding was the method that had been used by everyone not rich for a long time. Formula was expensive, but scientific. High status.
Formula became ubiquitous, and so its status was lowered.
Similarly for disposable diapers.
Some of this is due to scientists publishing studies showing bad effects for various things. But I do wonder how much of this was following the urge to declare certain things low status, and so finding out that those very things were bad for you.
There was a big "futuristic/clean/modern" crase in the 1950s. Then there were the crunchy con "hippies" of the 1960s, the back to nature folk. Stuff swings.
Nestle murdered a lot of babies with the line that "formula was better than breast milk".
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!
I wonder about the power of suggestion there.
An espresso is about 1/6 the size of a mug of coffee (40ml vs 230ml). The process of making espresso does not extract six times the caffeine that brewing does.
So it's not the amount of caffeine that's giving you jitters.
Generally, instant coffee has less caffeine than brewed coffee and espresso. Plus it takes me longer to drink a mug than a tiny cup so the impact of caffeine is lessened. I don't get jitters from an iced americano even if it has an espresso in it.
I'm not sure if instant has all that much less caffeine than brewed, though Google suggests about 2/3. I suspect there's more variance in brewed, since there's more types and preparations.
Yes it takes longer to drink a mug than an espresso. An iced coffee, particularly if you put cream or syrup in it, will take even longer.
But the effect of caffeine takes hours to wear off, far longer than any reasonable time to drink it.
Unless you're drinking three or four espressos in the place of one mug of instant I still think there's a psychological effect. Espresso is marketed as being strong, and it's generally drunk black. So it *tastes* strong.
Suggestion is a powerful thing.
Some people drink black tea before sleep because it helps them settle down. And then drink coffee in the morning to wake up. That black tea contains a fair amount of caffeine seems irrelevant.
Google AI largely agrees with me:
"In essence, if you're sensitive to caffeine, consuming the same amount in the form of espresso (which you're likely to drink quickly) might lead to more noticeable jitters than if you consumed it as a large mug of brewed coffee (which you'll likely sip over a longer period). " Dilution reduces the risk of jitters.
I always thought it's funny when in movies people drink hot chocolate to help them sleep when a hot beverage with lots of sugar and a small amount of caffeine would be a pretty effective energy drink to keep one alert. Hot chocolate was used on U Boats for exactly that.
Following your suggestion suggestion I suggest that this practice is a form of auto-suggestion.
Nah, you're missing it. Like Ritalin, caffiene is a stimulant. Autists and other non-neuro-typicals use coffee right before bed as a way to relax and drift off to sleep.
If you're using robusta,you're getting WAY more caffeine.
Robusta versus arabica, sipping versus tossing back, French press versus drip.
I doubt most of these make a difference next to simple quantity.
A mug is *six times as much* coffee as an espresso. The mug preparation has to have less than one-sixth of the caffeine per milliliter, or you're still getting more in the mug.
And the measured caffeine concentration in the different coffees just doesn't show that.
Okay, but let's quantify this:
https://www.breville.com/us/en/blog/coffee-and-espresso/arabica-vs-robusta-coffee.html
Testing of samples from different regions has shown that:
● Arabica coffee beans range from .8 to 1.4% caffeine concentration
● Robusta beans range from 1.7 to 4% caffeine concentration
So, if we take "large swing", you're looking at 4 times as much caffeine for robusta as for arabica.
Now, to do a decent "which is larger" it's really quite simple: gram per gram of input coffee. 14-18 grams per double espresso (does anyone really do a single shot?)
https://www.beanpoet.com/coffee-measurements/#:~:text=A%20cup%20of%20coffee%20requires%20nine%20grams%20%282,ratio.%20This%20produces%20perfect%20coffee%20of%20average%20strength.
And here we're at 9 grams.
Okay, but what about the extraction? (Caffeine extracts through water, it's about the easiest thing to extract -- espresso is deliberately designed to extract less caffeine).
https://baristajoy.com/french-press-vs-espresso/
"One shot of Espresso contains between 29 to 100mg per serving, while that of a French Press is between 80-135mg of caffeine per cuppa."
Again, there's your variability. See the swing in "robusta versus arabica". You're not looking at a volumetric difference, of "six times as much" in the bigger cup. I know my espresso is on the low side, caffeine wise (it's home roasted arabica). So I'm maybe getting 60 mg per double.
In terms of absorption, milk versus not milk is probably your key (second to "eat something with it").
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.
"The Secret of Our Success" review was great! If you haven't read Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World," I highly recommend it. It explains so much!
The WEIRDest People in the World was also reviewed in an ACX review contest, and made the finals: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-weirdest-people
(The reviewer was ultimately revealed to be David Hugh-Jones of https://wyclif.substack.com.)
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.
No, I don't think mashups (of the Cicerega/DJ Cummerbund/Willliam Marancini variety) are anything like this. They're more of a musical joke, putting unrelated things together as a means of commentary.
Sometimes it's just a dumb joke (as in Revolution #5) which mashes together Revolution 9 and Mambo Number 5 purely because both of them contain a spoken number, but sometimes it gives genuinely musically fun results like in Tiger or Wallspin.
The culinary equivalent of Mouth Moods is sushi tacos. The musical equivalent of instant mashed potatoes is whatever crap you get when you search on youtube for "relaxing piano music" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NycM9lYdRI)
> 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 is a reasonable view. A possible counter-argument would be something like tennis and pickleball, where no-one is saying pickleball is tennis but it's so similar that in reality it's a rival to tennis and likely to eclipse it.
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.
Yeah, agree strongly with this, both the specific objection to the "IMPs rely on nostalgia for the original thing" point (I'd guess more often the opposite is true") and just generally the "applications to society" section was a big miss for me.
I feel like it's already popular to complain that cheap and convenient stuff exists, or worse, is somehow some sort of a moral failing of civilization, rather than just a reality that people have limited resources and are going to prioritize different things.
Like McDonalds is a poster-child for this - tons of people have a very snobbish, verging on moralistic outlook on McDonalds. Yes, we all saw SuperSize Me, nobody thinks it's a health option... but people act as if if McDonalds didn't exist all the people having fast food would suddenly go home and cook nutritionally balanced and delicious home-cooked meals, and I just don't think that's the case.
And people have been complaining about this stuff forever, I don't think we really need a catchy name it, and it feels like this comment section is already trending towards "IMP" meaning "anything I don't like". (Maybe in a week someone can go through and compile the full list of "things the Commentariat thinks are IMPish")
I remember being about 15 and someone told us all about how his dad had a home-brew kit, and we all had a good laugh because it sounded like the oldest thing ever. This was c. 1999. Shortly afterwards we started going to pubs, and there was a wide variety of lagers but not many bitters or ales. And I feel since then ale has just gone crazy, IPAs left right and centre and even chain pubs are doing real ale festivals, and it happened thanks to sad old gits like my friends dad keeping real ale alive in the 80s/90s. Similar story with bread, I remember very boring bread in the 80s, now all sorts of sourdough etc because hippy health food shops and hobbyists kept it going. Convenience will take care of itself so we don't need to pay attention to it, but paying attention to awesome, relatively inconvenient things that are in danger of being lost may actually preserve some of them in a form that is genuinely popular.
You haven't met a homebrewer until you've met one that's forgotten to put the rootbeer in the refrigerator (Kaboom! 24 bottles of glass shards everywhere).
I agree completely. This reviewer may be correct that they personally do not like instant mashed potatoes as much as the the "real" thing. But an individual chooses to have thing A over thing B for many reasons. Maybe some people value convenience over texture (the authors description of the texture in the article was particularly alienating to me. I have never understood what that means.)
Or maybe people chose instant mashed potatoes because they are bad at making the real ones.
I didn't know that I liked mashed potatoes until my wife made the instant kind for dinner when I was in my 20s. Prior to that, I had only ever had "real" mashed potatoes made by my mom or grandmother. Both made them from scratch with real boiled potatoes, real butter, etc. Their mashed potatoes are gross. I still avoid eating them every Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I never ordered them at restaurants because I assumed they would taste like my mom's.
I literally did not know that mashed potatoes could taste good until I had the instant stuff. Now I am happy to have instant mashed potatoes, and I am happy to order them at a nice restaurant. But I don't think the ones at a restaurant are significantly better than the instant ones. More like a slightly different version of the same thing--like Coke is to Pepsi.
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.
I feel like you are assuming that because something is an aesthetic preference it has to be arbitrary, which is definitely not the case.
Not all aesthetic preferences are arbitrary, but whether or not instant mashed potatoes taste good is pretty arbitrary.
no it isn't...
In what way is it non-arbitrary?
I don't really understand the question. Are we using the same definition of the word "arbitrary"? For a choice to be arbitrary it would have to *not* be based on the merits of the two sides. Whether you think instant mashed potatoes tastes good obviously has a lot to do with (1) how they taste and (2) your culinary standards. Two decidedly non-arbitrary things. It's not like everyone rolls a dice when they taste something to decide whether they like it or not. It's certainly possible that somebody does that, but most people do not; most people's food preferences seem based on actual facts about the food.
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.
Many theories exist regarding UPF. It is not necessarily through being appetizing.
The small particle sizes as consequence of ultra processing may simply imply easier digestion and greater absorption, See incretin response.
Many Theories exist. But research does too. Specifically, Archer Daniels Midland has the largest body of addiction research on the planet.
"If I was to eat as many doritos as I want, I'd be very very fat." I said that once, but haven't bought Doritos since.
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."
I appreciate your name, one of 25 alternatives to Dave.
That's the one!
1) I detest the taste of potatoes of all kinds. This is a very rare disability; I've met only one other person who had it, and she's now deceased. But now I understand why, when I tell hosts that I don't eat potatoes, they insist that their potatoes are good. I ask, "Are they made of potato?" Yes. "Then I won't like them."
2) It's possible for inferior foods to take over the ecosystem without being fully IMPish. For instance, the things that Noah's calls bagels. As a member of the relevant ethnicity, I can state will full authority that they're not bagels. They're perfectly good for what they are, which is bread in the shape of a doughnut, and I actually like them sliced in half and toasted, at which they work better than bagels do. But they're not bagels. I am distressed at the idea of uninformed people eating Noah's and thinking they've had a bagel.
3) It is also possible, as noted by others, to like the IMPish food better than the original, if that's what you're used to. Example: I grew up on canned pineapple. The first time I had fresh pineapple, I was repelled. Though later I learned to prefer it.
4) If you like potatoes, you'll like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i69Rz4yb3cA
Canned pineapple is candy sweet. If that's what you want....
What do potatoes taste like to you? Is there something about them you dislike?
I enjoyed reading this review, it's quite apPEALING. It reminds me of a MASH-UP of Douglas Hofstadter and Michael Pollan. It does borrow rather heavily of the chapter in Botany of Desire, which means it's similar to the writing style of a great modern food anthropologist.
Also if this is published anywhere else, can I suggest a new title? "Tuber or not tuber"???
> The problem with this, of course, is the problem I had with my father’s instant mashed potatoes: the substitute is only able to satisfy a craving if you have the craving in the first place, and that requires direct experience with that which it is meant to replace. The memory of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work, the mental spell that allows the transmutation from IMPish Thing to Thing (original).
One claim I have heard is that the original postmoderns all had modernist training, and assumed their audiences did as well, and then things started to go off the rails when they had students that skipped the modernist training and went straight to postmodernist works.
This feels like a pretty different mechanism than the one you're describing here--a cousin instead of a sibling--but I think there's something interesting about sophisticated processes that falsify their assumptions as part of their action.
Had a blast reading this, reminded me of the essays in "The Anthropocene Reviewed" by John Green
That's actually what I expected when Scott created Non-Book Review Contest. Although what we actually gotten aren't actually too shabby.
Reminds me of Baudrillard's simulacrum stages. At stage 1 you have real mashed potatoes. At stage 2 you have instant mashed potatoes, whose merits are dependent on the notion of real mashed potatoes from which it copies. At stage 3, you've never tried real mashed potatoes so you only know mashed potatoes as unappetizing slop. Presumably at stage 4, you wouldn't even know non-instant mashed potatoes existed.
Mashed Potatoes Will Not Take Place
My favorite example of this is how a huge number of people love comic book characters without having ever read a comic book. The movies and tv shows can just steal the best stories, crush them into a quick episode or movie, and that's what people experience.
Were the comic books themselves much better? Maybe not, even Stan Lee admitted that lots of those stories were just "we need to sell something fast to pay the bills". But in the Infinity War comics, the surviving villains teamed up with the surviving heroes which sounds awesome.
Sadly, this review resonated with me less than most readers here.
First, because I despise mashed potatoes of every kind. I have no idea how many instant or real ones I've eaten, but I never intend to find out. (Funnily enough, I adore potatoes in all other forms - but that makes mashed potatoes even more offensive to me. Why ruin such delicious food?)
Luckily, my life partner agrees with me on this - our children will never eat mashed potatoes at home. (or any other mashed food really. We both hate food with that kind of texture.)
Second, because the premise is on very shaky ground. While it's true that human agriculture has bred for taste, it has always also bred for size, speed of growth and convenience. Some ancient vegetables and fruits have become only good through agriculture, others have become much worse taste-wise. (Especially size, taste and nutrients are often straight up opposites. Bigger size usually just means more water - and less nutrients per unit of mass. The article suggests the opposite as a general rule.) This problem ofc got much worse in the modern time, but is has nothing to do with Imp-substitution. In fact Imp-substitution is just another step of that process, not the beginning.
The process is also not that bad (which the review acknowledges, but too little in my opinion.) Wild strawberries are tastier, but also very, very small and not fit for mass production.
I would also say that while the analogies to LLMs are obvious I don't find it that clever. All human thought is just a mishmash of random imputs anyway. The LLM just mashes more stuff together, but it's all a mash in the end.
Nothing about frozen instant mashed potatoes? I used to get them at Trader Joe's until they stopped carrying them - disc shaped microwavable things that with generous amounts of butter and milk were almost as good as the real thing.
Separate rant about TJ's stopping carrying things that I loved and bought all the time...
Typo: In several places, "masſed potatoes" instead of "maſhed potatoes".
I was in Bolivia last month, and was surprised to see groups of potatoes on the ground in the villages. But we then learned about chuños — frozen at night, dried by the intense sun at 13,000 feet, and walked on in bare feet to squeeze out moisture without tearing up the skins too much. And we ate them often. They were quite delicious in a soup or stew. Maybe not so much by themselves. But a brilliant idea for storing a staple food.
> What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted with desiccated flakes, real milk with a thin byproduct, real butter with refined vegetable oil, real mashing with the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame with microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained.
This potato-esque abomination is properly referred to as "smashed potatoes," because it's had all of the goodness smashed out of it through food processing and alterations to the actual recipe.
I'm sorry to be critical, but this review just doesn't engage enough with its own thesis. It says, in a nutshell, "This is not a pipe." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images). It says, "Sometimes the replica grows so popular it replaces even the memory of the real thing, so we don't even remember what we've lost." And to this, it (almost but lacks the courage to) says, "RETVRN" -- just with a medieval ſ instead of a Roman V.
The trouble is, it lacks the courage to stand up for its own thesis because it *knows* it hasn't done a good job defending it. What of bread, for example? What of the times when chopping a Thing into tiny bits and then gluing them back together into a slurry (e.g. grain into flour into dough), is actually a *good* thing? Bread has almost completely displaced the original way we ate wheat & other grains, where you'd boil the grains into a gruel and eat the resulting "wallpaper paste". Bread has so completely replaced that, that people mostly don't even remember that that was ever a thing; grain now means bread to people, not porridge, and the closest people get (making oatmeal) still has been "corrupted" by the modern way (using rolled/steel-cut/chopped/etc. oats, rather than whole kernels). Is this a problem? Or is it a problem to the thesis, because it's not a problem where it should be?
Once you start looking, there are so many counterexamples like that, of "the student replacing the master". E.g. pickling, which started as a way to preserve vegetables into a fascimile of themselves, but is now enjoyed for its own sake. Or cheese. Or smoked meat. Or jam. Or bacon.
I mean seriously, look at the "signs things have gone wrong" list from the review:
1. Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
2. Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
3. Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
4. 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.
You know what fits the bill? The author's point about instant mashed potatoes, fair enough. But you know what also fits the bill? Smoothies. Concrete. Sausages. All of these get used as replacements for the original thing (whole fruits, whole rocks, whole meat). But I fail to see what the problem is.
I will grant that the review's thesis is definitely sometimes true. Just look at margarine for example. Horrible stuff. (... but even that points to a possible problem with the review's thesis: perhaps the problem with their dad's awful mashed potatoes, wasn't the instant potato flakes. Perhaps it was substituting butter for margarine, which is a bit like substituting herbs & spices for sawdust just because they look similar.
Though, as James points out at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-instant-mashed/comment/143395152, the problem might actually have been with the cooking method, not cooking ingredients -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/hqyea7/comment/fy0z5w9/ for the science behind it. Overcooking your potatoes results in the cells rupturing and leaking out free starch, so Sous Viding them below boiling is the way to go.)
But overall, I'm just not convinced. Is synthetic diamond bad because it's replacing the real thing, or is it good precisely *because* it is? Because it's replacing blood diamonds? Is lab grown meat bad because one day it'll replace the real thing, or good because one day it will? There's an interesting debate to be had about this, e.g. red states pre-emptively banning lab-grown meat (https://sentientmedia.org/texas-banned-lab-grown-meat/) precisely *because* it's trying to pressure the original thing out of business. But this review doesn't even engage enough with its own ideas to spot the possibility, and tout the sheer relevance of those ideas to our lives.
There are so, *so* many missed opportunities here. E.g. Matzah/Passover bread, and how the original Thing can survive in a world of superior replacements, precisely because people make a deliberate effort to remember who they were, not just who they are, and preserve history in a world defined by fleeting convenience. Or, on the other side of the fence, how the sheer performativity of your family's efforts to connect with their Irish heritage (Guinness! Potatoes! Corned beef & cabbage!), doomed the entire effort right from the start to only replicating the *appearance* of the original thing, never the reality. How we're all just 'plastic paddies', doomed to chase the shadows of the past the moment we throw them away, a modern Tantalus of our own making unable to reach the fruit we threw away.
(And, as one final note, good Concept Handles [https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3b7sidNrEkNaY9qfGwZjwz] are important. And, sadly, "IMP" isn't that catchy a Concept Handle. Something like "Doppelgangers", "Evil Twins", "Skin Suits", "Bodysnatchers", "Changelings", or "Counterfeits", could have gotten the point across better.)
TL;DR: This review needed more time in the oven. The argument is good; the polish is lacking.
This was a really interesting reply. In my view there's a difference between supplanting and supplementing. Bacon is an awesome thing, roast pork is a different awesome thing. Cucumbers - not awesome but pleasant enough, gherkins: awesome. Concrete performs a totally different function to rocks, functionally and aesthetically. The article in my view is talking about something more insidious and totalizing.
> You know what fits the bill? The author's point about instant mashed potatoes, fair enough. But you know what also fits the bill? Smoothies. Concrete. Sausages. All of these get used as replacements for the original thing (whole fruits, whole rocks, whole meat). But I fail to see what the problem is.
They really aren’t though. These are all different products not reconstituted rocks pretending to be rocks etc. If the author has an issue is in not making that distinction well enough in his other examples of IMP (the doctors surgery which has multiple practitioners in no way fits the theory, in my view. That’s just more useful).
I'm fairly sure "pink slime" is something somewhat different from what goes into McNuggets.
There was documentary a few years ago in which a professional chef (Jamie Oliver?) showed the pink-slime-to-nugget process.
Thereafter, McDonald's committed to switching over to identifiable chicken meat rather than byproducts - so it apparently was a thing at one time.
A number of years ago I ordered a meal at a moderately expensive restaurant. It came elegantly plated, and it tasted fine except for the mashed potatoes. I was thinking, ”How is it even possible to screw up mashed potatoes?“ Eventually I concluded they must have been instant mashed potatoes.
Depends on the screw up. It’s perfectly easy to mess up the real ones too, too lumpy or too smooth, too much salt or butter or not enough. It’s actually hard to get right.
> now hard to imagine [...], French sans vichyssoise
It's not hard to imagine French sans vichyssoise. Source : I'm French, I'd never heard of it.
... After a brief investigation : Ok, I'm freaking out. That's a pure American invention ; it has never been spotted in a *French* French restaurant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichyssoise
Please apply Gell-Mann memory to the rest of the the review — that I thoroughly enjoyed despite that.
Then replace vichysoisse with potage Parmentier (or gratin Dauphinois, or pommes Anna, or tourte aux pommes de terre, or even tartiflette) and the OP’s point still stands. A lack of familiarity with iconic French potato dishes doesn’t invalidate the rest of the analysis.
Excellent article .Informative ;enlightening even .And the wordcraft was exemplary and enjoyable.So jealous ! I'm going to steal "..continued existence of Idaho and Target." ,but probably edit to Walmart to reinforce my humbler ,working class bonafides.
Growing up, I always thought garlic bread was meh, ok. Then when I was 30 or so, my friend made it for me. I was absolutely delighted! I said, "It's almost like there are real chunks of garlic on it!" She looked at me in confusion. "That's what garlic bread is," she said.
I went home and asked my mother why her "garlic bread" was just bread toasted with margarine and garlic salt. She said, "because that's how your father likes it."
My mother must have done some things right, though, because once a kid came over to our house, and she made him a grilled cheese. The normally quite reticent kid exclaimed, "This is the best grilled cheese I've ever had!"
Upon further discussion, we determined that the kid's mom made him "grilled cheese" by sticking american cheese between two pieces of bread and microwaving it.
Well, the cheese does melt if you microwave it. Probably steaming the bread, though.
It was common for my childhood family to eat Swanson's TV dinners on TV trays whilst watching Disney between 6 and 7 on a Sunday evening.
My favourite was the one with rubber chicken and vulcanized mashed potatoes. I absolutely loved the pseudo potatoes.
It must have been happy associations - I doubt I would enjoy them now.
I forgot about TV dinners! All of the IMP foods segregated into little squares on your tray with the IMP brownie square saved for last. What a wild time!
And then one day The Wonderful Would have Disney time slot was filled with something completely different, The X Files.
Brilliant article. Exactly the sort of article for which I read ACT! I read the headline and lead and was like, “what the hell?” And then I kept reading and finished the whole article. Bravo.
My addition to this conversation is a 1980s phenomenon known as “powdered milk.” Yes, the IMP version of milk. Just add water and stir. For some reason, we used a whisk? This was the era of Tang, which we also drank, and I recall it had something perhaps to do with astronauts? It was a strange time.
Anyway, I grew up drinking fake OJ and pouring fake milk over my cereal, which was weird because my parents were also granola hippies about other matters. For instance, we could never buy “sugar bomb” cereals like the other kids. It had to be bland grains or whatever. Yet we smothered our grains in IMP milk? It makes no sense in retrospect.
There was also some kind of fake cheese? And I struggle to enjoy even the finest fish to this day because our fish came frozen in a rectangle that was then pressure cooked into oblivion. It was definitely about convenience as we were latchkey kids. I digress.
What I really wanted to share is the first time I tasted real cow’s milk at a friend’s house, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. My face must have looked like when you give a baby ice cream for the first time. This was actual milk?!
And fresh-squeezed orange juice? Don’t get me started….
I mean to throw no shade on this essay—it’s a good one—but isn’t Substack itself, the Instant Blog Post platform, with its business model of turning everyone’s random synaptic discharges into something at least superficially resembling the physical magazine articles of the not-very-distant past (with manuscript inboxes and experienced editors skilled in the art of selecting the great or at least good essay or short fiction), a prime example of IMP?
They pan for a few nuggets of monetizable gold from a very large mass of overburden with which they can turn an easy dollar without all the overhead.
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.
You hear this a lot, but it's wrong. There was no problem recovering.
The initial wave of emigration created pathways for future Irish to emigrate in turn. They continued to do that. After the famine, Ireland recovered in whole, and thrived, but it distributed its larger population over a larger area.
Well written and the first finalist essay to be Scott-like in first taking a close look at something then stepping back to think about big picture implications and isomorphisms.
Of course the author’s right about the AI-instant mashed potatoes isomorphism, as well as the ones between the IMP’s and lots of other parts of modern life. And I don’t think they’re just being cute and clever here, either. I think they’re onto something, and am now ruminating about this trend and what to make of it. I expect the writer is too, and would be interested to hear their thoughts.
AI is an absolute cornucopia of IMP isomorphisms. My favorite: idea of nanobots dissecting us into our molecular components to make more nanobots.
But why didn't the Europeans stick 'em in a stew?
I appreciate the “anti-massing rules as an IMPish simulation of a varied block.” I’m working on proposing protections for a small town main street’s small lots to preserve its visual variety, and one source of pushback is people saying that you can achieve the same thing on large buildings with articulation. Next time this comes up I’ll say that’s the instant mashed potato version of variety.
I loves this review, thank you!
I had quiche (which Iʻd always thought was disgusting but tried because the waitress/chef/owner told me to try it) at a French restaurant and realized what I thought was quiche was so different that using the name quiche was a lie. One of the best things I ever tasted.
More recently i had a similar experiece with bread. The bread was similar enough that I’d say I had simply never experienced good bread. The quiche was so different that I believed I’d never before eaten quiche.
Makes you wonder what else you’ll never experience because the pseudo version crowded out the real.
Cherries Jubilee. Good apples (for years, we ate red delicious. horrid things). For a lot of people, tomatoes (supermarket cardboard).
And you've NEVER had fresh asparagus unless you've had it within about an hour of being picked. It loses flavor so fast, and is so so fantastic.
Also beets. Good beets are a treasure.
That whole last section seems to boil down to:
"Judge things on their own merits, and not on the merits of the class they supposedly belong to"
Which I think is better point than "maintain proximity to the real". I think it's a well written post, but the part about "if you really think about it, I guess nothing that we interact with is real (even the original mashed potatoes)" gets hand waved really easily considering it's one of the thesis points
This really helped me understand modern Christianity. Thank you.
Great essay!
A quibble: I first learned of ramen in it's instant form and to this day I prefer instant ramen over the real deal from either the trendiest restaurant or street foodiest stall. Sometimes the IMP lands better than the real.
Great writing! And thought provoking. Another way I see a similar concept as “IMPish-ness” (it might actually be getting at the same thing) is whether the primary intention behind the creation of something essentially boils down to “love” or “instrumentalization”. Preserved Andean potatoes? To not starve during the winter. Homemade mashed potatoes? To feed the family with something tasty. Instant mashed potatoes? To profit from a market opportunity (by making mashed potatoes IMPish). I’m no expert but it doesn’t seem like instant mashed potatoes became a thing because some people really wanted to share their love of mashed potatoes with the masses.
Through this lens products like the iPhone and arguably ChatGPT are more “real” than TikTok. The former seemed to have been created through passion and intellectual curiosity for how humans and technology can work together to do something useful. The latter seems to have been created to maximize engagement metrics.
I am a super healthy - and happy, eating is one of the great pleasures of life - eater and my friends find it strange that I have at times indulged in preparing fish sticks. In their mind that food is industrial and not compatible with what I would normally eat and I have to convince them that even though it is definitely "industrial", it's mostly (not very tasty) fish with a thin crust to enhance the taste. The process is more additive than deeply transformative to the original product - cod.
Chicken McNuggets are actual chicken. Yes, they are mechanically-separated chicken that would otherwise be thrown away, but how is that bad? When we're told that the noble Native American used every bit of the buffalo (which is a lie, but bear with me), we're told that in order to emphasize how harmoniously in-tune with nature they were, but when we use every part of the chicken, that's an ultra-processed food and an example of our spiritual bankruptcy. The war on nuggets is bizarre, as illustrated in great length by Dan Olson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a9VDIbZCU
McNuggets take what would otherwise be a waste product and turn it into a useful and valuable product. And they taste good.
Plywood and MDF are also being unfairly maligned in the OP. Plywood has many advantages over solid wood, chief among them being that it is dimensionally stable. The plys have grain running in different directions, which makes it expand and contract and warp less. It's stiff in multiple directions. You can build things with plywood that you couldn't build with solid wood, like some of the best aircraft in WW2. Even high-end cabinetry often uses plywood, specifically because of its strength and stability. MDF has some similar advantages, with the added one that you can make it out of absolute crap wood that you couldn't do anything else with. No, it's not suitable for all applications, but neither is buffalo tongue, that doesn't make it bad.
Have you ever lived in or done any work on a house with plaster and lathe walls? I have, sheetrock is superior in every way. Oh, you 'dinged' it? It takes 30 seconds to fix a ding. It takes a couple of minutes to fix a hole.
These things are entirely unlike instant mashed potatoes, which take the original product, break it down into constituent parts, and then process those parts to produce something which attempts to duplicate the function of the original but is inferior. Putting sheetrock and McNuggets and plywood into the same category is an enormous error.
I, too, thought I hated mashed potatoes as a kid, only to discover in early adulthood that I'd never had them. In this case, my schools were to blame.
Same thing with custard, and for the same reason.
This is as good time as any to warn our non-middle-eastern brothers and sisters: the thing sold in supermarket under the name "Hummus" isn't Hummus. Real Hummus has inconveniently short shelf time, so that abomination is sold instead
When we were poor and married in college, my husband once accidentally substituted the butter measurement for the salt measurement. We were having my grad advisor and his wife over for dinner, of course. Turns out that two T of salt is a bit too much for instant potatoes.
Making mashed potatoes from scratch is not a culinary achievement. Any ten year old should be able to do it, you just have to have the correct potato type.
Fantastic review, beginning with the highly particular and opening out to the full scope of modern life itself. Adding the IMP metaphor to my general perceptual framework
"My world is made up of lies." You mean advertising? Then yes, it is, and has been since the advent of mass produced TV's.
Here's a simple rule: if the brand depends on a lie, then it isn't "real" in any meaningful sense. Those Europeans eating potatoes in the 16th century knew exactly what they were eating--American households in the late 20th/early 21st century generally do not. What you see on the box is a lie, and everyone knows it.
Marketing was basically invented on Wall Street in the 1920's. I sometimes think that all of history since was entirely predictable once you know that fact. How much of WWI and WWII came out of propaganda? How much of the Great Depression was a result of investor hype? The Cold War? The Algorithm? It goes on and on...
This is called Commodity Fetishism. Individuals relate to complex systems of production and distribution through the dimensionally reduced output of their personal perspective.
Profit seeking, without malice, inevitably solves for situations where radically different processes cast the same shadow as what is remembered in compressed form by the person considering the transaction.
Imagine the relationship between asterisms and the perceived celestial sphere, the learned behavior of holding your "big fish" closer to the camera, or any other seeming.
The radically over-catalyzed facility of organizing central production and transcending all restraint, combined with exhausted individuals and radically under-resourced watchdog mechanisms (so weak they are often captured by capital holders: n.b.: amazon reviews, follower counts, testimonials, etc.) make this a foregone conclusion until there is radical reorganization or replacement of markets in transactional contexts at almost any scale.
GAME OVER, MAN.
It's been interesting to watch over the last few years how "social media" has transformed from something that was actually kind of social (I'm thinking Facebook circa 2010, when the majority of your feed was actual, real-life friends posting updates about their lives and talking to each other) to today's more parasocial media landscape, where people spend most of their time following and shallowly engaging with professional content creators (think modern TikTok). I think we can all relate to the idea that the internet churns out IMPish communities by distilling down the essence of social interaction and then feeding it back to us in bits; this was always the concern, even when Facebook was "good". And yes, everyone knows that the enshittification of Facebook and other social media is largely explained by the fact that those companies eventually felt the squeeze to turn a profit and tweaked their algorithms accordingly. But I think there's another piece of the puzzle: is it possible that this transformation is also driven by a loss of the "nostalgia" aspect that is required for one to enjoy instant mashed potatoes, that is, the idea that a memory of the original thing is a necessary ingredient for one to enjoy the cheap facsimile? If pre-social media human interaction is the true masſed potatoes, and ca. 2010 Facebook is its instant mashed potato counterpart, perhaps the younger generation who can't remember a pre-social media era simply never acquired enough taste for genuine human interaction to care whether their social media offers even a hint of it?
Terrific piece, thanks!
Hmmm. I've made plenty of reconstituted potato product, and it's quite possible to make something out of them that has a decent texture, but yeah, ending up with paste happens too. A lot seems to depend on the exact way you add the water and butter and then stir it.
Lemonade. It isn't a fizzy drink that tastes vaguely of sweetness and lemon juice. The first time I had real lemonade made from fresh lemons, it was unrecognisable
I have seriously never laughed so hard consuming this format of content before