Category: Bad Ideas

Invisible Evolution of Meat, continued.

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Related Posts:

Meat “Packing” Industry, 1917:
“The String Department” and “Curled Hair Machines” at the
Meat Plant (here)

Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food
by Any Other Name (here)

Food, Food Packaging and Creating Desire: the
du Pont Company, WWII. (here)

I wrote yesterday (The Importance of Bridges in the Invisible Evolution of
Meat) about the invisible evolution of meat from range to plate, but mostly about
what happens in those big building with no windows. The wide solitary middle of this food chain
exists almost not at all in the popular mind, most folks choosing not to think
of the gruesome process of “processing” animals into the plastic-protected deli
selections.

The middle killing & etc. part has been generally very well hidden from
public view, at least for the 20^th century. For example, this 1949 ad from LIFE magazine
introduces the “Fall Pork Chop” with the evolution of meat summarized in those
three small pictures. The processing guy
is starched and white and pure standing there before the non-detailed,
smoothed-out carcasses. He even has a
little white cap. The interesting part
here is the Uncle Sam delivering the boxed final product. Uncle Sam?
How did he get into the picture?
He certainly sanitizes the whole procedure, what with the imprimatur of
the U.S.
government and all, and even suggests a slightly patriotic aspect to the food
chain. The odd thing here though is the blood-red background color, which was a
common practice for selling dead flesh in LIFE for many years.

The middle killing and scooping part of this is basically nothing that would
ever be broadcast on television, and certainly it is nothing that parents would
want their kids to see. Don’t people
turn in horror and disgust when those undercover videos of processing
plant practices make it to youtube? So if these images are too fabulously
gruesome for children (and adults) to watch, why take a benefit from them? I’d say that if the process of producing your
benefit is too horrible to watch you
shouldn’t be able to enjoy the outcome.

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The Importance of Bridges in the Invisible Evolution of Meat

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I wonder when it was that humans developed the extra senses that were able to “intuitively” determine (1) when
something is missing, and (1.5) when something is just wrong? I’m sure that these blood-bumpers were developed
soon after the recognition that the face in the primordial goo staring back at
its owner wasn’t something drowning.

This fast-forwards us through Wilberforces ultradense 6,000 years to the
near-present: when looking at the explosively chromaticized picture of the progress
of meat, brought to you by the invisible packing empire of Armour & Co. (of
Chicago, of course), one gets the ancient immediacy of something being missing
and just plain wrong.

The cows being herded from their pastures are being led to the Armour bridge
of Meat Evolution, where by some miracle the process of turning cows into
packaged goods—like Leda and the swan—takes place over the “A” in Armour, three-quarters
of the way over the bridge. This process
is wholesome in its invisibility, the walking product on the one side of the
bridge getting ready for transubstantiation for the nested humanity on the
other side.

The picture of the packer weighing the elements of the mysterious
gold-plated market rams this invisibility home as well: the “producer” and “consumer” columns behind
him are prettily illustrated with referential scenes, while the “packer” column
just gets a single slab of color. A
singularity of nothingness in regards to what goes on behind the packer’s head
is all the consumer would want, then and now, ‘cause certainly nobody wanted to
know what the hell was going on in the packer’s den to hasten the evolution of
cows from muddy hooves to the dinner table–especially in 1926, when this
pamphlet was printed. The vast
conspiracy of people not-wanting-to-know-what-happens-at-the-packing-house continues.

I can’t leave this short post without a nod to another extraordinary image
from the Armour pamphlet: the butcher
waving off the drover and his herd because of a glutted market. The “good old days” here doesn’t look very
much like the 1870’s to me: I can’t
recall a single drover/cowboy image in my very long experience that showed a cow
sniffing a fire hydrant. Plus everything
else in the picture is pure 1920’s, except for the drover, who—although wearing
skins in the city for some unknown reason—at least looks mostly like he should
and isn’t packing an endlessly bouncing-on-your-thigh revolver. Sorta.

The horse looks embarrassed and surprised at the same time. Is there an English word for that?

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Einstein as Subverting Flag-Burning Commie? What his FBI Files Look Like

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While looking at the FBI files for Leo Szilard, a great physicist who had liberal-left ideas about peace and strategy and the use of the atomic bomb (in June 1945), I stumbled onto the files for one of the people sought by the Bureau to talk about Szilard: Albert Einstein. He and Szilard went back a long way, and Szilard’s advanced physics supra-intelligence and illuminated social outlook was instantly recognizable to Einstein, making it easy for Einstein to give him an excellent recommendation. Which of course is something the FBI didn’t want to hear, as Szilard was mucking around in the national will to use the ultimate weapon, among other things.

I knew a little about the FBI’s interest in Einstein, but I had never actually looked at any of the declassified files, which as it turns out live at the FBI site, all 1600+ pages of them. Hoover had some sort of special need to fill with looking after Einstein, whose nearly 20-year-long file is just not pretty. The Director was sniffing around the edges of Einstein’s social life, trying to make them into centers to do god knows what with them. One of the files details the subversive organizations that Einstein was associated with–some of the hundreds and hundreds of groups that he lent his name to over the years.

Here’s some of those threatening organizations:

Not much to look at, really.

But it is this gentle, subtle, horrible document below that causes real grief, the “under investigation” part at the end is just heartbreaking, a Lilliputian effort to control forces beyond their comprehension. Such is the power of ignorance.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Selling to “Simple” Women, 1939: “She’s Not Interested in Bloody Meat”

Post 882 (revised; part of the History of Women Series; also see Women Meat Pioneers.)

These sales-happy customer relations images from a modern food merchandising catalog (Modern Merchandising, 1939) come at an interesting time in the history of eating—or lesser yet, the history of buying food. The pamphlet addresses the growing idea of the super market, a notion still new in the minds of consumers —it seemed as large to the consumer familiar with the 1920’s concept of a market as it seems tiny to the megamarket people of the present.The illustrations–all quite small, margin-inhabiting affairs, space killers, no bigger than 1×2 inches–are there to help the grocer deal with women customers and better understand “them”.

I’ll address the interesting merchandising changes here in another post—right now I’d like to focus on the marginal drawings in the bottom corners of the text. They may be small and offhanded–generally they are less than two square inches–but the messages they delivered, marginalia or not, were very strong. Over and over again these bits demand the sub-class of women, emphasizing their trivial, ephemeral interests—bits of Nothing reinforcing large bits of Something.

The messages beneath the images, collectively: “women judge meat by appearance:; “there a little bit of the monkey in all of us…we like to see and handle”; “offend not eyes , nose nor ears”; “part of the selling job”; “women like to WATCH”; “her work is monotonous”; “she goes shopping in search of adventure”; “she’s not interested in bloody meat”. They present cascading reactions: they’re somewhat funny to my eyes, and then uncomfortable, and outrageous, and then simply sad that their solemn pronouncements on the status of women would be so acceptable, their as-yet unidentified sexism and bitter “racism”a non-sequitur.

.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Bad Ideas — Perception — Perspective — Women, History of
Subjugation of Women 1938: “They DO as they are Told”

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The modern/antiquarian and very long history of the subjugation,
control and disenfranchisement of women slips not so silently into the present
here in the USA; elsewhere around the world this idea isn’t so “antiquarian” at
all and this presence is heavier still.
The morality of the capacity that restricts access to education, and
voting, and access to work, and equal rights in the control of a family, seems
slow in catching up to modernity.

This concept
of control struck home again while looking through a selection of CBS documents
on the state of radio in 1938. They seemed benign though ruthless in what they
were trying to accomplish: a simple objective and complex way of reaching it—the
sale of advertising on the radio. Looking
for comparisons between radio and the rest of the information-control market, I
came upon thin volume entitled What’s
Happening in Daytime Radio?, which for the most part was taking an historic
early stab at directing advertising at the women who were evidently
relentlessly following the soft romantic exploits of some of the fifty or so “soaps”
that were broadcast in 1938. (These very mild romantic adventures were called
so because of the soaps and detergents that sponsored and advertised on these
shows, directed of course at the target female audience.) The opening section started “The Women (God
Bless ‘em)”, wound its way through every manner of inferiority-inducing female
imagery: “the women, god bless ‘em, are not always chatterboxes. They do like to listen. And listen
carefully. They do what they’re told…by
radio.” It is still shocking though, in
an odd way, not at all surprising, to see this sort of copy printed at the
highest levels, and taking place within the lifetime of my still
extraordinarily full-of-life mother.

In this same pile was another bleak remembrancer of the
still-alive past, The Perfect Secretary,
a bleak messenger from 1938. In addition
to the de facto class and sexual
regulation of the structure of the business world and the woman’s
hardly-existent role in its formulation, we are introduced to the concept the most
basic mechanisms and elements of the control of a subjugated group. The pamphlet attempted to conform the
personality and character of the woman to her job as secretary. The
unannounced writer states that “it would be a mistake to overlook the
importance of the personality of a secretary.
What makes personality? Manners and dress produce personality.” He then moves on to specify the fat middle of
the correct mode of dress, reminding the secretary or secretary-to-be that it
was not only the “slovenly, unkempt” girl who lacked personality, but also the
overdressed girl was well “who adopted the undignified style of costume”. But correct dress and coifed hair wasn’t
enough: “with poise there is no personality”. (“An attractively dressed girl
without poise is unfortunate.”) “Conspicuously
colored nail polish is not becoming to a secretary in the better offices.” “Flippant and unreliable manners bury the
finest personalities.” And lastly, “it is one of the first duties of a
secretary in an office to be ever conscious of avoiding body odors”. There are another 34 pages of correctnesses
that follow, to painful to specify.
These attempts at control at the most basic level of a person’s identity
were “normal” for their time, and a remarkable testament to advances (thus far)
in equalizing the world of men and women.

“When we consider the positive evil caused to the
disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the
loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next
in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which
are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which
men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections
of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add
to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced
restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse
evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on
the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than
by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro
tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less
rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the
individual human being.” John Stuart
Mill, The Subjugation of Women, 1869

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The Indredible and Useless Dog Engines of 1895 and 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Post 797 (Sept 2009) Extended.

In 1702, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Savery (c.1650 – 1715) began the idea of calculating the work done by steam engines over that done by horses, writing in his book, The Miner’s Friend:

“So that an engine which will raise as much water as two horses, working together at one time in such a work, can do, and for which there must be constantly kept ten or twelve horses for doing the same. Then I say, such an engine may be made large enough to do the work required in employing eight, ten, fifteen, or twenty horses to be constantly maintained and kept for doing such a work…” But it was James Watt who first introduced the term ”horsepower” while trying to advertise and place forever the idea of his steam engine over than of the earlier Newcombe engine and, of course, horses.”

James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish inventor and “re-inventor” of the steam engine, the man who put the ‘power” into “horsepower”, determined that a horse could turn a mill wheel (of a 12-foot radius) about 144 times in an hour (about 2 ½ times a minute), traveling 2.5x2pix12 per minute. It has been shown though that on average a horse will work at about 1.5 horsepower like this for an hour on and off; and less than 1 horse in other times; a man could work at 1.5-2.5 horsepower for a short time, but generally would pull about a tenth of that for an extended time.

And so we come to the crux of the biscuit of this post: a dog motor. This entirely, utterly, unconvincing and thoroughly bad idea was fully fleshed out by a M. Richard (naturally of Paris) for the Agricultural Exhibition and re-published from La Nature in the Scientific American Supplement on 10 August 1895. It is slightly lovely in its high Victorian way, or at least so until you consider that an animal goes in side the thing, working its way along an infinite belt, a cup of water just within reach. The dog would power the large wheel, which would turn a smaller wheel and belt, which in turn would be connected to smaller, and so on, until it reached whatever it was it was powering, which is left entirely to our imagination. Even when I squeeze my eyes in a telescoping effort, I cannot see what it is that this poor doggie might power. Given the descending orders of radii of the wheelworks, perhaps the tenth-horsepower dog engine ran a fan, or something, something remarkably insignificant. It does tell us something about over-design, like buying a ten dollar bill with a twenty.

Another, more recent but less serious attempt at utilizing canine power was found in Popular Science for 1939:

The thing that really bothers me is that both of these really bad ideas occurred in years where there were fantastic ideas in the history of physics–1895 being the home to the discovery of the atomic world in the work of Wilhelm Roentgen, and 1939, well, more of the same plus making the atomic world go “boom”.

In this same vein, and keeping with the highlight-year-for-physics theme, is this thing, created in the 1880’s but published in Popular Science in 1933:

With the help of Laura Massey (Bookn3rd !), from the wonderful bookseller blog, The Cataloguer’s Desk at the great Peter Harrington Rare Book Shop (London), I’m including an 18th century version of sweating dogpower called the Turnspit:

I’m not sure what it is that would keep the dog running after it realized in the first half-minute that it will never be able to retrieve that hanging thing set out in front of him/her–maybe things got poke-y.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
Visionaries, Ice People, and the Marriage of Stupid and Brutal.

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The ‘twenties is know as the “speed” decade—everything was
going faster, increasing its speed, expanding to the limit: this was true for the ability to communicate
via telephone, the appearance of commercial radio, the great increase in the
speed of trains and planes and automobiles; the music was fast, the movies were
talking.

There are many iconic images relating speed and the roaring twenties—generally
though this spectacular cover for Otto Willi Gail’s Mit Raketenkraft ins
Weltenal…vom Feurerwagen zum Raumschiff (1928) is much less frequently seen, though it
certainly does get the message across.
Otto Gail was a creative German science fact and science fiction writer
with a strong background in following the scientific and technical
accomplishment in rocketry of the age, especially the works of Max Valier¹ and Hermann
Oberth². Raketenkraft was more a peek into the future and pop techy work for
kids than a straight-out scifi novel like his The Moon Stone, which was a story
that brought us Atlantis, space travel and hidden ancient culture in the
underground Ice World.

It’s the unfortunate Ice World that attracts my attention
around Gail, swimming around his interesting and tech-involved scifi world like a
melting and failing Moon made of hundred-year NYC garbage scows, the idea of a
good engineer-turned-trash cosmologist named Hans Horbiger, whose ideas wound
up being whispered into the ears of many monsters. Horbiger had some sort of
vision-dream about stuff in 1894 and spent the next 30+ years fleshing out the idea,
which sounds bad from the very start when the author admits to finding “Newton wrong”. Anyway without losing too many minutes
thinking about this time-hole, Horbiger’s theory worked ice up to being the
primary and primordial ingredient of all processes in the universe, with ice
planets circled by ice moons, and some sort of gooey ice ether to make it all
go ‘round. Oh yes: there were superior ice people living in the interior of the
earth. Horbiger died in 1931, but his many
followers managed to work the theory into a presentable Jewish-baiting
anti-relativity Deutsche Physik form
for the new government of Adolph Hitler in 1933, and it was there that his
ideas took hold in the cancerous Himmler and Hitler and others, a happy
marriage at last, the ridiculous to the unspeakable. I’m not sure where the
ice people are today, but I did saw some awful History Channel show that
stated that Hitler never did die in the bunker and was removed by submarine to
the interior ice people of earth, flying around the insides of our globe “in a
UFO”.

And so I associate poor Gail (1896-1956) with the Horbiger
mess, and not his good work in science reporting and popularization. So it goes.

The other thing that you can say about Horbiger—he had a
full-out behemothian mustache. That’s
about it.

Notes

1. Valier seems to have been the first person killed in a rocket-related incident, blistered by his exploding rocket-car.

2. Oberth is another one of those Germans working at Peenemunde (along with Wernher von Braun and a great host of others) trying to kill as many people in the UK as possible who wound up in Huntsville, working for our government. It is all so problematic. It is interesting that there is little in the Air and Space Museum (as part of the Smithsonian system) that mentions von Braun. He is burioed in a simple grave in a cemetery next door to a Jewish cemetery in Alexandria , Virginia. I also remember going to some restaurant in the diamond district that, in very high bad taste, served up a beer called the Wernher von Brown–von Braun certainly had his hands covered in Jewish blood at least to the wrists, and to have a product so stupidly named as that in that place was just one of those impossible things that happen every day.

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas
Medical Quackery: the Invention of Baldness and the Testicular Electrical Suspenders

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Well.
Margaret McKenzie (“Scientist” with a capital “s”) wrote this simple
treatise in 1934, claiming that she had discovered what caused baldness and
knew how to “grow hair with ‘Natural-Science’ ”. Answering her own call to baldness, and “after
eighteen years of exhaustive study”, Margaret “emerged triumphant…and uncovered
this thing baldness [sic]” with her discovery which would “banish baldness
forever and thus wipe out the bald head which is my aim [sic]”. Margaret’s
gift to “Man-Kind”, her discovery, boils down to fifteen words:
don’t rub your hair when washing your face, and do not smooth your hair
down with your hands. That’s it. Or almost it: we are told later that it is best to shampoo
your hair in a sink, and then if one must shower or bathe to use “a rubber
shower cap so as to not expose your hair to water”. I’m not sure how that holds together.

The great art of Margaret McKenzie is that that
like any great salesperson she was able to spread this tidy discovery over 15
pages. She strays off-topic only a few
times, once when discussing her cure for dandruff, and another when she states
with sublime magnificence that “the bald head era dates back to the 15^th
century”. The cause of the great onset
of baldness, by the way, was the invention of the haircut, which led to
smoothing down the hair and to rubbing the scalp (at the temples) when drying
your face after washing. Evidently haircuts
didn’t exist before 1400.

Sometimes all one can do is say “wow!”.

And a trailing, eyebrow-arched, questioning “wow…” is about all you can say about Pulvermacher’s Electric Belts &c/ Electricity Natures Chief Restorer, Self-Applicable for the Cure of Nervous and Chronic Disease without Medicine (printed ca. 1880), which features an electric “chain” in a belt connected to a “suspensory” for a man’s vitals. It is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of electrical geegaws that climbed aboard the principles of Michael Faraday’s monumental invention of the induction coil (1831)–one can hardly imagine what Mr Faraday would’ve thought of this application of his great addition to the history of technology. This electrical stimulus was supposed to cure all manner of unspeakably lingering medical tragedies, including spermatorrhea, exhausted vital energy, female complaint, inflammation of the prostate gland, seminal weakness, kidney disease, cramp, lost manhood, paralysis, indigestion, dyspepsia, spinal complaints, nervous debility, and of course the “debilities of sexual self-pollution” (“the sexual sin (which) is the most destructive of all human vices…the greatest outrage against Nature’s sexual ordinances that man can possibly perpetrate”. Isaac Pulvermacher’s (which is German for “gunpowder maker”) electrical medico-contraption was popular for several decades in the mid/late 19th century until it faded and trailed away at the turn of the century, though it was not for the lack of trying. Pulvermacher had all manner of glowing letters of support for his product, though one wonders if they

weren’t mostly cooked up on the back burner of a two-burner stove top, much in the way he invented this bizarre electrical device and pathologized aspects of male sexuality.

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Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of
History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research
Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the
vertically integrated food production business in the United States .
Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research)
directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the
contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover
intimates. There is a giant series of
silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted
agribusiness. The simple farmer on his
tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course
the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”,
but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would
become. The family farm would be
absorbed by the skyline of major business:
at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population
was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped
to about 1.5%. The small, independent farms
had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production,
controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil
erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic
chemicals, and on and on.

So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be
prescient after all, and pretty much true:
except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much
absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.

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Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food by Any Other Name
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This photo launched itself up to me while looking through
the 11 March 1946 issue of LIFE magazine for a depiction
of an atomic attack on NYC. It was Joe
Hormel who found me first, fistily challenging me to look at his food products,
a proud manager with his best stuff, presiding over his world of tinned meat
with steely Elmer Ganty-like broke-bone determination.

Joe ran his father’s “butcher business” and brought Spam to
the world in 1937, trying to find an end run around the shrunken Depression
food allowances, and pretty much succeeded.(Spam may also have been the first “singing
commercial” in what the LIFE article called “the earthiest, corniest and most
successful campaigns in U.S. advertising history.”) When the meat shortages spiked during WWII,
Spam found its way overseas via Lend-lease arrangements, feeding millions of British
and European people.. The consensus was
that Spam was mysterious and unpretty, but did deliver something like 15-grams of
protein per tin, which made it some sort of factor in waging the successful
war. US soldiers also received smeats
called “spam” though they weren’t necessarily Hormel’s product—just another in
a long line of monosyllabic imitators whose quality and zestyness didn’t come
close to the real thing, though this time prepared in the millions of pounds by
Army cooks who banked on the Spam name more so than the actual preparation. Or so I read.
In any event it was a real issue for Hormel who “insisted that Spam was
a high-grade compound of ham and pork shoulder” and that the [real] “dainty,
tasty Spam retained liquids in the meat, whereas the bulky Army preparations
was guilty of the worst sin the in the tinned meat world…” floating away in “loose
juice”. As a vegetarian, neither sounds
very appetizing. And the anti-Spam
stories and songs and newspaper articles and art and editorials of complaint
and disgust coming from US soldiers during the war are endless and legion and
iconic.

Spam seems impervious to the barbs and arrows and boulders
hurled its way over the last 72 years, still chugging along in its tinned meat
way, 6 billion sold units and growing.

[Note: “Spic” was
actually a shortening, and “Arf” was a dog food. I just couldn’t resist putting their names in
the title.]

Also, I include some of the recipes from the Monty Python
(170) skit on spam:
- Egg, bacon, and spam
- Egg, bacon, sausage, and spam
- Spam, bacon, sausage, and spam
- Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam
- Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce
  garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam.
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