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Category Archives: Food

The Genius of Red Solo Cups

14 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Matt in Food, Uncategorized

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A reader emailed in this week to say “I’ve been overlooking an instance of pure inspiration my whole life.  No more.” and included a link to an LA Weekly posting about red Solo cups (so apparently Toby Keith is not the only one to be moved by this great American invention).

Since we’ve had a bit of a food & drink theme on Historicalness.com over the past few weeks, and since summertime BBQ season is coming into swing, it seemed to make sense to delve a little deeper.

From the LA Weekly: “[Solo’s creation] was the hard work of a man named Leo J. Hulseman, who in 1936 started producing paper cone cups out of his home to sell to bottled-water companies [my note: during WWII, since glass was scarce, companies turned to paper cups]. The business grew into Solo, and by the 1970s the iconic red cup was born.”

And who can forget the landmark year of 2009 when history was made with the introduction of “Solo Squared®, a first-of-its-kind Squared® single-use cup”, according to the Solo Cup Company website.  What’s more, “in addition to the classic red party cup’s new innovative shape, Solo Squared® has four ergonomic grips, ensuring a more comfortable and reliable hold.”

In May of this year, a Michigan company, Dart Container, completed its acquisition of Solo Cup for approximately one billion dollars.  At today’s Solo cup-to-dollar conversion ratio (we did something similar for English muffins a few months ago), that equates to about 8 billion cups — which would stretch about 500,000 miles long if you stacked them on top of each other.  Not too shabby considering that  would get you to the moon and back, with about 25,000 miles to spare.

I guess Red solo cups really are a source of pure inspiration.

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The History of Chocolate

11 Friday May 2012

Posted by Matt in Food

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In honor of Mother’s Day, I thought I’d take a look at the history of one of my mom’s favorite desserts: chocolate.

So where does chocolate from?

The earliest signs we have of chocolate consumption go back to 2,000 BC in what was called Mesoamerica (what today is roughly Central America).

And for the vast majority of chocolate’s history, it was consumed as a drink, not as a food — only in the last 150 years has chocolate emerged in the form we know it today.  In fact, the word “chocolate” is derived from the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which was a bitter drink created from cacao beans.

Here you can see the cacao fruit as it grows on a tree, and the seeds inside which we use to make chocolate:

For the Mayans and Aztecs, cacao was held in very high esteem: cacao pods were represented in temples, and beans were used as currency as well as to make the xocatl drinks which often had medicinal purposes.

In the 1500s, Cortez brought cacao back to Spain after conquering Mexico and it spread throughout Europe. It made its way to America in the 1700s (and was given to soldiers in the Revolutionary War).

In the mid 1800s, European chemists created the first modern chocolate bars, which soon began to be marketed by companies like Cadbury’s.  In 1875, the first milk chocolate bar hit the market.

Today, most cacao is grown in West Africa and in 2009 total chocolate candy sales were $5 billion across supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets.  “Premium” chocolate, which has higher cocoa percentages — e.g. 70% cacao vs. a Hershey bar’s 30% cacao — has recently been a major growth area.

But if you don’t like eating or drinking it, at least you can bathe in it. Enjoy!

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Food for Thought (Literally)

24 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Matt in Biology, Food

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Now that lent has begun, seems right for Historicalness to look at another side of food (besides key lime pies and king cakes).

1) An interesting article at NYTimes.com this week called “How Exercise Fuels the Brain” discusses how hungry the human brain is and how we’re starting to understand better how it feeds itself.

It also highlights findings from a new study that indicates animals who exercised regularly (here, over a 4 week period), built up more fuel reserves in the brain (in the form of glycogen) — you also get temporary bursts of glycogen if you exercise but don’t do so regularly.  This led the author of the study to say ” ‘it is tempting to suggest that increased storage and utility of brain glycogen in the cortex and hippocampus might be involved in the development’ of a better, sharper brain”.

Maybe that’s why I seem to come up with some of my best ideas — like Historicalness.com! — when I’m on a run.

That's me, all the way in the back

2) In a related piece, Harvard Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Daniel Lieberman, in this 13 min video, “Making the World Smaller,” discusses how, before humans began to form agricultural societies and we were hunter/gathers, would exercise — by necessity — 9-15 KM per day (or, for those of us who don’t speak metric, 5.6-9.3 miles per day).

We love to eat and pack on fat to feed our big brains and enable us to hunt & gather.  Today, we still enjoy rest and fatty foods to feed our hungry brains, but there’s no longer the hunter/gatherer imperative to catch our meals or eat healthy foods.  As he says, “We evolved to: enjoy rest, but to have to exercise; crave fat, sugar & salt, but have to eat wild foods”.   So we eat more and exercise less.

As a result, today we intake 300-900 more calories on average than even our great grandparents did.  Prof. Lieberman argues that since we can’t change our biology, we should change our environment — starting by mandating exercise in schools (or at least at Harvard).

Do any universities that you know of currently mandate this?  Please email me at matt [ @ ] historicalness [ dot ] com if you know of any.

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The Greatest Dessert Ever

11 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by Matt in Food

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If there were to be a vote by the 7 billion of us alive today plus the other 100 billion of us (give or take) who have ever walked the earth, the one thing we would of course unanimously agree on is that the best dessert of all time is Key Lime Pie.

Which leads to the natural question: where did this creation come from?  Did Key Limes and graham crackers become more than friends one day, combining two great families of tart and sweet lineage?  Seems plausible.

But consensus seems to be that that the Key Lime Pie was born in the late 1800s at the hands of a cook in Key West, Florida, who built on the work of a dessert created by local fishermen.

The cook, named Aunt Sally, worked for the town’s richest man, William Curry, who made his fortune as a “wrecker”, the term for those who salvaged cargo on shipwrecks and then resold their captured booty for a handsome profit. (Hemmingway, who lived in Key West from 1931-1940, lived in a grand home built by another local wrecker.)

In recognition of its invaluable contributions to taste buds everywhere, Key Lime Pie was made the official pie of Florida in 2006.

No doubt further accolades are not far behind.

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A Toast to Muffins

04 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by Matt in Food, Muffins, New York

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve always been a fan of nooks.  I’ve also always been a fan of crannies.  So imagine my delight when I was just a lad to come across a food so amazing that it had both.  For the uninitiated, feast your eyes on the goodness that be Thomas’ English Muffins (and the nooks and the crannies):

Makes me hungry just looking at ’em

Meandering through the neighborhood of Chelsea a few months ago, I came across a plaque fixed to a townhouse at 337 West 20th Street (between 9th and 10th Aves) that revealed I’d inadvertently stumbled upon morning muffin holy ground.

The plaque commemorates the location of what is now called the”Muffin House” (a duplex unit inside was recently listed for $1.1million…or ~950K muffins at today’s dollar/muffin exchange rate).

His mama would be proud

In the early 1890s, Muffin House served as the second of two bakeries run by Samuel Bath Thomas (his first bakery was around the corner at 163 Ninth Avenue) who, after arriving in 1874 from England with the dream of bringing his secret recipe to the masses, had quickly made that a reality. Yet although these muffins have been baked on domestic soil for well over a century, I’ve found no records that Sam ever considered amending their name.

Next time you’re in the area, whip out a TEM and toast where it all began.

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