Rachel Laudan: My Great Grandmother’s Industrially Processed Food
August 24, 2015 11:32 AM Subscribe
The dough brake is not that different from my pasta roller, sold to me by a pair of grandfathers who remembered their grandmother using something similar. Hand-crank, though I wish I could power it with my dog.
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:20 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:20 PM on August 24, 2015
Time - maybe Pollan has old parents. My great-grandparents certainly enjoyed the efficiency provided by canned foods and bottled beer. However, they never in their lives imagined factory poultry or cattle-feeds. There are some family stories which relate to cooking, and one of them is a great-grandmother refusing to pay for the outer leaves of lettuce, which she would discard regardless. Another was of a great-great grandpa developing his own herbal bitter. I recall going with my grandma to buy chickens, in season, at a local breeder. The living conditions of those birds were not good - a precursor of what we see today. But there were 100 birds, not 100.000. And chicken was something you had in spring and early summer.
posted by mumimor at 12:47 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by mumimor at 12:47 PM on August 24, 2015
Well, to be precise, mechanically processed, not stuffed with additives as the term has come to mean.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:23 PM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by gottabefunky at 1:23 PM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
Heh, I've been researching flour milling in that period for about the last year, and I love looking at those old etchings/drawings of those early machines. Roller milling was just starting to hit its stride around 1880 and the transfer of the flour making process from small mills to larger commercial concerns was well underway.
It was obviously very competitive and fraught with resistance from every angle - the millers hated it because it forced expensive revamping of their milling processes while driving down their profit margins (there's a reason a lot of small mills burned down in the 1890s and early 1900's). The grocers hated it because larger mills marketed their flour under many names, taking up space on limited shelving, again at lower margins. And homemakers hated it because they had no control over quality. Adulteration of flour with lots of interesting substances was common, and millers were hesitant to submit their flour for testing for these substances. You never knew what the hell was in the stuff.
Interesting article, thanks!
posted by disclaimer at 1:44 PM on August 24, 2015 [4 favorites]
It was obviously very competitive and fraught with resistance from every angle - the millers hated it because it forced expensive revamping of their milling processes while driving down their profit margins (there's a reason a lot of small mills burned down in the 1890s and early 1900's). The grocers hated it because larger mills marketed their flour under many names, taking up space on limited shelving, again at lower margins. And homemakers hated it because they had no control over quality. Adulteration of flour with lots of interesting substances was common, and millers were hesitant to submit their flour for testing for these substances. You never knew what the hell was in the stuff.
Interesting article, thanks!
posted by disclaimer at 1:44 PM on August 24, 2015 [4 favorites]
My great grandma (born 1913) could both can the greatest peaches in the history of the world AND stock her top dresser drawer with candy bars. I treasure the skills I learned from her (making and canning gallons of stuff) but damn, she deserved any shortcut she could have as far as I'm concerned.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 2:33 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by bitter-girl.com at 2:33 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
"Honey, that was Del Monte canned cherry pie filling," she said.
To be fair, you can be absolutely sure that your grandmother's canned filling was vastly better than what is sold today. The quality, flavor, nutritional value, filler, chemical additives — worse today than yesteryear.
posted by five fresh fish at 3:01 PM on August 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
To be fair, you can be absolutely sure that your grandmother's canned filling was vastly better than what is sold today. The quality, flavor, nutritional value, filler, chemical additives — worse today than yesteryear.
posted by five fresh fish at 3:01 PM on August 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
Thank you, this is great.
posted by unknowncommand at 3:41 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by unknowncommand at 3:41 PM on August 24, 2015
I'll also mention that my great-grandfather farmed during the days of skies black with grasshoppers, and the standard way to control them was with lead and arsenic. Any old farm manual from the late-1800s through the Depression will have copious information on how to apply and handle them (pretty casually, that is).
posted by Fnarf at 4:17 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Fnarf at 4:17 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
I wonder how much of the drop in the price of flour had to do with roller versus stone milling and how much had to do with mechanization all along the supply chain including farming, transport, milling, distribution, retail, and general economies of scale. I suspect more of the latter and not so much just the difference between the types of mills.
Even today, I can buy stone-milled flour for a relatively small premium over roller milled. There really is a quality difference in whole grain flours.
Now if we could do something about the nasty hammer mills that are sold to farmers and others for small scale milling that really don't produce very good flour at all.
posted by ssg at 6:39 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
Even today, I can buy stone-milled flour for a relatively small premium over roller milled. There really is a quality difference in whole grain flours.
Now if we could do something about the nasty hammer mills that are sold to farmers and others for small scale milling that really don't produce very good flour at all.
posted by ssg at 6:39 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
And the dough brake is still manufactured in Italy. It is also very nearly the same thing as a pizza dough sheeter than you will find in pizza shops the world over.
posted by ssg at 6:48 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by ssg at 6:48 PM on August 24, 2015
Yeah...I'm pretty sure Pollan's talking about avoiding lunchables and twinkies and gogurt, and not so much about dried beef jerky and crackers. I mean, the article is well-researched and interesting, but it's really not the takedown of Pollan's food philosophy that the author seems to think it is.
posted by greermahoney at 8:27 PM on August 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by greermahoney at 8:27 PM on August 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
I pride myself on knowing a lot about primitive cooking tech, and yet... when the recreationist guide at the working prairie farm in Columbus OH described how the housewife prepared for a picnic - "First she gets up early to kill and pluck the chicken for frying...", I was stopped in my tracks.
Yep, of course: a picnic, a family outing, any of those pastimes meant getting up early to make special food the day-of. In a time when ice for the icebox was delivered in sawdust, fried chicken was almost always inside a living chicken that morning.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:48 PM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
Yep, of course: a picnic, a family outing, any of those pastimes meant getting up early to make special food the day-of. In a time when ice for the icebox was delivered in sawdust, fried chicken was almost always inside a living chicken that morning.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:48 PM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
I have a friend who used to spend winters in Mexico with her parents. She said she clearly remembers being sent to the market to get some chicken for supper, and realizing that the warm bag meant that the chicken had just been killed while she was waiting at the counter.
posted by sneebler at 10:22 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by sneebler at 10:22 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
No doubt Pollan doesn't mean crackers or jerky or whatnot. But many people who follow him have taken it to mean basically anything in a box is bad and dissimilar from what grandma offered. Or dissimilar unless it comes in a package with fake unbleached paper with the word "natural" or "organic" on it (meanwhile the "regular" version has the same ingredients only it uses the chemical word for each item and not things like "X extract").
posted by R343L at 10:43 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by R343L at 10:43 PM on August 24, 2015
I wonder how much of the drop in the price of flour had to do with roller versus stone milling and how much had to do with mechanization all along the supply chain including farming, transport, milling, distribution, retail, and general economies of scale. I suspect more of the latter and not so much just the difference between the types of mills.
Even today, I can buy stone-milled flour for a relatively small premium over roller milled. There really is a quality difference in whole grain flours.
Now if we could do something about the nasty hammer mills that are sold to farmers and others for small scale milling that really don't produce very good flour at all.
posted by ssg at 9:39 PM on August 24 [+] [!]
It's all intertwined, absolutely, you're right. But there were two, absolutely key inventions that started the whole thing going.
- the advent of better turbine technology allowed mills to run water at very high pressures (as compared to a waterwheel), vastly increasing the amount of horsepower available to run mill machinery. Waterwheels, as cool as they are, really don't have the juice to power a roller mill and the attendant sifting/cleaning/bolting machinery that accompany it. And of course the advent of the turbine meant that generating electricity from water power became much more feasible.
- to run a roller mill effectively you really need to grind a lot of flour and do it all the time, and this changed the economics: rather than farmers tithing a portion of their grain to the miller in return for grinding it (and then selling the flour to the market themselves), they just sold the grain to the miller wholesale, who then took it to market. This changes the industry dramatically from the top down, in terms of who stored the grain, who stored the finished flour, how it was marketed, and how it got shipped. It caused a massive consolidation of the industry from small mills (80-300 barrel/day capacity) to mills that could run thousands of barrels a day. In essence, the demand shifted from "how much flour the town needs ground today" to the demands of a much larger market.
A couple of other points of interest:
- using a millstone is a "sudden death" grind: it essentially smashes the grain, separating the bran from the germ. Do it too fast and you burn the grain; do it too slow and the stones clog. Using rollers and reduction rollers allowed millers to separate the bran from the endosperm in a controlled way, "breaking" the grain and sifting for different grades as it goes through the process. This allowed extra-fine grinding and much cleaner final product. It basically made "better" bread ("better" meaning more economically viable to produce in large scale).
- This fundamentally changed both our diet (as roller-processed flour is vastly different in nutrients and gluten content), and the agricultural landscape as farmers adapted to growing harder/softer wheats depending on the demand coming from flour manufacturers.
- electrification played a huge role in this, as mills converted from water/steam sources, the machinery got much more efficient and more powerful. River and water power changed from a source of direct power to a secondary one (using water to generate electric power to run the mill rather than running it directly). You didn't need to put the mill by the water: they could be built anywhere. That changed the agricultural landscape: now you could put the mill by the railroad rather than by the river, which led to further consolidation (and the de-emphasis of local rivers as power sources, in many cases).
It's all of a piece, but the fundamental initial changes were the development of the turbine allowing much more powerful mills, and the advent of rollers that allowed you to grind a whole lot more flour with much better quality.
There is a definite difference in quality between stone-milled and roller-milled flour. The difference from the late 19th century and today has, I think, more to do with the quality of the processes around the milling itself than the actual method. Flour from the 19th century would have been dirty, with stone grit, bran, and middlings in it. The sifting and bolting technology just wasn't good enough to clean it well. And it would have spoiled much faster than modern flour does, because of the high oil content. The downside to this, of course, is that all the sifting and cleaning removes the "good stuff" from the flour.
And alas, I think quite honestly that the marginal flour coming from hammer mills is probably very similar to the flour you would have gotten from a typical, small flour mill in the middle of the 19th century. So if you want to experience your 4th great grandmother's bread, there's where you get the flour :)
posted by disclaimer at 12:40 AM on August 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
Even today, I can buy stone-milled flour for a relatively small premium over roller milled. There really is a quality difference in whole grain flours.
Now if we could do something about the nasty hammer mills that are sold to farmers and others for small scale milling that really don't produce very good flour at all.
posted by ssg at 9:39 PM on August 24 [+] [!]
It's all intertwined, absolutely, you're right. But there were two, absolutely key inventions that started the whole thing going.
- the advent of better turbine technology allowed mills to run water at very high pressures (as compared to a waterwheel), vastly increasing the amount of horsepower available to run mill machinery. Waterwheels, as cool as they are, really don't have the juice to power a roller mill and the attendant sifting/cleaning/bolting machinery that accompany it. And of course the advent of the turbine meant that generating electricity from water power became much more feasible.
- to run a roller mill effectively you really need to grind a lot of flour and do it all the time, and this changed the economics: rather than farmers tithing a portion of their grain to the miller in return for grinding it (and then selling the flour to the market themselves), they just sold the grain to the miller wholesale, who then took it to market. This changes the industry dramatically from the top down, in terms of who stored the grain, who stored the finished flour, how it was marketed, and how it got shipped. It caused a massive consolidation of the industry from small mills (80-300 barrel/day capacity) to mills that could run thousands of barrels a day. In essence, the demand shifted from "how much flour the town needs ground today" to the demands of a much larger market.
A couple of other points of interest:
- using a millstone is a "sudden death" grind: it essentially smashes the grain, separating the bran from the germ. Do it too fast and you burn the grain; do it too slow and the stones clog. Using rollers and reduction rollers allowed millers to separate the bran from the endosperm in a controlled way, "breaking" the grain and sifting for different grades as it goes through the process. This allowed extra-fine grinding and much cleaner final product. It basically made "better" bread ("better" meaning more economically viable to produce in large scale).
- This fundamentally changed both our diet (as roller-processed flour is vastly different in nutrients and gluten content), and the agricultural landscape as farmers adapted to growing harder/softer wheats depending on the demand coming from flour manufacturers.
- electrification played a huge role in this, as mills converted from water/steam sources, the machinery got much more efficient and more powerful. River and water power changed from a source of direct power to a secondary one (using water to generate electric power to run the mill rather than running it directly). You didn't need to put the mill by the water: they could be built anywhere. That changed the agricultural landscape: now you could put the mill by the railroad rather than by the river, which led to further consolidation (and the de-emphasis of local rivers as power sources, in many cases).
It's all of a piece, but the fundamental initial changes were the development of the turbine allowing much more powerful mills, and the advent of rollers that allowed you to grind a whole lot more flour with much better quality.
There is a definite difference in quality between stone-milled and roller-milled flour. The difference from the late 19th century and today has, I think, more to do with the quality of the processes around the milling itself than the actual method. Flour from the 19th century would have been dirty, with stone grit, bran, and middlings in it. The sifting and bolting technology just wasn't good enough to clean it well. And it would have spoiled much faster than modern flour does, because of the high oil content. The downside to this, of course, is that all the sifting and cleaning removes the "good stuff" from the flour.
And alas, I think quite honestly that the marginal flour coming from hammer mills is probably very similar to the flour you would have gotten from a typical, small flour mill in the middle of the 19th century. So if you want to experience your 4th great grandmother's bread, there's where you get the flour :)
posted by disclaimer at 12:40 AM on August 25, 2015 [8 favorites]
chemical additives
It's not like additives are that recent. Things like maltodextrin, modified starch, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins and common synthetic flavorings (almond, vanillin, etc) were all developed during the first half of the 19th century, and produced at industrial scale during the second half.
posted by effbot at 2:22 AM on August 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
It's not like additives are that recent. Things like maltodextrin, modified starch, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins and common synthetic flavorings (almond, vanillin, etc) were all developed during the first half of the 19th century, and produced at industrial scale during the second half.
posted by effbot at 2:22 AM on August 25, 2015 [4 favorites]
She cheerfully told the story of how she baked her first cake as a bride: she thought, why surely the recipe can't call for raw eggs, and so she scrambled them first.
(reminds me of a famous swedish troll thread where someone keeps a cooking forum occupied for weeks by asking if you're supposed to boil or fry the eggs to get the eggwhites needed to make meringues.)
posted by effbot at 2:28 AM on August 25, 2015
(reminds me of a famous swedish troll thread where someone keeps a cooking forum occupied for weeks by asking if you're supposed to boil or fry the eggs to get the eggwhites needed to make meringues.)
posted by effbot at 2:28 AM on August 25, 2015
And alas, I think quite honestly that the marginal flour coming from hammer mills is probably very similar to the flour you would have gotten from a typical, small flour mill in the middle of the 19th century. So if you want to experience your 4th great grandmother's bread, there's where you get the flour :)
I'm interested as to why you think this.
I've done a lot of my own testing of bread flour from various small and large mills in Western Canada. There is a huge difference between hammer, stone, and roller milled flours. The differences are not subtle at all: in whole grain flour, you can see the difference between bran that has been smashed, ground, or rolled with the naked eye and feel it with your fingers. There are also quite a few restored historical stone mills around and they also do not produce flour that is anything like hammer-milled flour.
So why would 19th C stone mills have produced flour more like modern hammer mills than modern stone mills? Though the process before and after milling has changed a lot, stone milling technology itself hasn't really changed much.
posted by ssg at 7:56 AM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm interested as to why you think this.
I've done a lot of my own testing of bread flour from various small and large mills in Western Canada. There is a huge difference between hammer, stone, and roller milled flours. The differences are not subtle at all: in whole grain flour, you can see the difference between bran that has been smashed, ground, or rolled with the naked eye and feel it with your fingers. There are also quite a few restored historical stone mills around and they also do not produce flour that is anything like hammer-milled flour.
So why would 19th C stone mills have produced flour more like modern hammer mills than modern stone mills? Though the process before and after milling has changed a lot, stone milling technology itself hasn't really changed much.
posted by ssg at 7:56 AM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I slipped there (it was almost 4 in the morning) and made a presumption about hammer milled flour. I haven't had any experience with that type of flour (I've only in the last month started actually working with different flour types - all my research up to then had been purely based on researching flour milling in the 19th century). I'll take your word that they aren't the same.
My research has been purely an amateur effort, and started when I found some ruins in a field next to my house that turned out to be a flour mill. I wanted to know more about the history of the place, and that led me down a rabbit hole of learning about how it worked and in turn why the mill owners had revamped it several times during its life (which was of course in response to changes in the industry and market). Consequently I know a fair bit about milling, not so much about the flour itself.
posted by disclaimer at 10:39 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
My research has been purely an amateur effort, and started when I found some ruins in a field next to my house that turned out to be a flour mill. I wanted to know more about the history of the place, and that led me down a rabbit hole of learning about how it worked and in turn why the mill owners had revamped it several times during its life (which was of course in response to changes in the industry and market). Consequently I know a fair bit about milling, not so much about the flour itself.
posted by disclaimer at 10:39 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Now that I've had a few days to mull this post, I'm still bothered by it because Laudan collapses everything that's eaten in a non-raw state into the broad category of "industrially processed food." Pollan's distinction is not much better--"Those aren’t foods, quite; they’re food products"--but opens up a very different conversation.
fff:To be fair, you can be absolutely sure that your grandmother's canned filling was vastly better than what is sold today. The quality, flavor, nutritional value, filler, chemical additives — worse today than yesteryear.
Yes, exactly: have a look at the FDA's food additive status list. We all need to take shortcuts for many reasons, and I won't put anyone down for doing so. There are still differences along the spectrum of apple --> dried apples/applesauce --> Star Wars fruit-flavored gummy snacks, and so much store real estate and design is tilted in favor of the highly-processed foods that it becomes all too easy to think, "Well, there's a vegetable/fruit in there, that counts" and end up paying for additives and refining processes and pretty colors and smells than for nutritious content. In the U.S., the scales have been very heavily tilted toward highly-processed and shelf-stable for practical reasons (think of MREs: now there's some food science in action; even the canning I love to do has its origins in military history), and we think of it as the norm, even in those situations when we have the option to choose foods that are closer to their raw states or more nutritious. Snickers really satisfies because it has been engineered within an inch of its life to be appealing to the American palate, and makes the poor carrot look dull and listless by comparison.
Laudan's post interests me as a look at the origins of the processed foods industrial complex, but making Pollan the bad guy is not a great framework. More affordable food for more people is a good thing. Food products replacing food as a consequence may not be.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:09 AM on August 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
fff:To be fair, you can be absolutely sure that your grandmother's canned filling was vastly better than what is sold today. The quality, flavor, nutritional value, filler, chemical additives — worse today than yesteryear.
Yes, exactly: have a look at the FDA's food additive status list. We all need to take shortcuts for many reasons, and I won't put anyone down for doing so. There are still differences along the spectrum of apple --> dried apples/applesauce --> Star Wars fruit-flavored gummy snacks, and so much store real estate and design is tilted in favor of the highly-processed foods that it becomes all too easy to think, "Well, there's a vegetable/fruit in there, that counts" and end up paying for additives and refining processes and pretty colors and smells than for nutritious content. In the U.S., the scales have been very heavily tilted toward highly-processed and shelf-stable for practical reasons (think of MREs: now there's some food science in action; even the canning I love to do has its origins in military history), and we think of it as the norm, even in those situations when we have the option to choose foods that are closer to their raw states or more nutritious. Snickers really satisfies because it has been engineered within an inch of its life to be appealing to the American palate, and makes the poor carrot look dull and listless by comparison.
Laudan's post interests me as a look at the origins of the processed foods industrial complex, but making Pollan the bad guy is not a great framework. More affordable food for more people is a good thing. Food products replacing food as a consequence may not be.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:09 AM on August 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
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"Honey, that was Del Monte canned cherry pie filling," she said.
I gained a new respect for Del Monte. I also gained respect for my great-grandmother, who, among other difficult tasks, had to prepare chitlins, beloved of the men and no one else. It was a grim day-long errand for a family in which the custom was for men to get their food first and eat separately from the women, until the 1970s. She was entitled to cut all the pie corners she wanted.
One of my grandmothers -- not in that family, to be sure -- was, I believe, consciously ditzy, in a way meant to separate her from drudgery like cooking. She cheerfully told the story of how she baked her first cake as a bride: she thought, why surely the recipe can't call for raw eggs, and so she scrambled them first. Even by the time I knew her, she only prepared packaged foods, if ever. This was good living to her, and considering the Tennessee hills she came from, it meant a great deal.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:00 PM on August 24, 2015 [18 favorites]