Why is the the military meddling in every single thing on this planet? I was reading up on instant coffee of all things and saw: "High-vacuum freeze-dried coffee was developed shortly after World War II, as an indirect result of wartime research into other areas." And now I'm afraid that soon enough somebody will tell me that coffee spread all around the globe because of The Great War or some other major human sacrifice.
@saper I fear you are right!
@kensanata if whatever that advancement is helps bring coffee to troops on a front-line cheaper and easier then that makes sense.
@kensanata The WWII saw some significant technical developments: the microwave, plastic, nuclear fission (and the atomic bomb), and, actually, the computer.
@bluebirch Yeah! And radar, penicillin...
@wrenpile perfect! โTea Paste [โฆ] has been used by the Chinese Army on campaignsยป Aaaargh!
@kensanata There are tons of technologies that stem from military research, the most obviously ubiquitous relating to food tech, and shelf-stability in particular (things like Twinkies come to mind). There's a pretty fantastic episode of 99% Invisible about this, called "War and Pizza". https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/war-and-pizza/
@rpdillon I thought I had listened to their entire archive but I must have missed that one!
Americans drank a beverage they called coffee, but it was made of other things, like roasted corn meal. South American coffee beans were exported to Europe. When the great eat began, this disrupted their markets, so they decided to start selling to the us. The San Francisco world fair included an event called 'international coffee Day'. Each visitor received a box of coffee beans. The day ended with the grandest banquet ever held in the state at that time.
(My great aunt kept a box of coffee, which I inherited from my uncle).
And that's how Americans started drinking coffee made out of coffee.
Anyway, century old coffee beans look normal, but smell like dust. I gave them to a friend who gave then to a traveling exhibit about food at the San Francisco world's fair.
If you're in to post war art music: that's the same world fair where Lou Harrison first heard gamelan music. And also how the Palace of Fine Arts came to be built.
@celesteh Yeah, I groaned when I saw the Great Eats. ๐
@celesteh Gamelan Music as in the music from Java and Bali? I only discovered Gamelan a few years ago. What a fantastic discovery (for me, being a non-music person).
