A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Currently reading: Civilisations by Laurent Binet and Sam Taylor, ISBN: 978-1473577091
Huge fun, recommended by a friend to whom I raved about Cahokia Jazz.
Eat This Newsletter 273
Number one question: In the 17th century, did the Dutch really brush their teeth with butter?
And a bunch of other morsels.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn273-buttery/
How do you cure a dietary disease caused by poverty? Give sufferers better food.
“The hospital doctors all knew: give them a decent diet.” Knowing wasn’t enough.
“We can’t improve the peasants’ diet. That’s that’s not our job. We’re doctors.”
So whose job is it?
https://eatthispodcast.com/pellagra
LECTURE NOTES: Lash, Cash, & Cotton in the Imperial-Commercial & Early SteamPower Age
”It is crucial to remember, though, that the principal beneficiaries of this system were not the plantation owners. The principal beneficiaries were the middle-class consumers at the heart of the industrial and commercial economies. Their cheap sugar, cotton, and tobacco were made possible by the brutal labor of enslaved people on distant plantations. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of global capitalism: prosperity in one place, purchased at the cost of suffering in another.”
Pellagra is a dietary deficiency disease that ends in madness and death. And at one time was responsible for half the inmates in Italian asylums and 100,000 deaths a year in the US. Now it is all but forgotten.
https://eatthispodcast.com/pellagra
“I never relinquished my desire to hop a train, I just stopped pursuing it.”
Very disappointed, in the end, by this article, which I had hoped might tell me about the reality of riding the rails today.
Instead, a bit like me, the writer just gave up on the dream.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05/09/the-hobo-handbook/
Album artists to 12 June at last.fm https://www.last.fm/user/jeremycherfas
1 Paul Lewis 18
2 Spiro 17
3 Gigi 14
4 Junior Wells 14
5 Coleman Hawkins & Lester Young 13
Maybe:
Just put the finishing touches to tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter. There’s a common theme to the stories; how forces way beyond a person’s control influence what and how they eat.
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