Holy Shit, Fondue!

If you're a middle- to upper-class American yuppie (or are friends with one), or are just some other type of foodie I haven't met yet, you know all about fondue. It's a bucket of melted stuff that you dip other stuff into. Traditionally, it's meant to be melted cheese and bread. Either way, it's kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

Who decided that dipping bread into a communal bowl of viscous cheese was a delicacy? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for jazzing up any dish with some cheese. But how did this become fancy? The answer, shockingly, has to do with war, corruption, and a veritable cartel dedicated to Swiss cheese.

As much as I'd like it to be, the cartel was not run by literal Swiss cows

And I'm not making any of that up. The cartel was called the Swiss Cheese Union. It was founded in 1914 by Swiss dairy farmers in order to control cheese production and prices. You may recognize this as the exact principle behind OPEC. As an added bonus, the Swiss Cheese Union also decided what cheeses dairy farmers were allowed to produce. Only Gruyere, Sbrinz and Emmental were allowed, and farmers needed a license to make and sell any of them or they risked being blacklisted.

And before you ask, yes. There were cheese rebels.

The cheese cartel gained significant prominence after World War I, owing largely to the fact that the infrastructure of other European nations had recently and literally been burned and blasted to bits. Which meant most cheese in Europe was coming out of more-neutral-than-beige Switzerland. That gave the Swiss Cheese Union an enormous amount of power, because it turns out people can get pretty serious about their cheese. With some bribes and favors, the Union was able to get a few politicians in their pockets, leading to huge subsidies for their industry.

Still, the cartel was unsatisfied. They had the supply side of the cheese market pretty much cornered, but their marketing arm decided they could do something about the demand side as well. Luckily, there was a regional dish in certain Alpine areas known as fondue that could literally have people eating bucket loads of their product. The Swiss Cheese Union successfully lobbied to have fondue made a national dish of Switzerland, and pounded the ever-loving cheese curds out of their marketing efforts. Your knowledge of fondue, whoever you are, is very likely a result of this marketing effort.

Pictured: Corruption.

Eventually, the people of Switzerland got wise to the corruption involved in the cheese cartel, largely because what government spends so much money on talking about fondue? Dirty laundry was aired, people were jailed, and by the 1990s the Swiss Cheese Union was a shadow of its former glory. By 1999, it was completely dissolved, and a new era of freedom dawned for Swiss dairy farmers. But the legacy of the Swiss Cheese Union lives on today in every pot of melted cheese you stick your comically long fork into.

I'm suspicious of dishes that require a unique utensil to be eaten.

So next time you visit your local quirky, atmospheric little hole-in-the-wall fondue place, just remember the enormous and corrupt cartel that brought it to your attention.

Holy shit.

"Swiss fondue 2" by JHG (Julien29) - Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

"Mozzarella cheese" by Jon Sullivan - http://pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=pdef&pg=8553. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

"Fondue2" by -jkb- Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons

"Fondue fork" by Vearthy - based on the shape in the PONS Picture Dictionary - Polish-German + free wood pattern from http://mayang.com/textures/Wood/images/Flat%20Wood%20Textures/wood_1163214.JPG. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

Holy Shit, Turkeys!

I'm gonna make this short because I have been distracted recently by the birth of my newest niece. That guy up above, as you probably know, is a Turkey. Despite being thoroughly American, he's named after Turkey the country. The reasoning behind this is that it sounds exotic, and the European explorers who found him may have still been under the impression that America was part of Asia.

Strangely enough, many other languages use country names for the turkey as well. In actual Turkey, they call it a "Hindi," suggesting that it's from India. That's surprisingly common. France, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, and several other countries also call it some variation of "India." In actual India, they call it a Peru.

In Cambodia, they call it a French Chicken. In Arabic, it's called either a Roman Chicken or an Ethiopian Chicken. In Malaysia, it's a Dutch Chicken.

Bottom line: Turkeys are weird, people's names for Turkeys are weirder, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Holy Shit, the New Coke!

Let's say you're a soft drink manufacturer. In fact, you're the biggest soft drink manufacturer in the world. You're on top of the world for almost a century, keeping a huge majority of the market for yourself. Life is good. Then suddenly, one of your chief rivals decides to try a new markeitng thing and actually prove that people prefer Pepsi to your smelly old Coke in blind taste tests.

That's the position in which the Coca-Cola company found themselves in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Pepsi had introduced the "Pepsi Challenge," where random people would participate in blind taste tests and regularly choose Pepsi over Coke. It was a devastating blow to morale at poor, folksy old Coca-Cola, and the sales figures weren't helping. Between 1940 and 1980, Coca-Cola's market share dropped from a comfortable 60% to a terrifying 24%.

Pictured is (one of the buildings at) their rickety old mom-and-pop multinational corporate headquarters

So they sprang into action. The President of Coca-Cola and the VP of Marketing developed a radical rebranding strategy that would involve not only introducing a new, sweeter version of the famous beverage, but discontinuing the original. Enormous amounts of money went into meticulously crafting the new formula and taste testing it against both Pepsi and the old Coke. They called it Project Kansas.

If there's a better name for a project that would ultimately fail to excite anyone in a positive way, I haven't heard it.

And it won. Big time. It was poised to be the new favorite drink of the entire world. In 1985, they gave the green light. All at once, Coca-Cola stopped selling their old drink and launched the New Coke. If you or anyone you know was alive and cognizant during the 1980s, you know what happened next: a complete, unmitigated, cluster-fucking disaster.

Coca-Cola, April of 1985

It's not that people didn't like the taste of the New Coke. Research showed they liked it better than anything. It just wasn't Coke, dammit. There were some initial successes, but the backlash was outrageous. Coca-Cola's hotline saw a 200% increase in calls, almost all of which were people talking about the old formula as though their favorite uncle had just died. Some were depressed. Some were angry. Some even threatened to sue. After three months of this, the company finally decided to relent. They announced that the classic recipe would be making a triumphant return. The news was so celebrated that it was brought up on the floor of the in-session United States Senate.

And that was the last time anyone did something pointless, misguided, and stupid on the Senate Floor

Here's the part where I prove myself wrong. I called the disaster "unmitigated," but the re-release of the original recipe was actually a massive mitigation. People were so relieved to have their familiar product back that Coca-Cola surged ahead in the market once again. After a few months (and, notably, the release of Cherry Coke), Coca-Cola enjoyed twice the sales as Pepsi.

Little by little, the company put New Coke behind them. Sales in the United States were discontinued shortly after Coca-Cola Classic came back. A few years later, the New Coke was more or less gone. Finally, in 2009, the "Classic" label was removed, and the last vestige of the massive failure turned enormous success was gone.

To sum up: Pepsi, to most people, simply tastes better than Coke. But taste is almost insignificant compared to the power of familiarity and nostalgia.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Silphium!

I decided to go a little festive for this week's entry and talk about Silphium. It's nearly Valentine's Day, after all, so it's only appropriate. Silphium was an herb that was so valued for its flavor and medicinal properties that it was said to be worth its weight in silver. It's been found on ancient coins from Cyrene in North Africa. And its seed pod looked like this:

Yes. That's why it's festive.

If that looks more like a heart symbol to you than an actual heart does, you might be onto something. In fact, it's possible that Silphium seed pods are the origin of the heart symbol as we know it. There are other theories, too, but it's usually best not to illustrate them.

This close, they always look like landscape.

Silphium was apparently a wonder plant. It was described as an incredibly aromatic herb that every good cook should always have in their kitchen. It was also used for a medicinal purposes, treating all maladies that stretched from sore throats to pregnancy.

The reason this plant is thought to be the origin of the heart symbol, you see, is that it may have been an early form of birth control. And what could be more romantic than sending your sweetheart a message that says, in essence, "I want to have consequence-free sex with you."

"I Birth Control New York" has...what I'll call an interesting ring to it.

Alas, the ancient civilizations eventually had to give up their herbal anti-baby love drug. Through some combination of over-harvesting, over-tilling, over-consumption, or over-grazing, Silphium became extinct early on in the Common Era, around the time of Nero.

The way I choose to see it is that people were so excited to discover that they could easily make with the hanky-panky and not worry about babies, they all ran out to the fields and harvested the shit out of Silphium until there simply weren't none left for nobody. Thus did the promise of copulation lead to the demise of a pillar of the North African economy.

Holy shit. Happy Valentine's Day!

Holy Shit, Gut Feelings!

If you're like just about anyone in the world, you're pretty sure you've got a handle on the whole "intuition" thing. You can think logically about your conundrums until the cows come home, but when it really comes down to it, you have to go with your gut. It never seems to let you down.

Okay, now I want you to strap yourself in. We're going for a ride through Wild Speculation Based on Recent Research Land, and the turbulence can get a little bit rough. There are basically two points that you need to take out of this that will completely blow your mind. Or gut. Hopefully just your mind.

This is as far as I'm going with that joke.

Number one: when you get a "gut feeling," it may actually originate in your gut. As in, you are literally thinking with your stomach and basing your major life decisions on how it's making you feel.

Number two (and this one's the kicker): it may not actually be you doing the thinking. In fact, in a very real way it's not thinking at all, but a general optimism or pessimism, and it's all thanks to these fellas:

Aren't they just charming?

Well, not specifically those guys, but microbiotic organisms that reside in our tummies. Recent research suggests (not conclusively, but suggestively. Like your friend's mom making a few uncomfortably familiar remarks while he's in the bathroom so you're not sure if she's just being friendly or...anyway) that there may be a causal link between the types of bacteria in your gut and how you respond to stressful situations.

So far, all the hard evidence we have relates to mice. Scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario took a group of mice, studied their behaviors, and looked at their poo to see what type of bacteria was there. Because the life of a scientist is a life of glamour.

It's not all posing for group pencil and wash portraits

Then they started feeding probiotics and antibiotics to different mice and observing how they reacted to the changes. What they found was that, as the tiny ecosystem of their digestive track changed, so did the behavior of each specimen. Aggressive mice attained a Lebowski-esque state of calm, and lazy hippie mice began wailing and gnashing their teeth at the murine condition, taking out their newfound existential distress on their neighbors.

The reason for the connection seems to be a single nerve, shared by mice and humans, called the vagus nerve. It connects with both the stomach and the brain, and when its connection is lost, so is the influence of microbes on mouse behavior.

The implications of this research, if it turns out to be applicable to humans, could be staggering. Mental illnesses ranging from autism to bipolar disorder (and remember, speculation) could be reined in by the research that's currently looking into your stomach. It may actually turn out that the secret to living a calm, happy, and fulfilling life is contained within this:

Plus it helps Jamie Lee Curtis to poop regularly. So that's nice.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Green Revolution!

When you think of a revolution, your mind will probably mosey its way into a battlefield, full of glory, gore, and lives laid down willingly for the righteous cause. This is not that kind of revolution. In fact, the Green Revolution was the exact opposite. It was centered not around death, but life.

The Green Revolution is most notable, for preventing hundreds of millions of deaths by starvation. It all started in the mid-1940s with an agronomist named Norman Borlaug. While many young American men were overseas causing brown stains in the pants of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese high command, Borlaug was receiving a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology and Genetics. When he finished, he took a research position in Mexico and started tinkering with wheat genes.

That's his tinkering face.

After a few years, Borlaug had developed a new and dwarfish type of wheat. It was short and resistant to many diseases, so it ended up being a boon to Mexican agriculture. Seeing how well it was working, he figured, "What the hell? Let's keep this going."

That was one of the most important "What the hell"s in human history, made no less important by the fact that I just put the words in his mouth and he probably never said it like that. According to Malthusian population projections, the world - and India in particular - was due for a massive starvation epidemic around the 1980s.

Because there's a friggin' lot of people there

Norman Borlaug came along with his dwarf wheat (and later dwarf rice), and suddenly there was just...food. Everywhere. The problem in India was that rice has a hard time growing high up on hills, because it has a tendency to blow over and break. The reduced height of Borlaug's crops, coupled with the resistance to blight, meant that new acreage could be opened up to farmland. Lots of it.

And open up it did. Between 1950 and 1984, the duration of the Green Revolution, world grain production exploded by over 250%. Instead of a catastrophic population collapse, the world's population grew by four billion. Four billion more people were born than died in a time that was supposed to be marked by fear, famine, and death.

Suck it, hunger.

You can argue that the Green Revolution only delayed the inevitable, perhaps even increasing the already horrific burden that the unsustainable human population places on the Earth, and you'd probably have a pretty good point. But it's hard to look at a man who won a Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for pretty much single-handedly saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation as anything but a goddamn hero.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Girl in the Closet!

Once upon a time in 2008, a Japanese man was troubled. I'm sure he wasn't the only one, but his reason for being troubled was somewhat unique. See, he had gone grocery shopping not long ago, and suddenly he found he was missing food that he knew he should have had. Feeling dumbfounded and a little bit peckish, he decided to set up security cameras to find out how presumably wild animals were getting into his home.

"Why you gotta make a thing of this?"

Now, I want you to imagine this is you. You know food is going missing, so you set up security cameras. You leave the house, locking all the doors and windows behind you. When you come back, you decide to check the footage, just in case. Nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen. Then, out of nowhere, a woman shows up in the kitchen on screen and starts rummaging through the fridge. She takes out some food then goes back to wherever she's hiding.

And it occurs to you after seeing the video that she's there right now.

This would be roughly my face

Being reasonable and terrified, the concerned homeowner immediately called the police, who came right away and searched the house. After an extensive search, they found the woman buried deep in a closet with some food and a small mattress. She was immediately arrested and removed. When questioned, she said she just didn't have anywhere else to go.

It's sad, I know, and you want to feel bad for the homeless woman, but put yourself in the man's position here. Your food goes missing, and when you take steps to find out why it turns out there's a homeless person in your house right now without your knowledge.

One more thing. Before her discovery, the woman had been living secretly in the closet for over two months.


Holy shit. Have fun sleeping tonight.

Holy Shit, Carrots!

That's right, carrots. Didn't think they were too interesting, did you? As it turns out, they kind of are.

First of all, I should tell you that your vision of the standard, archetypal, original carrot is wholly inaccurate. Because you're thinking of an orange carrot, and orange carrots have only been around since the 17th Century, when they were developed as a political statement.

You read that right. They didn't have TV back then, so when they wanted to wow someone with propaganda, they had to pull out all the stops and start screwing with genetics. In this case, horticulturalists loyal to William of Orange, who had led the Dutch in kicking off a successful but eighty freaking year long war for independence.

Peace whenever we get around to it!

In celebration of their good friend Billy Orange, Dutch farmers tampered with carrot breeding until they managed to make a strain of orange carrots. Then they kept at it like they were on a mission from God, apparently. Nowadays non-orange carrots are considered such a strange novelty that people eye them suspiciously more often than they eat them (though that could be because they don't like vegetables).

Years later, carrots would be partially responsible for the Royal Air Force's victory in the Battle of Britain during World War II. I'm not even joking. Don't give me that look.

It makes you look like this

See, the British had finally perfected radar and started using it as an early warning system for bombing raids. They'd send their pilots out to intercept bombers earlier than should have been possible, and the pilots were able to zero in on German planes fairly easily despite it being really goddamn dark out. It was enough to make a Nazi suspicious.

So, the British government created an urban legend. They released false information saying that they had discovered extraordinary benefits that a diet rich in carrots would provide to your eyes, and specifically to your night vision. They claimed, outrageously, that carrots could make you see in the dark!

"GOOD THING WE EAT CARROTS, RIGHT GUYS? *snicker*"

It wasn't that big of a stretch - carrots have vitamin A, which helps to maintain (but not improve) eyesight. It was just big enough to cover the truth while fooling the Germans. And the British. And the Americans. In fact, it continues fooling everyone today.

Not bad for a vegetable, right? Carrots became orange for strictly political purposes several hundred years ago, and they remain orange to this day. Around fifty years ago, they were said to improve night vision - a rumor started for strictly military purposes which remains common knowledge today.

A rumor which may have helped the Allies win World War II.

You're welcome.

Holy shit.