Grrl Power #713 – Bloopberry or malted flerg?
So first off, yes the page is screwy. If you’re on the home page and you can’t see a comic, just click on the title above (Grrl Power #713 etc.) and you should be able to see it. I had some back end work done including moving everything to an updated theme, and I don’t have all the CSS back in place yet. I should have the page back to looking cromulent by the end of the week hopefully. On the plus side, future proofing! Also I should be able to make non-comic posts and edit previously posted stuff, which I haven’t been able to do for a few weeks now. I’ll have to go back and put in all those direct links to the patreon comic for the ones I missed. Also, I need to make Who’s Who badges for the rest of Cora’s crew, but I want to get the page settled before I mess with that stuff.
This is kind of a transitional page, mostly just covering the Grakz aftermath and then moving them to a weirdly spartan kitchen. If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen me complain about various stuff I don’t like drawing – perspective correct backgrounds is a big one, but honestly one of the most difficult and tedious things to draw is stuff like a set table. Silverware, plates, cups, centerpiece stuff like? Man that takes a surprising amount of time to draw correctly. I could just say that Altus keeps his kitchen so tidy you could perform surgery in it but that’d still be a bit of a cop out. I just sort of ran out of time to come up with alien kitchen gadgets and I was having too much fun drawing Altus’s obliques.
So speaking of alien milkshakes… if a race has access to sugar and dairy, or a dairy like substance at least, it’s a fair bet they’d have come up with something like ice cream. Personally I’m blown away by bread. That doesn’t happen accidentally. You have to take this grass stuff, which I would only think people would consider food once they saw animals eating it, then pluck these little grains out of it by hand, then grind it up, mix in water and cook. Forget all the baking soda and yeast and eggs and whatever else, the first piece of ‘bread’ was probably like a cracker where someone got some wheat grains wet and it sat on a hot rock and they ate it anyway. The evolution from that to shit like croissants makes total sense to me, but the very first caveman who invented bread had to have done it by accident.
BUT I DIGRESS. The point is, space ice cream is totally realistic because people like experimenting with food. Whether or not there’s such a thing as space vanilla is another matter. Sydney has to choose if her milkshake will be blin flavored, cahola, bloopberry, shabazoz, or flerg. Oh, what does blin taste like you ask? Well, it’s like flibbib, but more shoozy, and with a hint of glulb. Yeah. The Universal Translator is of no help here, because there’s no equivalent flavors on Earth.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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She does too – so does Slyv…
Also – hit the comments link on TOP of the page to post for the time being.
Is it Blue milk?
He goes shirtless for Slyvv?
C’mon, given the R-rating of the comic’s subject & the nature of the Captain & her old Succubus/Alien hybrid BFF…..you don’t think aliens can be bisexual?
You assume he’s even from a species that HAS genders.
think it’s pretty clear at this point Cora and at least part of her crew are Pansexual.
…Cora? I think Cora’s preference is quite clear…
Generally sexual crew.
Even the toaster could be in danger
Given the level of tech on the ship, I’m willing to bet the toaster has the ability to consent.
And is both ribbed and self-lubricating. XD
So warm…
–Too warm! *punches Dabbler in that unpronounceable organ*
Not so sure about Cora, since she only seems to have male crew. But Altus and Slyx seem to be. Notice he didn’t mention Frix or the other guy.
You mean, the poor guy sitting next to Cora?
He does have a name
Fiiiine, his name’s Gellen. I looked it up in the archives :)
Thank you for that, had forgotten his name as well :P
Gellen is off duty so he can choose to wear a shirt. On duty uniform is uniformly bare chested.
For the ship chef the uniform is strictly half naked.
That can be dangerous when cooking baconoid type products. so half dressed in this case would be long apron on the front.
The classic naked under apron style is both functional and fan service.
They’re sexy malians, so they have a gender. :)
It’s in the name :)
I mean, there can be people of all sexualities in any rating.
They’ve found roasted nuts in stone age camps.
It’s possible that stone age humans found nuts after a forrest fire, and sind since they didn’t find much else to eat, tried those, too, and found them GOOD. (This may actually have been some of the earliest heat-treated food)
From that it’s not all that long a stretch to ‘Uughah?’ or ‘Fire tree-food taste good. fire grass-food taste good?’
“Hey, friend. That burned squirrel tasted AMAZING.”
“Totally, friend. Especially after it was peeled. You know what we should do?”
“What?”
“We should try some of the other burned stuff. Maybe it’ll taste better that way, too.”
Next time let’s not eat the bones!
What puzzles me more than cooking stuff is cooking stuff that is already known to be poisonous. And trying it again.
Trying stuff that has gone bad (and finding it good) isn’t nearly on that level.
I’ve always figured that the cook was actually trying to poison somebody, but accidentally left the stuff cooking too long for that purpose.
Tapioca! have you seen the prep required to eat it? Who figured this out?
Olives are bad enough!
Your loss, move hot buttery cinnamon rolls for me!
I feel like much of that food based discovery was based in no small part on desperation.
“Awww, crap, all the milk in my deerskin water pouch has gone bad! It’s all gooshy! Welp, I have nothing else to eat, so it’s this, or die of starvation.”
*gobble gobble munch munch*
“Hey, this isn’t half bad. Well, it’s one third bad, but still, with some salt…”
Humans are equipped with tools that make food experimentation easy.
They’re called NOSES.
Generally, if something smells like food, it’s OK to eat. If something smells BAD, we generally won’t eat it.
So, if a nut or grain gets aaccidentally toasted by the fire, the smell will usually clue us in that something good is happening here, and that we should try it.
Smells = food is somewhat learned. Anyone who has had food poisoning ( and they know what food did it) can tell you that the smell of that food is no longer appetizing. There are other things, like stinky cheeses that smell repulsive until you have acquired a taste for them.
When it comes to alien foods, smell might not be nearly as useful as it is here on earth, where the bacterias that rot old meat or old veg are global, but not literally universal.
Durian. Smells so bad you cant take it on public transport in some places, yet….
I direct your attention to natto, which doesn’t smell like food at all.
actually we have evidence that before bread, ancient man was already eating something akin to porridge, using ground grain. (think cream of wheat but with a texture more like oatmeal due to larger chunks).
the earliest bread we’ve found evidence of predates agriculture, and is similar to modern unleavened flatbread.. basically porridge spread over a hot stone to bake.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/16/archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-bread
our earliest evidence of purpose brewed beer is even older.
so the progression seem plausible to me. early man starts gathering wild grains, finds easiest way to eat them is to soak them in water, then they decide to heat the water. they figure out that crushing the grain between stones makes them cook faster, that leads to grinding. someone spills the gruel on a hot stone, tries it anyway. the result is bread. then eventually someone tried using beer instead of water to make bread, invents leavened bread.
of course, this is all over many generations/hundreds of years.
then someone got tired of all the work it takes to gather wild grains, starts scattering extra seeds in one place so they don’t have to run all over to find the stuff when they come back the next season.. boom, early agriculture.
That’s pretty much how I thought it went.
Well except for one caveat.
You wouldn’t need beer as a source of yeast.
There’s yeast on the grains and in the air, so if you leave dough/batter for a few days yeast will start growing in it and create dough for leavened bread. It’s almost like how they make Sourdough bread.
Congratulations on the update.
Will comments ever be editable?
Ohhhhhh…. Maybe that’s why we didn’t see a Star Trek kitchen until Voyager.
Having replicators was easier to film.
Riker used to cook also on TNG. Worf liked his eggs. :)
And Sisko’s father ran a restaurant on Earth.
The weird bit about Sisko’s (the name of his dad’s restaurant) is that he served real food, which, going by the rest of the franchise, is a rarity. Some people in the ST universe have never tasted real, non-replicated food in their lives. And some think stuff like real meat “is gross.”
But what the weird bit I’m leading up to is, is that the Federation is supposedly a cashless society because it’s post-scarcity, primarily due to energy generation and replicator technology. But real food means it *isn’t* replicated and there’s more effort and time involved, especially given how few people actually bother with it anymore. This means it should actually be worth more than it is today, but without currency, did the restaurant just give the food away? Did any restaurant that served real food? Do they do it out of love for their craft? Or is it just one of the handwaves involving semi-currency like “Federation Credits” that was mentioned in TOS?
On the same subject, Quark served both real and replicated food, and he *charged* for both. It seems odd someone would be willing to pay actual currency for something they could literally get for free at the station’s replimat or their quarters if they had any. The only thing I can use to explain that is that they wanted the social environment and atmosphere, and were willing to pay for otherwise free food and drinks.
There was a line in one of the Diane Duane ST novels where Picard was talking to a cetaceanoid scientist and assured him that the replicators could provide fresh fish. The scientist then responded wistfully that he wished that the replicators could provide *live* fish; the taste just wasn’t quite right. Picard then admitted that he himself did find the caviar to be lacking something.
So, heck, maybe that’s it. People in the Star Trek universe can taste the life force, or something. They don’t really realize it’s there, but they respond well to it when it’s present in their food.
Dark Mirror, one of my favorites.
On the subject of people paying for something free… people pay large up charges at book stores to get coffee, or at “convenience stores” (gas stations) to get soda and snacks. It costs ~$1.75 for a 20oz soda you grab at the checkout in the grocery store. That same brand of soda from that same grocery store is $1.10 for a 2 liter. The difference is it’s not on the way out… and it’s not cold. Get a cold 2 liter with your pizza order? $2.50
Convenience has a price. Apparently a high one.
This is one of the many reasons I like the Ferengi, at least the Ferengi after Armin Shimerman’s reinterpretation of them.
Quark also had some of the best lines in DS9 putting down Sisko, although Nog had a good one against Jake as well
Such as:
“Let me tell you something about hewmons, nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.”
OR the one that had Sisko speechless and dumbfounded:
“I think I figured out why Humans don’t like Ferengi. The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget.
… But you’re overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi: slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see? We’re nothing like you… we’re better.”
Only time I’ve ever seen an episode of DS9 where Sisko didn’t have a badass comeback.
He even can talk down Klingons, while still being really brave:
“Go ahead, kill me! That’s why I’m here, isn’t it, to be killed? Well, here I am, so go ahead and do it. You all want me to pick up that sword and try to fight him, don’t you? But I don’t have a chance and you know it! You only want me to put up a fight so your precious honor will be satisfied. Well, I’m not going to make it so easy for you. Having me fight D’Ghor is nothing more than an execution, so, if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. An execution. No honor, no glory. And when you tell your children and your grandchildren the glorious story of how you rose to power and took Grilka’s House from her, I hope you remember to tell them … how you heroically killed an UNARMED Ferengi half your size.”
And he passed the gift of talking other species down to Nog when humans get all holier than thou about how humans don’t need something as primitive as ‘money.’ Although Nog, being a softie, helped in the end anyway because he’s not a businessman like Quark.
JAKE: Come on, Nog.
NOG: No.
JAKE: Why not?
NOG: It’s my money, Jake. If you want to bid at the auction, use your own money.
JAKE: I’m human, I don’t have any money.
NOG: It’s not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favour of some philosophy of self-enhancement.
JAKE: Hey, watch it. There’s nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
NOG: What does that mean exactly?
JAKE: It means…. It means we don’t need money.
NOG: Well if you don’t need money, then you certainly don’t need mine.
In ST: Voyager didn’t they talk about “Replicator Credits” or something?
I’m not just talking about on the ship. There was that episode where Harry Kim experienced an alternate timeline and I think they mentioned it in that.
I took that to mean there was a limit to what you could replicate, and they could be used in exchange for goods & services.
Replicator access in VOY was rationed precisely *because* the ship had limited energy reserves.
Editable comments runs the risk of a comment getting approval, then being edited to be something that would not be.
I meant editable by the commenter for fixing spelling errors and such.
Also…there should be an option for ‘likes’.
I’ve toyed with the idea of editable comments in the past. The simplest way would seem to be to switch to another comment system like Disqus, but I wouldn’t dare try that unless I was guaranteed that the existing comments wouldn’t be messed up by the conversion. It’s not out of the question but it’d be a stressful conversion.
Plus, I can’t help but worry that I’d make the changeover, and the next month Disqus would file for bankruptcy or change their TOS to say they own every comment that passes through their system or some nonsense.
Yeah Disqus is a nice system for the users but it’s a pain to not own/control your own comment section content and from what I’ve heard the moderation tools in Disqus aren’t great.
Ah yes.
“Discus.”
A so called “service” that manages to actually function even less oftenDo than “Recapcha.” That’s truly a remarkable achievement, although not in a good way.
You’d have to add authenticated users to the back end, which has its own issues and liabilities. :(
Not sure what options are out there, but Auth0 has a WordPress plugin (and many others) and is free up to 7000 monthly users. Using a well-established provider with social logins solves a whole lot of problems.
You wouldn’t need authentication. A non-authenticated comment system could save an identifier token on the client machine with a 5-10 minute expiration. As long as the user didn’t clear their cookies they would have ten minutes to edit that comment.
Either way, you have to validate an auth token server-side, possibly just as an in-memory table linking tokens and post IDs, and invalidate / delete the tokens after x minutes. If there’s a 3rd-party WordPress plugin that does that, it’d be a great simple option.
There’s always the chance that someone will have coookies completely disabled, but that’s a small enough % of internet users that I’d classify it as “your choice, your problem” for a free site like this.
No please keep the comments uneditable. It’s more fun this way.
On the plus side, it makes me think and check my posts before I post
I am not 100% sure on what engine they use but the one on the Techdirt site seems to be a viable option.
Downvotes just hide comments that the community doesn’t care for and it gives you a window of opportunity to fix bad posts before the lock.
Is it just me or is the comment box teeny tiny?
I actually switched my comments over to disqus. I don’t have anywhere near as many as you do, but it had no problem with importing all the old comments.
It shouldn’t be hard to back everything up so if the conversion doesn’t work that well you can revert.
I don’t use diquess so I will be out of luck as far as commenting goes
Actually, we saw a kitchen in the movie, Undiscovered Country.
That’s where transporters came from. It was too expensive to do a shuttle landing shot for every episode so they had them transport down instead.
I heard it was the expense, but that either the set for the shuttle or the model for it hadn’t been built in time for the pilot, so they came up with transporters since they figured it would be easier to pull off.
Food on or off earth is always a funny thing.
I mean, if they are mammals they know milk and using milk from other animals is not unlogical and so on. But who the hell invents Hákarl or Kopi Luwak?
I had to look up Hákarl, but I knew what Kopi Luwak was. And you have a point… I’d be curious about the thought processes of whoever first thought it would be a good idea to try brewing some beans that came out of a civet cat’s butt.
Hákarl was probably first eaten by some drunken guy when his other drunk friends challenged him to on a dare.
Kopi Luwak was probably invented by an 18th century Dutch hipster.
Lots of odd foods and preparations were discovered out of necessity and desperation (aka starving to death otherwise.)
Sushi is a good example. Originally rice was used to pack fish into barrels for long-term storage. When they needed the fish and opened the barrels, they’d toss the (now fermented) rice and eat the fish. The rice was simply a waste product at that point. But one year when fish harvests were low and people starving to death was a real possibility, they decided to eat the rice as well. They discovered the fermented rice was delicious, and from then on it was no longer thrown away.
It became so popular that people didn’t want to wait for it to ferment. So they imitated the flavor by using vinegars. This is why sushi actually means “vinegared rice” and not “raw fish” as many people believe. And to this day, sushi rice is vinegared when prepared.
Gah, this is going to double-post. First one seemed to not work, and refreshing multiple times didn’t do anything so I retyped it. NOW the first one actually shows up.
I got into a discussion on who the hell would try eating clams or oysters. My response was a fisherman with a hungry family who didn’t catch anything, but then noticed river otters having a hell of a good time with those white things.
And nevermind that humans already had cooking technology, so even if it looked disgusting, they could just fry ’em up in some oil to get over that.
Now we eat ’em raw as a delicacy, food-borne pathogens be damned.
Lots of dishes and preperations we know today were the result of desperation and necessity (aka starving to death otherwise.) People can get creative when they’ve got little to work with.
Sushi is a good example of that. Originally the Chinese (yes, Chinese. Japan adopted sushi from them and put their own spin on it) would pack fish into barrels for long-term storage and they would use rice as a packing material. When the lean seasons hit, they’d open up the barrels, toss the rice and eat the fermented fish. The rice had been soaking in fermented fish juices and it was considered a by-product no one wanted.
However during one particular rough season with low fish and rice yields and facing potential starvation, they ate the stored rice as well. And they loved it. From that point on they didn’t throw the rice away. In fact it became so popular that to meet the demand for it, they started using vinegars to mimic the fermented flavor without the wait.
This is why sushi actually means “vinegar rice” rather than “raw fish” like so many believe. And to this day, vinegar is used when preparing it.
What Earth nation has fish soaked in drain cleaner?
Drain cleaner?
you mean Lye?
That’s Lutefisk, and yeah, I’m ashamed to say it’s from Norway.
Sorry. So, so sorry…
I’m serious in assuming most food from both Scotland and Norway were invented on either a dare, a bet, or a drunken night out with the boys full of practical jokers.
title=”Great Chieftain o’ the puddin’ race!”>Haggis, which I presume you’re referring to, started out as just a way to avoid wastage. Instead of throwing out the organ meats, you boil them up (with some oats for bulk and binding) to get one more tasty meal out of the same sheep. Not all that different to black puddings or faggots NOT the perjorative USA meaning of the word! in that regard.
The deep-fried Mars bar, on the other hand, was very much as you say. There used to be certain fish-and-chips shops in Glasgow who would batter and fry just about anything you cared to bring in, and that one seems to have caught the imagination. Consume with caution, as it’s a very good way to get very nasty scalding all over the inside of your mouth.
Actually, Lutefisk is quite clever way of turning rock-hard dried fish into something edible.
One of the easiest way prepare dried cod for food is to soften it by soaking it in lye water for 3-7 days. After the soaking, the softened fish is washed and cooked. When prepared properly using lye made from birch ashes, the resulting fish has very mild taste.
True, though depending on what kind of fish is used, the smell can be off-putting. If it’s made from pollock or haddock, it has almost no smell. But if it’s made from cod… well, it has its own brand of humor. For example:
Patron: “What is this fly doing on my lutefisk?”
Waiter: “Gagging.”
Or the joke about the guy who found some skunks living under his porch, so he threw some lutefisk under it. The skunks moved out, but he attracted about a dozen Norwegians.
And as bad as that sounds, the smell of Surströmming (fermented Baltic herring) is even worse. I’ve heard it described as “smells like a salty corpse dipped in oily dishwater”.
IIRC that particular delicacy was determined to be the smelliest in the world, far surpassing that gem from Korea.
I have noticed that the northern climes have similar types of prepared and preserved foods no matter what continent you are on.
Pickled cabbages for one or Haggis/Grützwurst/etc as another.
Lye is also used in a method for processing maize seeds (‘corn’, in n the American usage of that term), to produce ‘grits’.
Well, as long as it tastes similar enough to milk, i don’t bother much what or who it comes from …
^_^
As long as it is an animal and not a vegetable :P
There might be a world out there, in Grrlpower universe, where there is no difference between plant and animal. Only because it happens to be this way on earth does not make it a universal constant.
And Planimal still produces milk. Of some kind.
Or nuts. Almond milk is actually REALLY good. :)
You did that on purpose, didn’t you, to bait me
Awww, you know you would like Slurm (now with honey).
I’m not a big fan of soy milk’s aftertaste but I can get behind most other varieties.
Chances are these ancient peoples made a porridge or a lentil-esque casserole using those grains first, then discovered it could be baked into something, refined it by grinding the seeds, and then baked the first unleavened bread.
If they left the mix for a few days, it would get natural yeast from the air and you’d have leavened bread.
The first bread was actually fried, not baked. :)
I thought it was baked on stones around a fire whilst other stuff cooked.
Never heard of the first bread being fried before.
`sounds like frying to ^me^.
I’m personally still looking forward to finding out why there were “too many” Harems when they were transported to that planet….
….it clearly wasn’t a time-displacement incident since Max, Dabbler, Hiro & Daphne got back at what seems to be a reasonable passage of time since the mountain went boom, & Deus & Vale then took a portal to the Fracture at around the same time that Sydney was there, which seems to me to have required about a day, day & a half, for them both to get there?
She could have a similar origin to Triplicate Girl too.
All members of Tri’s species split into the three, she (and her grandmother) were freaks who had individuality between the three
Actually Deus and Vale taking a portal to the same place at the same time as when Sydney was there can still be a case of time displacement, if we assume the portions with them were taken out of context and it actually took a while for Deus to have the portal designed and build, including the power source to operate it.
Though that might be a stretch and I too am curious what caused it and how it ties in with Dabbler thinking it could help with finding Sydney.
Sure there was a time displacement. But it was both ways.
Going from Earth to the Alari homeworld they jumped forward in time, and returning to Earth they jumped back in time.
My thought exactly!
there should have been a time displacement… the Brane Ripper was in Sciona’s base when they portaled thru and the base was subsequently blown up a few minutes later (say less than an hour-ish) and Deus was shown to have one of his power generation towers only partially completed… BUT he not only had Vale recover the Brane Ripper and transport it to a now-FINISHED tower for installation into the stargate opening mechanism then literally right then and there, stargated out to The Fracture… at the SAME TIME Sydney was there, and we know this because the various camera angles and pan-shots showing them there but not near enough to see each other, the nearest they came to that was when Sydney was riding Cora’s Naga-body and he heard her squee-ing (i tried with the original word and it came out just… wrong… so i substituted!) Also, we have yet to determine the meaning of the Science Officer in panel 5 of comic strip #674 where he says “Local Relative time is… WE’RE A BIT LATE…” emphasis mine, but this implies they can travel thru time, otherwise it doesn’t make sense to say that they’re LATE…
It’s generally accepted in archaeological circles that bread is a byproduct of the much more important beer . Someone left the mash leftover from brewing near the fire and it rose and baked into the first loaf. It tasted good and soon became the standard way of using up what had previously been a waste product.
Beer mash is still used today as a bread starter in a lot of places.
I’ve just checked Wikipedia, and though ancient cultures like the Gauls used Beer foam, known as Barm, as a source of yeast for bread making, beer has only been around 13,000 yrs or more.
Bread has been made for at least 30,000 yrs, plus there’s plenty of yeast in the air and on the grains for making leavened bread, like when making sourdough bread.
I can confirm that yeast is just everywhere. Make any kind of fruit or berry juice, put an airlock on top, keep the temperature somewhat constant and it will ferment.
Forget that airlock and it will mold though. Mold also is everywhere.
Yay, something else which I know about aside from the law. The history of beer – because I actually wrote something on this :)
Bread was not invented 30,000 years ago, it was invented about 8,000 to at most 11,500 years ago actually (for the simplest type of bread, which would basically be fried gruel). It’s only supposition that bread was around before that, because 30,000 years ago, humans had learned how to make gruel, and its not a huge jump to make bread once you know how to make gruel (ie, frying gruel on stones). The oldest thing that we’d actually recognize TODAY as bread is only from 4000BC though – sourdough bread.
Beer, on the other hand, is much older and the oldest surviving recipe is from 5000BC, but even in that recipe it’s known that beer was actually around thousands of years before that – as far back as 9500BC (almost the same time that agriculture started – ie, 11,500 years ago).
In any case, beer is one of the primary reasons for the buildup of civilization. Far moreso than bread.
No, seriously, it is.
Barley and rice require so much labor to get anything edible from them. So the two main things you can make from them worth all the time and energy? Beer and bread-like substances.
But Beer was easy to make – they were able to make it with a simple mortar and pestle and some fermentation – and had more uses than bread – it was both good as a carbohydrate for nutritiono and also as a beverage (plus it was mildly alcoholic so that was a good advantage as well). Yep – early beer was possibly more nutritious than early bread, and also safer to drink than water since the fermentation killed off a lot of pathogens. They might not have known what pathogens were, but they would have noticed that people who drank beer didn’t die as early as people who were drinking stagnant water. :)
Btw, modern bread is actually VERY recent by archaeological timelines. Leavened bread started in 4000BC (sourdough bread), but croissants were only invented as recently as 1838. :) That’s almost 6000 years difference.
And yeah, before 4000BC, bread tended to be unleavened and basically matzah-like – little more than fried, hardened gruel.
Yes, though I’d suspect the brewers grains left over from the beer were very likely boiled or fried to soften them up, then eaten. They’d generally be a bit much in a drink.
We don’t know nearly as much about early life as we like to think we do. Their major tools would have been fiber and wood based, and we rarely find any traces of THAT after thousands of years. Seriously, wood can only last if it’s in a very controlled environment with enough moisture to keep it from drying out and shrinking, but not enough for molds and dry rot to grow. That happens, but not often.
People who tend to live near bodies of water will figure out fish traps and nets pretty quickly. And they’re going to rot and fall apart just as quickly and be replaced.
They were usually ground, actually. Originally with a mortar and pestle. It’s one of the main reasons millstones were invented. To make grinding the grains easier :) And they (paleolithic people) did boil them as well, but only as part of the process of making beer. You have to remember how labor-intensive it was. They wouldn’t go through all that effort to just eat something which gives low nutritional value and no real taste, when they could be using that effort to eat something like meat, which took less effort to prepare.
Minor comment on the timeline: the latest discoveries point to (unleavened) bread predating farming, made instead from wild grains harvested and ground.
“At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago…”
source: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-archaeologists-bread-predates-agriculture-years.html … also several other links from the search “bread predates farming”
I have no idea of the timeline for bread, whether it came before or after beer, but I always thought that it was a natural progression, once humans realized that grain was good to eat. Like all things, grain is kind of a pain to eat in its natural state, so “pre-chewing” it is in order – hence, grinding it up. The resulting powder is easier to eat when mixed with a bit of water. And I’m sure folks decided to try cooking that flour/water, resulting in very crude bread, which could then be improved on over time. No idea if that’s how it actually came to be, but makes sense to me!
Seems like a lot of supposition to say they recognize ‘the charred remains of flatbread from 14,400 years ago.’
Whereas they have actual pictures of the beer making process on the walls. :)
Except it’s very obviously charred flatbread crumbs in the article. Here’s another one with an actual picture of one of the charred crumbs; https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/24/631583427/14-000-year-old-piece-of-bread-rewrites-the-history-of-baking-and-farming
That pretty much does look like a magnificed view of a charred crumb from my toaster.
Well bread was probably baked on stones around a fire, not fried.
Frying infers fat or oil to prevent sticking, when all they’d need is a smooth stone from a river to put your unleavened dough on.
Plus you forgot the most important thing about Beer. No poisonous microbes.
Water could be contaminated with all sorts of nasties.
Boiling it to make beer kills of most if not all of these waterborne nasties.
So Beer was healthier than water.
It’ll be an interesting first few months after First Contact, once we figure out all the boring-ass political details, and get to attempting to each eachother’s food.
I wrote up a story for my Patreon (“Excerpts From “An Oral History of the Rise of the Terran Empire,” https://www.patreon.com/MoeLane) where Earth discovered that nobody else had fermentation yeast. The introduction of booze had interesting effects on the rest of the Galaxy…
Direct link to the PDF: https://www.patreon.com/file?h=6009028&i=472942
That sounds like an awesome “Humans are awesome” story.
Going to read it!
I love “Broad Spectrum Death” as a name for a disease.
Or a Norwegian Death Metal band.
Oh, this is brilliant! Well done!
(“Broad Spectrum Death” sounds like “Hogfarb’s Resplendant Immolation” from the webcomic Girl Genius. Link to the wiki page on it and Vericus Pantelix’s Chromatic Death which it somewhat resembles: https://girlgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Hogfarb%27s_Resplendent_Immolation )
If you’re talking about actual humanity, that’s a long shot.
In the words of Agent K :- “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!”
IF mankind somehow manages to survive the next billion years ( not a good bet given the current state of affairs), there’s also the question of if there’s anybody ELSE in THIS galaxy besides US.
I believe in “aliens”, if only because we are the proof of their existence.
If life evolved here, the conditions for life MUST have happened somewhere ELSE as well.
Those conditions might not be ideal for us, but that doesn’t mean it won’t allow life to arise.
As for if we’ll ever actually MEET, not likely.
If they’re in the next galaxy over, forget about it, we’ll never meet the neighbors, not unless we stop thinking about ourselves as individuals and start seeing ourselves as a SPECIES that HAS to evolve,adapt and spread to survive.
Long as we remain sunhuggers, we’re gonna die here, regardless of what Cooper says
There’s always the possibility that the Earth is the one of the earliest planets in our relatively young universe to create sentient highly intelligent life and we’d basically be the precursor race to all the other alien races that evolve after us.:)
I tend to like the whole ‘Humans are awesome’ trope.
That being said, if there are other alien races ‘the next galaxy over’ we still might get there. There’s no reason to assume that thinking of ourselves as individuals rather than a collective is necessary. In fact, recent evidence might point to the opposite.
Take SpaceX vs NASA. SpaceX is created by enterprising individuals (in particular, Elon Musk). NASA’s a government organization. SpaceX is quickly showing itself capable of overtaking NASA in technological innovation, for a fraction of the price. He managed to build multiple rockets which were able to take off, orbit, then land on the same platform it took off from. How many years did it take for NASA to make the space shuttle, whichw asnt even meant for that in the first place and is far less efficient at doing the same thing? :)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure when humans invent the first extrasolar or intergalactic ships, it’ll either be based on some sort of profit motive or on a bet.
Random Person: “Elon, you might have been able to put your car in space, but an intergalactic ship is beyond what you can do! the science is just not there!”
Elon Musk: “Hold my beer. Watch this.”
Elon Musk has the advantage that he doesn’t have to take orders from assorted secret agencies.
did you know that the Space Shuttle was capable of insertion into a POLAR orbit?
Do you know how much energy that takes?
And how much smaller and more efficient the shuttle could have been without that requirement?
No, the Shutle was pretty darn good based on the tech from back then and the horrid requirements they had to fulfill.
You’re sort of proving my point. Individuals can get things done faster than a collective sometimes, especially when the collective is very bureaucratic and not cost-effective in their thinking.
I generally agree, but a bit of pedantry seems in order: Musk is able to advance the state of the art because he’s standing on the shoulders of giants. NASA did all the really hard initial engineering and theoretical work; Musk gets to start from where they finished and skip over the hard parts. Also, he is able to do only one thing: figure out how to put rockets into LEO as quickly and cheaply as possible. NASA has to do general research, robotics research, interplanetary probes, interplanetary communication, infrastructure development, etc etc.
Saying that individuals are better than collectives because Musk is bringing down the cost of space launch isn’t an entirely fair comparison.
This is pretty true. It’s like trying to compare apples and wheat. You get an apple pie when you put them together, or apple turnovers, both are edible, and both in general are carbohydrates…but beyond that, they are VERY different, and wheat (NASA) fills so many more roles in cuisine than apples (SpaceX) ever could. It’s improper to compare them as if they are equivalents, when they are not.
I also wouldn’t try to claim that one is superior to the other, because the context of what they’re being used for is vitally important. Both apples and wheat can have their carbohydrates leached into boiled water and fermented with yeast, but apple cider is never going to taste like beer. You cannot grind an apple into flour and expect to make pastry out of it like you can wheat (no, not even if you dried it to a powder; it does not have the gluten that provides the ‘stretch’ of pastry dough, and causes problems for those with celiac disease, etc)…but at the same time, raw wheat is very difficult to chew and digest compared to a raw apple.
Context is everything. SpaceX isn’t being used in nearly as many dishes as NASA is…but you gotta love those individual serving sized apple pies they’ve been putting out!
Any society which evolves along the same lines as ourselves is likely to exhaust their available resources before developing interstellar travel. Let’s face it: we’re focusing on developing self-lacing shoes and the next gen smartphones, not attempting to ensure that our species survives by spreading to other worlds. And it will soon be too late to exercise that option, if it isn’t already.
As for meeting the neighbours, we may be separated in time as well as space. The nearest sapients may have already evolved and gone extinct, or they may still be living in caves.
You’re being a bit negative. We have been technologically evolving at an exponential rate, rather than an additive one.
I don’t think it’s unthinkable by a longshot that if we keep progressing at this rate, we’ll eventually be on other planets and other systems. :) I do tend to prefer the ‘other sapients, if any exist yet, are still living in caves and we might be the most advanced species around.’
Only because I’m really a fan of the ‘Humans are awesome’ trope and I tend to get bored with the idea that every other alien species in ficiton is better than us technologically, stronger, faster, have natural powers that make humans the blank slate useless sapients of the galaxy, only useful by author fiat.
Like in Star Trek (much as I like it). Humans are incredibly average compared to a LOT of other species. Klingons are stronger and hardier. Vulcans are smarter and stronger and have a type of telepathy (as do Romulans presumably). Changelings are shapeshifters. Betazoids are telepaths. Q are freaking omnipotent. Hell… even the g.d. Ferenghi have superior hearing.
Basically, in a universe of a World of Hats, humans have no Hat. Which is supposedly their hat. But yeah, humans are more ‘explorative’ and ‘curious’ – but I’ve seen a lot of other species in Star Trek who were just as explorative and curious as humans, plus have other superior abilities. The only reason humans in Star Trek seem to be in any way special is the other species seem to generally be very static in their evolution, but it always feels like a forced static-ness.
I like the way you think. ;)
I have to keep my nerd cred up somehow. :)
You already have a gold card.
The only problem with that opening statement is not that we are advancing exponentially versus additively.
It’s that we’re running out of time, with governments so corrupt, they don’t care that the world is already on the knife’s edge and about to tip over. No, no arguments: I’ve read a lot of ecological, climatological, and biological reports over the years. We’re now at the tipping point. We have just a couple years in which to act.
According to a report released over a year ago, divers don’t even want to dive anymore in certain reaches of the Great Barrier Reef, not even for money, despite Great Barrier Reef diving expeditions being a big moneymaker in the past. Why not? Because the water is so hot, everything there is dying or dead. The whole place leaves you and your wet suit reeking of dead and rotting sealife.
Up in Northern Alaska? “A new satellite-based study of the retreating permafrost coastline at Drew Point, in Alaska’s North Slope region, shows that from 1955 to 1979, the rate of loss was only about 23 feet per year. From 2007 through 2016, it was about 56 feet per year.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/14/watch-warming-ocean-devour-alaskas-coast-this-striking-time-lapse-video/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4f3943e414a8)
The kicker is, we have the techology to reduce global warming right here and now. But because so many governments around the world are corrupt and don’t care about 20 years from now, just the 20 billion their corporate masters can make extra right here and now…nobody will implement it. And because the problem IS so wide-spread, it would require governments acting immediately to stop mass extinctions, wildfires, famine, and refugees trampling away from the equatorial and subtropical regions.
…The last time such a globally (or close enough to count) plethora of interacting civilizations faced decades of drought, famine, civil upheaval, and mass migrations was in the 1200s-1100s BCE, when the Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Middle East collapsed and vanished. (Go watch this video, it’s a fascinating lecture on what the most likely probable causes were of all those collapsed empires: https://youtu.be/bRcu-ysocX4 …and realize we are in that spot right now, but we are causing the environmental disasters, and at such a fast rate, it will get out of our hands in less than 20 years…and if you don’t believe how fast the climate is changing, I direct you to xkcd who does some outstandingly meticulous scientifically fact-based research in his webcomic: https://xkcd.com/1732/ )
But yeah, because of politics and fragile egos and entitlements and political brainwashing to the point of massive rampant cognitive dissonance caused by that brainwashing, we have the most deliberately destructive governments in charge of most of the major world powers…who in past decades deliberately destabilized third world countries every time they came close to getting actually effective, responsible, responsive governments.
It doesn’t matter how advanced our technology gets if we don’t use it in a timely manner to save ourselves. There will be a point in the next few years where it will be too late.
And then anything we do will be like anti-vaxxers desperately trying to give their dead child an MMR shot, wailing how they didn’t know measles would kill their beloved boy, and their neighbors, and the doctors at the local clinic, and the…
…When I get this depressed, I remember that in all probability, the survivors of humanity’s hubris, selfishness, & greed will either be House Cnidarea, House, Blattodea, or House Tardigrade. (I’m voting for House Tardigrade, myself.)
Maybe on different planets but Earth has lots of energy dense materials in it. Uranium will keep us going lots long enough to figure out fusion and fusion can run on common materials like water or hydrogen.
I disagree that a human-like society is likely to exhaust it’s resources, unless they have no fissile material or fail to discover nuclear power. Just look at our own timeline:
– pre-1902: “Gee, birds are cool, I wish we could do that.”
– 1903: 1st powered flight
– 1914: 1st commercial flight
– 1942: First nuclear reactor
– 1957: 1st orbital launch
– 1959: 1st probe reaches the moon
– 1961: 1st human space flight
– 1969: 1st human landing on another celestial body (the Moon)
– 1961-1989: flybys of all neighboring planets (sorry Pluto)
– 1971: 1st space station
– 2012: 1st human object to leave our local system (Voyager 1)
– 2015: flyby of farthest system planetoids (yay Pluto! and Charon, I guess)
– 2019: 1st non-governmental crewed flight to space station (next week!)
– 2025-ish: 1st human mission to Mars
– 2030s: 1st permanent human colony on another planet
From grounded monkeys to the Moon in a single lifetime, from the Moon to settling another planet in a 2nd (and most industry experts think SpaceX’s timeline is pretty realistic). We haven’t even really figured out the best ways to use nuclear power yet (e.g. thorium, fission), but the next couple generations could very believably build generation ships to reach Andromeda even without FTL travel or other exotic power sources.
Correction – the March 2nd SpaceX launch is the first flight of their crew module, but will not have any human crew aboard. If all goes well, first flight with humans will be in July. But still 2019, or maybe 2020.
I have wondered if there is actually life on Venus, but it is so different than us that we didn’t recognize it. The temperature is too hot for hydrocarbons, but perhaps sulfur based life is a thing. Just not a thing we recognize as life. By the same line of thought, there could be life in the Corona of every star.
Welllllll, if i had rock hard abs, poppin’ pecks, Gaston’s jawline, and .50 cal guns i would show them off too.
Especially when pretty women like Cora and Sydney are watching.
Don’t forget Slyv
His milkshake brings all the girls to the yard.
…Dang. Good spot, that.
Just remember don’t forget to inhale, and don’t laugh…
I think you can get unleavened bread just by storage-baking crushed wet seeds into a bannock or damper. Mushing, forming and baking on embers as a means of preservation works for lots of hunter-gatherer foodstuffs.
OBVIOUSLY the kitchen computer has patterns for numerous on-demand hard light utensils and appliances, that can be un-materialized whenever not needed. This cuts down on clutter, mass, and random crap that can go flying if the
cameraship shakes during battle, and as a bonus you never have to remember which drawer you put the whisk in.Or worry about washing up afterwards :D
You do still have to put the dirties in the sink before you de-materialize them, but it is a WHOLE lot easier.
Whisk the sauce, batter, fluid and direct, “Computer, stow whisk” while it is in the solution or above it. All the mess stays in the food-to-be.
Got to hand it to Sydney she can appreciate a good thing even if she likes to take things a bit slower than some. And let’s get that girl some iron cuz she looks like she needs it.
Get her some more grakz. I’m sure what happened had nothing to do with the grakz. Surely, Cora was just teasing her about it and she probably picked up a space bug or something.
Dooo it. Doooo it. Doooooooooo it.
I’d opt for bloopberry, but that may be a mistake.
I’m still waiting to try Snozzberries
My favorite is razzleberry dressing.
That’s patented and Mr. Wonka has VERY good attorneys like you wouldn’t believe.
Only if the snozzberry shake tastes like snozzberries. If it’s a cheap imitation like artificial grape, you’re better off with a blin/flerg combo.
Your better off with just about anything than with imitation snozzberry. I had it in the 90s and it was like rancid cucumber.
Are you sure it wasn’t actually a snozzcumber? The coloring and texture is similar when blended, so the budget food services sometimes use the ‘cumber for a base and mix in the artificial ‘berry syrup. It’s a tricksy, squelchy problem to get it right, so it’s totally worth going to the more expensive food carts for the real thing.
I just realized… Halo has been without her glasses for a while now… what’s the deal there again? Near-sighted? Far-sighted? Cunning-disguise-so-nobody-realizes-she-is-actually-Superman?
Since we saw her driving wearing them, I think she is slightly nearsighted. I am farsighted and only wear my glasses when reading or other close-in work that needs me to be able to see what I am doing.
According to DaveB, her glasses were being fabricated/repaired while she was sleeping/doing battle with the toilet for control over her rectal cavity.
Oh! I wonder what weird thing they’ll add secretly :P
“clothing-optional-vision”?
“weird-eyes-when-she-is-using-them-so-everyone-laughs-but-she-can’t-see-it-so-she’s-just-confused-as-to-why-everyone-is-laughing”?
“spy camera things so her life becomes a cross-dimensionally watched reality TV show”?
I wonder what weird things they added openly.
Word of God from a few strips back said Sydney is far-sighted and just uses the “blind without glasses” trope as a ruse in close combat. When driving she only needs glasses to read the instruments, like the speedometer.
New comment system? Cool.
Anyways, everyone knows where space milk comes from. It was explained in The Last Jedi unfortunately.
I love Sydneys sly smile in the fourth panel.
Those alien caregivers to infants have breasts and are mammals , so you got milk variants.
So the intergalactic “My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard” is a given.
It gets a bit weird ethically / socially with sentient species though. Food that talks isn’t food, and aside from nursing their own offspring, byproducts of talking food are probably off-limits too.
Milliways, The Restaurant at The End of The Universe.
Everything after:
Zaphod: “That’s cool, we’ll meet the meat”
Ha, I’d completely forgotten that scene. Even so, Zaphod’s tastes and reactions hardly the model of ideal social behavior.
One could equally argue (page linked and several following) that byproducts of sapients who have given consent to such use are the most ethical way of obtaining various proteins, fats, etc. given current technological limitations.
What’s up wih Cora? in the last panel she looks annoyed.
The last panel,does it put to mind of Dabbler making cookies wearing only an apron?
Authors comment: I had some back end work done.
And so did Sydney.
That’s what I was going to say…
Diet of aliens will depend on what’s available now and what was in short supply during their evolution. Humans have a desire to eat fats and sugars because that was in short supply and hard to get for a very long period in our history. Some other race may consider bran to be the essence of foodie perfection, because their past made edible roughage hard to acquire.
Plus, humans have a bit of a weird thing with fats and sugars, we desire either separately, somewhat. Mixed together, and we’ll kill ourselves gorging on that stuff. Nobody stands by the sugar bowl just spooning it up for hours, nobody eats a dozen sticks of butter all at once. But mix sugar and butter and whip them up a bit, and we lose our freaking MINDS and can eat that crap forever and call it candy or icing (depending on how fluffy it is). Add milk and freeze it and you just invented ice cream of a sort.
We love that stuff so much, we’ll expend vast energy acquiring it, and huge ingenuity just to chill it down.
https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/articles/this-ancient-technique-to-make-ice-in-the-desert-is-mind-boggling/
Evolutionary food preferences aren’t really about scarcity, they’re about energy content – scarcity is a byproduct of desirability and position on the food chain. Fats, alcohols, and sugars have the most energy content, followed closely by protein, so there’s a greater payback in survival odds from hunting an animal all day than spending that day harvesting grass.
Which is yet another reason we’re space orcs, we just run our prey to death. Sure, a cheetah’s speed can beat us to a kill, but when they miss (which is often) all that energy was wasted, which is why cheetahs always look semi-starved.
CSS Request: Change the link colour. In the write-up section, it’s like trying to read a small neon sign at a distance. In the comment wrapper, it takes some focus to see it clearly. Being functionally colour-blind, I can’t really explain what needs to happen. The hover colour is substantially easier to read.
I would like to add some other issues to the list.
I am not seeing the comics web links panel normally on the right side of the page.
Also, the images in the Top Web Comics, Patreon, What I’m reading, and Crossover boxes are missing.
(Windows 10 box running Firefox if that helps)
Seconded and thirded on the link colors. Color contrast is a huge part of accessibility, and easy to quantify. The ‘a’ color vs the normal black text just barely passes the WCAG guideline of 4.5:1 for level AA (but fails the AAA level of 7:1), but the ‘a:visited’ style is only 1.5:1, far below either acceptance level. Ditto the black-on-gray of the disabled ‘forward / latest’ links.
I also preferred the arrow images for navigation, and liked having comment paging above and below the comments, but those are style choices and not a huge issue. Hoping you’re bringing those back, but maybe you’re trying to reduce bandwidth / increase performance by dropping some images…?
Just found their link-specific color checker, previous link was to the text vs background one.
Yeah, still tweaking stuff. Hope to have most everything fixed in the next few days.
Thank you, DaveB, for being willing to help ensure accessibility for your various readers!
Ditto. Also want to say I’m willing to help with troubleshooting code or adding minor features gratis, although I recognize that taking advice from strangers on the internet is generally considered a bad idea.
Once the dust has settled, I’d actually like to update the old comment highlighter extension (how did I never see that in the sidebar?!) to work with the new layout. Was working on my own version but they were basically identical functionality-wise, and the old one has a Chrome/Greasemonkey wrapper. If the dev ever responds to me I’ll issue a pull request, otherwise I’ll finish building out my own version.
I think updating the new comment notifier would be as simple as changing a few key “HTTP”‘s to “HTTPS” It broke when I got a SSL certificate for the site.
I’m already imagining the commotion that will occur when they arrive at Earth. Basically all the (non-gay) girls on the team will turn into female versions of Math.
Everyone of the team isn’t even aware that Dabbler is an alien. Why would Archon let them know that there’s a large spacecraft in Earth orbit? (I doubt they’re going to land that ship. )
What has happened to Sydney is quite probably on a need to know basis, and most probably believe her to be off on special training or something.
If the crew get down to Earth they’ll more than likely be using some sort of disguises.
(Cora already have at least one ‘outfit’ thatwould help her blend in… )
I’m thinking they just put her in an airlock while they’re in orbit, make sure Sydney’s shield is up, and cycle her through so she can fly home herself.
…The only problem with this is, can she even find her home city without help, when she had problems trying to find her car in the parking lot of the bank she uses a lot? Did she remember to recharge her bracer thingy? For that matter, even if she did remember it, was there a compatible cord to plug it into on board Cora’s ship? (Probably, or perhaps even wireless energy transmission a la Tesla’s Wycliffe Tower project…which got shut down by greedy self-centered oligarchs…)
While they may not have the Clearances to know where they went, i’ll bet that at least Harem gets read-in to the fact that Aliens Exist pretty quick, once HQ figures out that they left Earth for the Alari home planet… as for them telling Arc-Swat in general, probably not… however… how WOULD they explain away Halo getting home if NOT for Alien help?
Well, we have confirmation that Cora really did have ice cream available.
I’m betting that bread is actually an offshoot of porridge. Boiling, I think, is probably the next logical progression after roasting, for cooking methods (so, like, Grok started out with putting chunks of animal in/next to a fire until they get hot- they are easier to eat/taste better after that. Figure out how to do it with water. The water gets hot, starts bubbling [witchcraft!], but you never get sick from it after that. So lets put meat in the water! Oh, hey, what about plants? Look, if you put enough grains in, it makes this thick stuff that tastes good with fruit! Uh oh, Brala left the porridge out, and now it’s hard- it’s still food, though.) etc. etc.
Sydney: Hello again Altus… What’s for Lunch?
Altus: Grakz
Sydney: *Turning green*
Cora: Altus! Stop teasing Sydney!!!
Altus: Grakz, It’s what’s for dinner… erm… The other, OTHER white meat? Gawd!!! Tough crowd!!!
Cora: I think Sydney might prefer a hotdog.
Fix smirks.
Frix, not Fix.
Site is looking faaancy
Actually, bread started out as a soup, cooking the crushed seeds into something like gruel.
Then somebody let the pot on the fire too long, and it dried out. People were upset, but found out it works fine as preservative, and was reversible if you just remixed the dry bread with water and cooked it into gruel again.
That turned into flat bread as food storage, and only later it evolved into bread loves, with still having the option to reuse the hard bread in cooking (for example – bread dumplings)
You are forgetting one of the other discoveries coming from leaving a soupy mixture of grain and water sit around too long. Beer.
recipie wise, pie crust and bread have only yeast as a difference. Still flour, salt, sugar, butter, and optionally yeast
(Puts on thick glasses)
Good News Everyone!
The cast page actually goes somewhere when you click on it now.
On the down side, several page formatting commands that should be hidden are showing up as text.
His milkshake brings all the girls to the ya… galley.
Bread’s not that remarkable. We only eat the seeds of grasses, and we eat the seeds of everything that doesn’t have poisonous seeds, because seeds are universally high in energy. And once you’re cultivating mutant grasses with freakishly large sex organs, it’s not that big of a leap to discover that you can make it into a paste and then heat it, and now it tastes better.
What I find remarkable is cheese. That requires somebody to let their milk go bad, still be desperate enough to eat it (even though the fact they have milk and can consume it as an adult implies they long since developed agriculture and so food scarcity will be rarer), and have it result in something that seems worth recreating even though the curds were produced in a completely uncontrolled manner.
My guess is that yogourt predates cheese and was a way of giving milk a shelf life to begin with.
The Nordic countries have a huge assortment of these but try and find fresh milk at your peril.
Then one day someone added too much souring agent and the milk clotted. The liquid wasnt all that great but the clots tasted good. Then comes extra salting and drying for longer storage.
More likely that the first cheeses came about because ancient peoples would use animal stomachs as pouches in which to store liquids. These stomachs would still have rennet left in them from when the animal was alive, which mixed with the milk and allowed to get a bit warm results in the milk turning into curds. At this point they have what is essentially curds and whey, which can be eaten asis, or pressed and aged to make proper cheese.
Yogurt requires more care in its creation than cheese, because it requires a very specific strain of bacteria to create it.
All cheese needs is to be warm for a while–cottage cheese was literally the leftover milk set near the hearthfire to warm it for several hours. By using rennet (an acid found most plentifully in the stomachs of calves not yet weaned onto grass) or some other edible acid (vinegar, citric acid, etc), you can separate the casein (proteins, curds) from the water and sugars (whey). The degree to which these are separated, ie the care taken to separate them, means that cottage cheese (curdled and strained but not like super-washed, total carb 2g, protein 6g, per 1/4 cup) has a much higher carb content to protein in ratio than cheddar cheese (very thoroughly curdled, strained, washed, pressed, washed again, etc, total carbs 1g, protein 7g, in 1/4 cup of cheese).
It’s healthier to separate the milk into curds and whey in cheesemaking quickly via using an acid, rather than to let it sit out overnight because of the possibility of mold, bacteria, and other unwanted microbes growing, because milk is full of yummy things they can eat and proliferate in very quickly (i.e. toss out that cup of milk that’s been sitting out on the counter for more than an hour!) Strong digestible acids can separate curds and whey fairly quickly, in a matter of a few hours, to even just half an hour or so, depending upon batch size, lactose content, temperature, etc, etc. (It’s a science, but it’s also an art.)
A lot of people like to claim that cheese was made from the milk left over after butter was churned out of it, but this was actually not very common. That buttermilk (which was not sour like the stuff we know today) was actually much like nonfat milk, and still usable for porridges, etc. …Actually, buttermilk has an acid in it, so it was probably a mix of post-butter milk and post-cheese whey, with the squeezed-out rennet or other acid providing the sourness that, when combined with white ashes from a clean wood fire (potash, or potassium ashes) would create a quick-rising leavening action via the chemical reactions between the alkalines in the potash and the acids in the whey.
…Yes, I know way too much about making cheese and bread.
Personally I prefer Villi (Filli) (Finish origin I think) bit sweeter, way easier to keep going as a start like sourdough. Just need milk and (generally 2%)
Sydney pooped out all her blood.
And burnt it!
Probably tastes like bread. Or beer.
I used to bake habanero beer bread (Rye, usually.)
Bread – yeah, well, if you think about it, you will recognice bread was something waiting to happen, actually.
Consider that ape of the morning. Living in that vast grass land where he (and she of course) walk upright between the trees. Eating grains is something essentially to their diet. Indeed our teeth still give away that our ancestors had about 90% of their diet consisting of grains, once.
Consider the use of stone tools. What is grinding grains? Nothing else than what you do with your teeth, just with mecanical help, outside of your mouth. The millstone is the first artificial teeth ever invented.
well, and if you ever had a mouthful of flour, then you will know that mixing it with water is the lgical next step. It is so unbearably dry!
And that is the simplest bread dough. A tortilla, if you will. Experimenting with fire is downhill from here. The first yeast surely came by accident overnight, as so many wild yeast has conquered man`s recipe book. And because salting makes things yummy, add a sprinkle of salt. Many years later, and there is Croissant, and Cinnamon Roll, and Bread Pie, and Fruit Tart, and whatnot…
Poor Sydney, she is looking very enemaic.
For a moment, I thought you meant anemic, and then I realized…enema-ic…oy. Oy.
I don’t know whether to say “Bad Yorp!” or give you a pat and a biscuit…
Biscuit, biscuit, BISCUIT!
*tail wagging intime to the chanting*
I dont think bread is so hard to invent.
Just imagine hunger, being omnivorous and hungry means you try everything. And nothing is so obviously made for eating as it is now, we havent invented agriculture, we havent selected artificially plants so they give us more food. So everything is as bad as those hard and indigestible grains, that you will pulverize when you make tools because you literally lose your teeth trying to feed on them.
Then, time and genius minds with nothing to do but think, try new things and hunger…
What about yogurt, cheese and alcohol? That means people starving, eating anything even if it is rotting, and finding sometimes rotted is better. Remove hunger and maybe those things would not exist.
On the subject of Universal Translators, here’s an article about the inadequacies of Google Translate compared to a live translator: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/
Hey, that’s how I make a few bucks here and there. Sometimes I get paid for cleaning up machine translated user manuals for companies without techs speaking English as a first language. If you don’t speak a language you might think Google Translate is just fine, but you need either a native speaker or highly literate ESL person to get an idiomatic translation. I don’t translate so much as use the machine translation as a first draft and use my skills as a technical writer going back to the early 1980s to produce a working document.
I know it doesn’t belong here but wouldn’t it be cool if in some D&D or similar setting with actual magic if some guy wished for the the ability to speak to women got his wish. However instead of being a charming conversationalist as he might have intended he instead becomes a universal translator as long as he is speaking with a woman. I suppose that would fall into the ‘Genie grants wish literally’ trope.
I love this idea!
Or a wish to be a “really hot chick magnet” and he’s now constantly on fire and baby birds keep flying through the air at him.