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I strigil with the concept as well
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Nov 29, 2023 05:10
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:36 |
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olive oil is delicious
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Nov 29, 2023 05:12
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you use it to make light at night
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Nov 29, 2023 05:50
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It is pleasing to offer to the gods - it's true!
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Nov 29, 2023 06:01
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It also doesn’t spoil and fits a lot of calories in a small volume, making it a highly transportable food (and thus a good trade-good). Fresh foods rot, dried foods are bulky and need to be kept dry, but olive oil in a sealed amphora doesn’t care about anything. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Nov 29, 2023 |
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Nov 29, 2023 07:17
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Oil can also be used for cooking and it adds alot of flavor. Humans are kind of weird. We're almost like cats, we've lost alot of carbohydrate flavor receptors in our taste buds, and our guts are much shorter than most other primates. We have much fewer oligosaccharide taste receptors than other omnivores like pigs and mice, and we have a huge taste preference for salt and mono/di-saccharides and amino acids and fats. Pre-modern humans were evolving to be far more carnivorous than most other primates, who sit far more on the vegetarian end of the omnivore scale. But midway through this evolution, while we were eating a mixture of game and foraged seeds and grains and tubers and fruits, neolithic man learned how to promote the growth and artificial evolution of some varieties of plants, vastly increasing the amount of calories available within foraging range. Hence the amount of starch in our diets greatly increased. We re-evolved a preference towards starches, but it's incomplete and we don't derive pleasure from it in the same way as other flavors. Hence our desire for other flavors, of which fat is readily available.
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Nov 29, 2023 08:08
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Wasn't there a long period in hominid evolution where our ancestors substituted on the one weird trick of using rocks to break open the bones of kills left by big carnivores? I'd think that hundreds of thousands of years of mainly eating bone marrow might do it for the short intestine / lack of carb taste receptors...
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Nov 29, 2023 08:51
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Wasn't there a long period in hominid evolution where our ancestors substituted on the one weird trick of using rocks to break open the bones of kills left by big carnivores? That can't be the only thing those hominids subsisted on, there's not enough energy. As a specialization, it's absurd. But as a dietary suplement, it can't hurt having an extra source of fat to scavenge.
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Nov 29, 2023 09:06
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And on the note of sweetness, an immense amount of human endeavour and suffering has been dedicated to generating this particular flavorant. Vast plantations in the Carribean, hacked out of the ground by slaves and indentured servants, boiled down in huge steaming vats, just to generate a luxury and a trade good. Whose history reverberates forward to this day with the illegal blockade of Cuba by its hyperpower neighbor. And fun fact the first Japanese colonies were not Korea, but the Amami islands near the Ryukyus, deep within the Edo period. All this for a simple disaccharide. An elemental component of every plant and food crop grown anywhere. You can even boil it out of Beets. To give you an idea of how simple it is to get sweetness, sweet corn has a mutation that stops it from properly synthesizing disaccharides into starch, meaning a huge quantity of sugar accumulates within the kernels. In return the sweet corn spoils faster because sugars are easier to digest for microorganisms. And if you want sweet flavorant again, you get a massive pile of starch, and you enzymatically react it down into corn syrup.
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Nov 29, 2023 09:07
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Elden Lord Godfrey posted:Hence our desire for other flavors, of which fat is readily available. We continue to really like acids though, which I'm assuming derives from when we were arboreal primates eating mostly fruit.
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Nov 29, 2023 09:08
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The Lone Badger posted:We continue to really like acids though, which I'm assuming derives from when we were arboreal primates eating mostly fruit. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213004181 quote:Why humans are able to taste acids and even prefer sourness has been debated. Sour stimuli are not of great nutritional value, with the exception of vitamin C. This is an important exception, however, as, unlike most mammals, monkeys and apes cannot synthesize vitamin C due to the loss of a functional gluconolactone oxidase gene [63]. The common ancestor of the anthropoids that lost this enzyme must have had sufficiently high ascorbic acid intake from fruits and other plants that the enzyme became dispensable. Presumably, sour taste was necessary as a guide to vitamin C rich fruits. The mixture of acids with sugars also can enable the identification of fruit ripeness via sweet and sour taste combinations. From this perspective, acids were not stimuli which we evolved to respond to alone, but rather we experienced them in the context of fruit sugars. Thus, sweet and sour tastes are perceived as synergistic in fruit flavors [64]. In addition, acids and sour taste are markers of fermentation, which humans around the globe clearly seek and ingest. Fruits yes, but also fermentation. I suspect this is a recent selection, as deliberate fermentation is relatively new. But fermentation is extremely useful, letting us store food for months without them being eaten by unwanted microorganisms. Alot of cultures use fermented and pickled foods.
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Nov 29, 2023 09:31
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Fermented fruit isn't new, it happens naturally on the ground as airborne yeast digest fallen fruit. Animals seek it out, especially wasps which is why they're so interested in your picnic you lush
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Nov 29, 2023 14:29
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Arglebargle III posted:Fermented fruit isn't new, it happens naturally on the ground as airborne yeast digest fallen fruit. Animals seek it out, especially wasps which is why they're so interested in your picnic you lush Explains why the cats try and drink my beer, yeah
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Nov 29, 2023 15:26
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Olive Oil was also used as soap in ancient Rome, after getting out of the bathhouse you would lather yourself in oil and then scrape it off to remove grime from your skin.
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Nov 29, 2023 18:25
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Did that work? I mean I get how scientifically it acts as a cleaner but wouldn't everyone loving stink of rancid oil
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Nov 29, 2023 18:30
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You don’t just leave the oil on. You go to the baths, take your clothes off, get oiled up, work out a bit, scrape the gross oil-sweat-grime off with your strigil, then wash in the hot water, then the cold, dry off, get oiled up again (by massage), then clean up, get dressed and go home. There’s reference to perfumes and scented oils being used for the last bit. People probably smelled a bit oily by and large, but if everyone’s doing it then you’re gonna be used to it—and in a largely unsoaped world, a bit of oil smell is probably more palatable than the alternative. If you think that’s gross, Pliny says (Natural History 15.5) that some gymnasiums sold the scraped off oil for lots of money since it was considered medicinally useful: Natural History 28.13: Remedies Derived from the Human Excretions posted:In Greece, where everything is turned to account, the owners of the gymnasia have introduced the very excretions even of the human body among the most efficient remedies; so much so, indeed, that the scrapings from the bodies of the athletes are looked upon as possessed of certain properties of an emollient, calorific, resolvent, and expletive nature, resulting from the compound of human sweat and oil. These scrapings are used, in the form of a pessary, for inflammations and contractions of the uterus: similarly employed, they act as an emmenagogue, and are useful for reducing condylomata and inflammations of the rectum, as also for assuaging pains in the sinews, sprains, and nodosities of the joints. The scrapings obtained from the baths are still more efficacious for these purposes, and hence it is that they form an ingredient in maturative preparations. Such scrapings as are impregnated with wrestlers' oil, used in combination with mud, have a mollifying effect upon the joints, and are more particularly efficacious as a calorific and resolvent; but in other respects their properties are not so strongly developed. I guess that’s why they call it Greece!
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Nov 29, 2023 19:46
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Shoulda called it Grosse
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Nov 29, 2023 19:51
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So you're telling me I can buy the bath oil of the top performing Olympians straight from Sparta? B..but why would I want to ? Degenerate graeculus 
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Nov 29, 2023 23:31
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skasion posted:You don’t just leave the oil on. You go to the baths, take your clothes off, get oiled up, work out a bit, scrape the gross oil-sweat-grime off with your strigil, then wash in the hot water, then the cold, dry off, get oiled up again (by massage), then clean up, get dressed and go home. There’s reference to perfumes and scented oils being used for the last bit. People probably smelled a bit oily by and large, but if everyone’s doing it then you’re gonna be used to it—and in a largely unsoaped world, a bit of oil smell is probably more palatable than the alternative. Surely this must have been brought up somewhere when the poison bath water articles happened
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Nov 30, 2023 00:07
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Strategic Tea posted:So you're telling me I can buy the bath oil of the top performing Olympians straight from Sparta? I took my
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Nov 30, 2023 00:18
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First as tragedy, then as farce…
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Nov 30, 2023 01:25
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gamer boy bathwater
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Nov 30, 2023 02:36
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Arglebargle III posted:gamer boy bathwater The rarest of bathwaters.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:42
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edible oils, due to mouth weirdness, also amplify and improve other flavors even a small amount of olive oil or butter goes a long, long way
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Nov 30, 2023 03:32
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Butter is a Germanic fad. Will all blow over any century now
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Nov 30, 2023 03:45
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Oh yeh a lot of fat soluble flavorants are dissolved and carried into tastebuds and olfactory sensors. Arglebargle III posted:Fermented fruit isn't new, it happens naturally on the ground as airborne yeast digest fallen fruit. Animals seek it out, especially wasps which is why they're so interested in your picnic you lush Kind of, but naturally fermenting fruits aren’t that sour, so in order to get the intense sourness of a properly fermented food it requires more recent technology like say pottery or bagmaking to get a big mash of an anaerobic environment.
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Nov 30, 2023 04:17
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Elden Lord Godfrey posted:Oh yeh a lot of fat soluble flavorants are dissolved and carried into tastebuds and olfactory sensors. Use of stomachs and bladders goes way back though.
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Nov 30, 2023 05:30
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Use of stomachs and bladders goes way back though. Almost immediately after they first evolved, even.
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Nov 30, 2023 06:32
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The main thing you need for lactic fermentation is salt. Lots of salt.
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Nov 30, 2023 06:47
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The Lone Badger posted:The main thing you need for lactic fermentation is salt. Lots of salt. I would've thought it was lactate.
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Nov 30, 2023 08:54
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I would've thought it was lactate. Lactic acid bacteria will feed on any form of sugar. Even the quite small quantities that leach out of e.g. cabbage. But if you do that with plain water then molds and unwanted bacteria will spoil the food long before there's enough acid to preserve it. You need to add a good quantity of salt to discourage other microorganisms and give the lactic acid bacteria a competitive advantage.
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Nov 30, 2023 09:15
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skasion posted:Butter is a Germanic fad. Will all blow over any century now Eating butter, wearing trousers, wiping the beer foam off my mustaches.
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Nov 30, 2023 10:23
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Arglebargle III posted:Where I worked at least it was pretty much understood that Brazilian Portuguese speakers could understand Latin American Spanish speakers, but the intelligibility did not go the other way. I don't speak either language but I was told that the vowels and stresses are all different in Portuguese, which was difficult for Spanish speakers to hear right because Spanish has very regular vowel sounds and very even syllable stress. E: also I would pay irresponsible amounts for the Authentic Roman Bathhouse Experience. Oil me up, Decimus Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 16:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:E: also I would pay irresponsible amounts for the Authentic Roman Bathhouse Experience. Oil me up, Decimus Is there any cultural lineage to Roman bathing traditions and Turkish ones? Obviously treating bathing lavishly isn't something unique the Romans came up with, but I imagine nomadic Turks probably weren't building stone hammams on the Eurasian steppe. I can't recall ever reading about Byzantine bathing traditions, did the East maintain them after their decline in the West for the Turks to adopt?
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Nov 30, 2023 17:10
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Judgy Fucker posted:Is there any cultural lineage to Roman bathing traditions and Turkish ones? Obviously treating bathing lavishly isn't something unique the Romans came up with, but I imagine nomadic Turks probably weren't building stone hammams on the Eurasian steppe. I can't recall ever reading about Byzantine bathing traditions, did the East maintain them after their decline in the West for the Turks to adopt? It's a direct lineage. Roman-style bathhouses remained in both Western Europe and the ERE throughout the Middle Ages, only starting to disappear in Western Europe towards the end of the period, but they never went away in the East. Various church writers spent a lot of time and effort decrying bathhouses as places of sin and vice, to apparently little avail, which is part of how we know they stuck around.
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Nov 30, 2023 17:13
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And happily they remain so even today. Also as a place to get jumped naked by a guy with a linoleum knife.
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Nov 30, 2023 17:15
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FishFood posted:It's a direct lineage. Roman-style bathhouses remained in both Western Europe and the ERE throughout the Middle Ages, only starting to disappear in Western Europe towards the end of the period, but they never went away in the East. Various church writers spent a lot of time and effort decrying bathhouses as places of sin and vice, to apparently little avail, which is part of how we know they stuck around. And worth noting that in the Western Europe, the disappearance of Roman-style bathhouses wasn't a disappearance of bathhouses in general, but of a shift to a different style of bathhouse, that tended to involve smaller bathtubs made of wood rather than big stone/marble carved baths for many people. These were also often considered dens of sin and vice, which we know because we have legal codes from Paris and other cities where they draw lots of really hair-splitting regulations about the distinctions between bathhouses and brothels (since they'd be subject to different and sometimes overlapping guilds and taxes). Here's some medieval art that i just like 
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Nov 30, 2023 17:25
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Lots of places still called Baden or bath today
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Nov 30, 2023 17:26
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Tulip posted:And worth noting that in the Western Europe, the disappearance of Roman-style bathhouses wasn't a disappearance of bathhouses in general, but of a shift to a different style of bathhouse, that tended to involve smaller bathtubs made of wood rather than big stone/marble carved baths for many people. These were also often considered dens of sin and vice, which we know because we have legal codes from Paris and other cities where they draw lots of really hair-splitting regulations about the distinctions between bathhouses and brothels (since they'd be subject to different and sometimes overlapping guilds and taxes). is that the royal cuck shack?
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Nov 30, 2023 19:48
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:36 |
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ChubbyChecker posted:is that the royal cuck shack? Probably not royal, but otherwise sure I guess. Also the dog is making me go "hm" because it looks so chihuahua but its a 1470 painting so pretty doubtful there were any chihuahuas in 1470 Burgundy.
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Nov 30, 2023 19:55
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