John Delaney
23.6K posts
@john_p_d I'd heard it is because they use dried milk instead of fresh, which is why some American chocolate smells like vomit.
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I’ve often wondered why Hershey’s and other American chocolate tastes so much worse than European chocolate. And it turns out that there’s a specific reason.
ArchaeoHistories@histories_arch
In 1937, the United States Army approached Hershey's Chocolate with one of the strangest product briefs in food history. They wanted a chocolate bar, but they needed it to taste, in the words of the Army Quartermaster himself, "only a little better than a boiled potato." Captain Paul Logan of the US Army Quartermaster General's office sat down with Hershey's chief chemist Sam Hinkle and laid out four requirements for what would become the Field Ration D bar. It had to weigh four ounces. It had to be high in energy. It had to withstand high temperatures without melting. And it absolutely could not taste good. The Army's logic was straightforward: if the emergency ration chocolate was delicious, soldiers would eat it whenever they wanted rather than saving it for genuine emergencies. The solution was to engineer the palatability out of it on purpose. Hinkle and his team spent months developing the formula. They reduced the sugar dramatically. They increased the chocolate liquor to make it more bitter. They added oat flour, which created a dense, dry texture with an unpleasant aftertaste. The mixture was so thick it could not be poured into molds at all. Every single bar had to be pressed in by hand. The factory workers at Hershey's reportedly hated making them. The resulting product delivered 600 calories in a 4-ounce brick that soldiers described as nearly impossible to bite into without a knife. The instructions recommended eating the bar slowly over the course of thirty minutes, or dissolving it in water as a drink. Most soldiers said they would rather have had the boiled potato. The Army ordered 90,000 bars for field testing in 1937. They worked. By the time the United States entered the war in 1941 Hershey's was producing the D ration at extraordinary scale. Before the war ended, the company had produced more than three billion bars. The soldiers nicknamed them Germany's secret weapon, partly because of their effect on digestive systems, partly because they were so bad that trading them to civilians who had never encountered them was considered something of a scam. The D ration bar also survived in the most literal sense possible. In 1943 Louis Zamperini, an Olympic distance runner and Army Air Corps lieutenant, survived 47 days adrift on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean after his aircraft crashed, sustained in part by the few D ration bars he had on board. His story is the subject of Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 book Unbroken. Hershey produced a second bar for the Pacific Theater in 1943 called the Tropical Chocolate Bar, designed to withstand temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It tasted slightly better than the D ration and was immediately nicknamed by soldiers the dysentery bar, because it was the only thing they could tolerate when they had dysentery. By the time the war ended Hershey had received five Army-Navy Excellence in Production awards. The chocolate industry had argued successfully that candy was an essential war material rather than a luxury, and won. The precedent that established chocolate as a mass market, everyday food for ordinary Americans rather than an occasional luxury was set partly in the factory lines at Hershey, Pennsylvania between 1937 and 1945. M&Ms were also invented during this period, specifically because Forrest Mars wanted to create chocolate that could be included in military rations without melting. The hard candy shell was the solution to exactly the same problem Hershey was trying to solve with the D ration bar. Mars got an exclusive military contract and M&Ms went to war first before they went to the general public. The entire modern American candy industry has roots in the specific logistical problems of feeding soldiers in extreme conditions, where survival over taste was a must. © Eats History #archaeohistories
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@SalvadorDafti “Unreleased treasures”: spot on. Down In The Flood is one of my favourite Dylan recordings.
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Bob Dylan - Greatest Hits, Vol. 2
My album of the day. An almost impossibly good collection handpicked and sequenced by the man himself. Signature hits, deeper cuts, some unreleased treasures. A genuine display of greatness from just one decade.
1971.
🎧 I Shall Be Released
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Ok, here's something I want to vent about:
@Microsoft how many more fucking times am I going to see the screen‽
I've had this computer for years, and you keep wanting me to "set it up" again after updates
I don't want M365
I don't want Office
I don't want OneDrive
I don't want to have to have a Microsoft account just to log into my computer
Let my computer just be *MY* damn computer. Because at this rate, as soon as SteamOS works with Intel and Nvidia, I'm ditching windows on all my machines. This is ridiculous. My computer was already set up the first time I set it up when it was still on Windows 10 a few years ago.
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@SamanthaKolber “Very unique” is an instant disqualification by itself.
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@batcountry1980 I can see why you’d say that, but I can’t resist it.
More ham than Mattesons.
Camper than Milletts.
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@john_p_d It’s a song I’ve grown to appreciate more as the years have gone on. But it’s still near the bottom of Beatles songs for me.
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You ever have a moment where you could swear that Some Other Guy is on a Beatles album? It seems like it should be one of their classic covers. It’s on Live at the BBC, but It’s that Cavern footage that’s lodged it right in the brain. And to think, we got Mr Moonlight…
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@jhendersonYT Wodehouse endearingly acknowledged this, in the preface of “Summer Lightning”.
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Reading a lot of Wodehouse these days. The books are all the same. I do not mind, I just keep reading.
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Call me an old curmudgeon; but so far, I haven’t seen Artemis 2 do anything significant that Apollo 8 didn’t do 58 years ago…
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@marcusash @pavandavuluri this is exactly the kind of thing I had hoped your recently announced new approach would be putting a stop to.
Teeth-clenchingly annoying.
Windows Central@WindowsCentral
Microsoft is testing a new default behavior for Edge that will automatically launch the app every time you start up your PC. The latest Edge Beta build now includes a banner that warns "Edge now launches when you sign-in to Windows," which appears to be something you must opt-out of rather than opt-in. While you've always been able to manually set Edge to open at login, it's never been pushed as the default behavior, until now. The good news is you can disable this behavior if it does appear on your PC. windowscentral.com/microsoft/wind…
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Q: what comes out worse than generative AI content?
A: generative AI content produced by a committee
Satya Nadella@satyanadella
New in M365 Copilot: Council. You can run multiple models on the same prompt at the same time, so you can see where they align and diverge, and understand what each adds.
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@JVMonte2 I also turned down a corporate hospitality ticket to see Genesis in Twickenham, 2007. Still in two minds about that one.
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@JVMonte2 In the 2010s, I developed a habit of buying tickets and not going. Eventually, I stopped buying. The only no-show I really regret is Wayne Shorter, 2016. I’d just taken my son to see rugby in Cardiff and it left me too tired to schlep to/from London. Should have made the effort.
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@WonderAmericana Frank Robbins’s work on The Shadow is among my favourite comic book art ever, by anyone
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Frank Robbins was a very controversial choice to take over for Mike Kaluta's 70s The Shadow run. When i was a kid, I didn't like the change ... now, I see Robbins really brought something strange and wonderful to the comic book.
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@thewritertype From 2027, you will also get advertising even if you do subscribe to the premium service
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You didn't lose an hour when the clocks went forward. The hour is stored securely in a giant hourglass by qualified timelords and will be returned to you later this year. NB: the hour that is returned to you will contain advertising unless you subscribe to the premium service.
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@batcountry1980 Saw Bowie touring this one. I really liked the record, but it was great to hear that tight, slick band doing some of the earlier, less commercial material.
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I am a fan of the guise adopted on Let’s Dance, and the sound Bowie shapes. He’s clearly having fun, and if anyone deserved to make some serious coin from their endeavours, it’s him. The sequencing doesn’t do the album any favours, though. It’s not that there aren’t good songs throughout. But opening with that mammoth trilogy of almighty pop gems sets a serious moonlight, sorry, momentum, that the record never quite catches up with again. Still, I do love how Bowie just decides “now I’m going to be a bright, shiny, massive unit shifting, MTV-conquering pop star” and then clicks his fingers and does it, just to show how easy he could.
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@The_Pequod_ When this was published, I’d recently been enjoying a Pynchon binge - Vineland, V, Lot 49 - so I bought it as soon I could. Bailed after 50 pages. It was like trying to read fog.
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