Astral Codex Ten

World War II

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World War II

Article

World War II is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between March 09, 2021 and August 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “after WWII”; “until the collapse of the European colonial era after World War II”; “World War II happened after”. It most often appears alongside France, Japan, United States.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
Do I believe they have a tendency to generally make things better? I'm not sure. One thing I'm still chewing over was a throwaway line in the paper saying that of course getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth, look at Japan and Germany after WWII. The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.
Inline links: 4, 5
Zeihan explains World War II in a few pages, the message of which is America’s near invincibility. Some of his assertions may have been a surprise to people at the start of the war, and they certainly made me pause (“Because of American participation the war’s outcome was never in doubt”), but the story he tells about its result are convincing. He cites America’s 6,800 vessel navy at the end of the war (up from less than 400 at the war’s start), over 1,000 of which were “major surface and submarine combatants,” and the sunken remnants of every other major naval force, other than the UK’s, which itself needed American support to operate outside of Europe. The result “was the single greatest concentration of power that the world had ever seen.” When the war was won and America was left standing as the undisputed heavyweight, what would it do?
The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, which concluded with the Americans intentionally and publicly humiliating the English and French by withdrawing post–World War II recovery aid and spearheading international opposition, was the most visible manifestation of the Americans driving home just who was in charge. Over the next generation every significant European colony got its independence. The Americans didn’t take any of them over, because it didn’t need them. Its goal was to break the European hold over the world and make the European powers dependent upon the Bretton Woods system.
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
In the second world war, we no longer viewed war as inevitable or normal, but we had yet to build infrastructure and institutions, such as the sanctions regimes and "outcasting", as H&S call it, that we would use to respond to a country invading another. Many countries also had yet to fully internalize the idea that war was illegal, or imagine what that meant they should do about it when someone broke the Pact. Today we have those institutions, though they are far from perfect. Some of them seem thoroughly broken, like the UN Security Council, others are creaky with disuse, and some, like individually targeted financial sanctions, are brand new and may turn out to be more effective than what we had before.
It had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
World War I happened before the Peace Pact, while World War II happened after, so one of the major differences between them could be the Pact, and H&S claim that it is. I’ve often assumed a false equivalence between them, that I notice others share. They're both World Wars, after all, and Germany's the bad guy in both cases. Our brains like to make morality plays out of the silliest little things, so why not enormous monumental ones too? The US and Germany were on the opposite sides in both wars, and Germany was evil in II, so clearly Allies good, Axis bad, right?
Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero
February 07, 2023 · Original source
This is also how I feel about that one woman who donated her hair and it got used to make World War II instruments. It’s a cute story, but before you talk about how underrecognized and underappreciated she is and how this is an affront to all women everywhere, do remember that World War II was also the time where millions of people volunteered to go to horrible foreign countries where they would probably get killed. I think medicine is like this too.
Inline links: that one woman who donated her hair and it got used to make World War II instruments
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
Inline links: Etirabys, clarifies two additional points, Garrett Jones says, Related quote:
Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
March 09, 2023 · Original source
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links for July 2024
July 24, 2024 · Original source
18: Related: the obsolete anti-malaria drug mepacrine has an odd side effect: it turns your skin yellow. During World War II, some American spies in China would take mepacrine to blend in. And more interesting facts about WWII US spies in China here:
Inline links: would take mepacrine to blend in, here
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
Pursuit of efficiency: As women entered the workforce en masse in the postwar era, the pool of hours available to be spent on domestic labor like cooking shrank. As much as any dishwasher or washing machine, convenience foods are labor-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies for the home. This last factor is the only one that can explain the continued development of instant mashed potato technology. There were no potato-flaking interests during the war to have inertia; the instant mashed potatoes are not superior to their fresh antecedents; there was no ingrained consumer preference for an instant mashed potato product. It is only the desire to reduce time spent on food prep that could create “better instant mashed potatoes” as a commercially viable R&D space in the 1950s. The other factors contributed to the unique awfulness of my father’s instant mashed potatoes, though. Another WWII technological innovation, the cavity magnetron used in radar installations, led directly to the invention of the home microwave oven which began to proliferate widely in the 1970s. The microwave supercharged all “convenience food” trends, shortening not just prep time but cooking time as well. Uneven heating is hardly a concern when you can speed up your meals by a factor of ten. Meanwhile, the existing postwar status of margarine and skim milk was greatly enhanced by the dietary fat scare of the 1980s and 1990s. These products displaced butter and whole milk as health-conscious consumers sought to eliminate saturated fats from their diets in a doomed effort to stave off the incipient obesity epidemic. My parents, both already primed to accept these imitative products by my grandparents’ wartime preference formation, exclusively purchased margarine and skim milk for the household once they got married. And, pressed for time with two jobs and two kids, they frequently purchased instant mashed potatoes as well. And cooked them in the microwave. What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted with desiccated flakes, real milk with a thin byproduct, real butter with refined vegetable oil, real mashing with the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame with microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained. Yet because the name was the same, my father still believed he was eating the same dish my grandma made, the same dish his ancestors ate in Ireland, the same dish Glasse wrote about a quarter millennium ago. The appeal to him was undiminished. His body ate the slurry, but his mind still ate the maſhed potatoes of his youth. My World is Built on Lies In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand happening in this Reddit post title.1 The phrasing implies that chuño resembles modern instant mashed potatoes in some way, that instant mashed potatoes are in some sense continuous with indigenous ways of potato-knowing. But there is no continuity of process, because the way chuño is created has no particular commonalities with the Philadelphia Cook beyond the removal of moisture. There is no continuity of form, for chuño actually looks like this: (source) And there is no continuity of purpose, either. To the Andean peoples, chuño was the only way of ensuring that their potato crops would be available well into the future. In America, our indigenous way of achieving this potato security is the entire miracle of modern agriculture and food distribution. I don’t need to stomp on freeze-dried potatoes in the Altiplano to make sure I’ll have access to potato nutrients next year. I just have to rely on the continued existence of Idaho and Target. No, despite what this redditor would like to believe, the instant mashed potato serves some other purpose. That purpose is illuminated by the second rhetorical sleight of hand in the Reddit post, the one occurring on the box, in the form of the offset between the yellow lower-case “Instant” and the white majuscule “MASHED POTATOES”. “These are fundamentally maſhed potatoes,” this typography lies, “that happen to have been given the quality of ‘instant’”. But they’re not. They’re a different thing entirely, a completely new evolutionary lineage of potato preparation that’s called “instant mashed potatoes” even though they’ve never been mashed. They are as distinct from Glasse’s maſhed potatoes as chuño is, but they masquerade as being the same, because that is their purpose - the fulfillment of a psychological need to consume something resembling the classic dish of “mashed potatoes” with slightly less effort than that dish requires. This is a pedantic distinction - but it’s a distinction that had a big impact on my culinary life, because I believed the lie. My mental category of “mashed potatoes” was hijacked by this impostor and it made me think, for years and years, that I hated something that I actually would have liked all along. My preference formation was distorted by this warped, hyper-optimized fulfillment of my father’s crystallized preference. The expedient way to fulfill one generation’s desire locked the next generation out of experiencing that desire at all. At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers. Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps: Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Inline links: this post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GFq8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee286622-7cfd-45fa-b18e-6fc06b9fea81_739x919.png, 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dL21!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f7f74da-27ee-4ffa-8d76-ea9fa3853394_1280x855.png, source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source
These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source