Fair warning: This is way too long and fundamentally way too trivial to bother with. Given all the urgent stuff going on in the world, Megan McArdle hardly deserves anyone’s attention. I’m just posting this to clear my hard drive and brain of a bit of unfinished business. Plus I think I promised several times to post on Megan McArdle’s response to my post on the serial factual errors in her writing on the history of innovation as seen in the American kitchen.
So by all means, walk on by if you’ve had enough McArdle (I have, and won’t be going to that well again for a while) — but if you want some smack talking and the odd bit of fact, jump the jump and join me.
First, just to catch up with the action: I’ve had prior occasion to think of this list of officers’ fitness reports in the context of the writer in question. The title of this post refers to the twelfth item on that tally, but many others apply, I think. Pick your favorites in the comment thread.
In her response, McArdle was particularly stung, I believe (because of her link to it), by a Wall Street Journal blog’s summary of the Krugman-Cowen-McArdle-Levenson sequence.
Thus provoked, she was then moved to produce an 2,300 word justification of her claims, on which mastication I will now comment. (That noun chosen because being attacked by McArdle always reminds me of Denis Healey’s marvelous description of being attacked in debate by the Tory politician Sir Geoffrey Howe: it is “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”)
I’ve got to say I am a bit resentful here. I’m the one supposed to stupify my antagonists with posts rivaling War and Peace for length if in no other aesthetic category, and here she comes stealing onto my patch.*
Ah well.
McArdle begins well, at least for the case I’m trying to argue, setting out on her journey of redemption with perhaps the most revealing and humiliating sentence I’ve read on any blog:
“It’s certainly possible that I got something wrong in that post; I am of course not a historian of kitchens.”
There’s a perhaps even more self-diminishing line that follows: “But neither is Mr. Levenson, and I can’t plead guilty to the offenses I am charged of based on his evidence.”
I like to think that I’ve left seventh grade far behind me, and so see no need for comment here — beyond that we are dealing with someone who really needs to think some more about the argument from authority.
Once she gets past that reflex of pique, she answers my criticisms with three basic types of deflection.
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First, she tries to shift between categories of existence, availability and penetration to suggest that whatever actually occurred, the specific appliances she cites weren’t really part of the 50s landscape. This is nonsense, as I’ll detail a bit below.
Second, she tries a bit of indirection suggesting that some of my examples of her errors aren’t really that significant, because, in essence she knows better.
Third she uses what is perhaps her most powerful (and often used) trick when cornered. She declares that she was talking about something else that whatever it was she clearly got wrong — and when seen in light of that other issue, everything she said becomes both correct and humiliatingly more insightful than whatever her critics might have argued — or, as she wrote, it surprised her that “someone who teaches science writing at MIT is so unfamiliar with the containerization revolution that he can mistake “container” for “refrigerated.” It was ever thus: when cornered, she resorts to the ad hominem, hoping that the insult will distract from the failed argument behind it.
On tactic number one: McArdle had originally claimed that 50s kitchens did not contain, “electric drip coffee brewers, stand mixers, blenders, food processors, or crock pots.” I countered by documenting the history of stand mixers (sold to the public in 1918, widely disseminated in cheaper models through the 20s and 30s); blenders (invented in the twenties, sold in mass quantities in the 30s) and of electric coffee makers, common since the thirties.
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In response to this impressive record of error, McArdle complains I should have understood that what she meant was not that the 50s kitchen lacked this or that, but that it did not possess versions of these inventions that would have been acceptable to one Megan McArdle:
I thought it was obvious why I was specifying drip coffeemakers: at least for people from my generation, percolated coffee tastes horrible. I do not think of percolators as drip coffee equivalents, I think of them as something close to crime against humanity.
Note at least three things: first and least, she’s simply trying to baffle with bullsh*t, replying to a claim unmade. As it happened, as examples of pre-1950 electric coffee makers, I offered not percolaters, but the vacuum coffee maker, a very different technology that the steampunk caffeinistas among us rate highly. These were indeed generally available in the thirties and are still prized.
Second, and really all in all, recall that the theme of all this is innovation. The question she herself raised was whether or not there were in the fifties the means to automate a common kitchen task, brewing up a cup of coffee?
Well, yes, there were, as she in fact admits. Which is what she hopes to keep you from noticing when she decides to wrangle over whether she would actually drink such brew.
Which leads me to this: it did give me pleasure to read the sentence above, because in a sense it captures all you ever need to know about McArdle. She decides the facts worth knowing by a simple criterion: do they meet her exquisite standards.
Percolators? Get me The Hague on line one!
Moving on: for an example of the next of McArdle’s favorite tricks to hide her failings, check out this attempt to persuade the reader that she may have been wrong … but not really:
As for the rest, my understanding is that the stand mixer was not widely dispersed in American households until the early 1960s; the stand mixer invented in 1919 was commercial grade; the home versions appeared in the 1930s and sold well, but were somewhat derailed by the dearth of consumer production during World War II. Of course, if anyone has data better than I was able to find, I am open to correction.
Again, errors, minor, but still there: according to the Kitchenaid company the commercial stand mixer was first produced (not invented) in 1915, and the first home models were sold in 1919. Perhaps McArdle may asssert that by “commercial grade” she means “home,” but I think a reasonable person would find that disengenuous at best.
She admits, though that mixers sold well — Sunbeam, makers of cheaper models than Kitchenaid, topped 1 million sold before World War II. But, argues McArdle, she’s still right, despite all this, writing that “some of this, however, may simply be an argument about what constitutes ‘common.'”
I didn’t think she loved Bill Clinton so much that she’d expropriate his “defintion of ‘is'” defense so readily.
She goes through a similar exercise for the blender, and then concludes that after all, maybe she and I were both right: “I lean towards requiring some amount of broad diffusion, [of appliances] but I can see the argument for the other side–indeed, that’s what I was getting at in the post, that the definition of a “1950s kitchen” is tricky.
Well, I guess.
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Just to be as blunt as possible: by “common” or “broad diffusion” she seems to mean whatever number is just a little bit higher than those actually use in the 1950s. That’s a child’s bob and weave, not an argument from anyone who wishes to be taken seriously.
Oy. This will never end, will it — which is, of course, McArdle’s true genius. She throws up such an endless spray of word salad that actually pulling apart each and every one of her distortions, errors, and outright lies takes much longer than anyone wants to either write or read. So I’ll just give the slightest of glosses on the third attempt McArdle makes to defend herself, in her discussion of the emergence of container shipping.
As noted above, she does so in a way that emphasizes her mock horror that a professor at MIT should mistake refrigeration for containerization– which would indeed have been a simpleton’s error had it been made.
But the problem is that the discussion was, in McArdle’s own framing, about whether or not people in the 50s had access to fresh produce:
I don’t believe that they have gone without fresh produce for six to eight months at a time, as my mother did in her childhood–and was told to be grateful for the frozen vegetables which hadn’t been available when her mother was young….
Is the shift to flash frozen produce greater, or less great, than the shift from flash frozen to the fresh produce made possible by falling trade barriers, rising air travel, and the advent of container shipping?
McArdle’s gaming the question here of course, asserting her assumptions as the answer: fresh produce in her telling could only arrive on American tables through her triad of trade (which, I guess, could only have happened post 1960, to the great surprise of the United Fruit Company and Dole), air travel (fresh fish was delivered by air to Moscow in 1945!) and containers, a genuinely post 1960 innovation, (one that I actually witnessed transforming my home town; I was a child when San Francisco’s docks died and the upstart Port of Oakland’s container terminal came to dominate freight traffic to the Bay Area).
But if you were to make the mistake of taking McArdle’s question more seriously than she herself does, then what we want to know is what innovations were most important in delivering fresh food to distant markets. And there, the answer you find again and again in histories of food was rolling refrigeration, which, as I gabbled on at length last time, is a development that has a history in the US dating to before the Civil War. Last time, I talked of meat — but just in case you were wondering, the first American shipment of fresh produce — strawberries –rode the rails of the Illinois Central in 1867, which is a factoid that makes this quote from McArdle at once pathetic and telling:
When my mother was growing up, it was theoretically possible to buy fresh strawberries or asparagus in December, shipped in a refrigerated boxcar from a hothouse or maybe California. But I doubt the grocers in her small town would have stocked them, and if they did, my grandparents, who were solidly middle class but whose memories of the Great Depression died hard, would never have dreamed of buying them…
Yup. We’re back to that again. This or that is unpossible because I or mine can’t imagine it.
And so on and on. There’s more, but I’m done. There isn’t time in the day to fisk out every last bit of nonsense showering forth from McArdle’s keyboard.
So I’ll just leave you with one last thought.
As in my earlier post, let me explicitly call out The Atlantic. For all that there are good people doing good work over there — for one example, have you seen the folks posting at Fallow’s blog lately? They’re going great guns — the bottom line is this:
A major media operation resembles an old fashioned World War II convoy, at least in one respect: just as those gaggles of vessels traversing the North Atlantic couldn’t travel faster than the slowest ship, over time, publications can’t be seen as more reliable than their least trustworthy writer.
Just sayin.
*Perhaps it’s because the indictment hit just a little too close to home, and she has opted for one of the traditional tactics of those in peril with the truth: “When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, attack the plaintiff.”
Images: Georg Flegel, Pantry by Candlelight, c. 1630-1635.
Ivana Kobilca, Coffee Drinker 1888.
Willem Frederik van Royen, The Carrot, 1699.
gbear
OK, I didn’t bother reading the post, but that carrot is just damned weird.
Tom Levenson
@gbear: delicious, I would say.
Pooh
Handwaving defense commences in 5…4…3…
Ija
Why even bother? She’s incorrigible and unshameable. She will just go on her merry ways. Just ignore her.
MattR
I first saw that list of British sailor evaluations quite a while ago as either teachers’ evaluations of their students or employers’ evaluations of their workers. But it is still quite funny. Especially when you see one that fits perfectly for someone you know.
Yutsano
She has you so verklempt your S key got stuck.
/pedant
I mostly stay for the art anyway. The carrot picture is kinda creepy and awfully modern for 1699.
Wag
Alon the lines of the British Naval quotes above is an actual letter of recommendation stiffer by one of my partners:
“When you get to know Dr Smith the way we do, you will understand why we feel about him the way we do”
Nothing more. Nothing less
One could easily write the same letter for ms McArdle.
jk
@Tom Levenson:
Tom, thanks from the bottom of my heart for taking on the insufferable and nauseating commentaries of Megan McArdle. You have a real knack for picking outstanding paintings to accompany your posts.
Penon
I think Tom should sleep with Megan and get this over with once and for all.
JGabriel
@gbear:
That’s our Speaker of the House, you commie!
.
Church Lady
Please, God, I beg of you and DougJ, just stop. It’s not good for either of you and it’s not good for us, the abused readers. Just. Stop. The. Insanity.
Yutsano
@Church Lady: I’m thinking an intervention for Tom on McMegan and interventions for John and DougJ re: Sully are in order here. The obsession has now entered into unhealthy territory.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
McMegan fatigue; I haz it. Thank you though, TL, for honoring your promise of this post: it was wonderful. And please observe that, unlike McMegan, I know the use of a semicolon. She has delusions of adequacy, and the Atlantic suffers for them. As someone said at OTB:
Church Lady
@Yutsano: Almost as unhealthy as Sullivan’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s icky girl parts.
gbear
@Tom Levenson: It’s got shifty eyes and a pen-is. Too weird.
mythago
That’s one straight out of The Art of Deception: never, ever admit you were wrong, and if utterly cornered, declare that you deliberately took a weak position in order to illustrate a larger truth.
JoshA
I for one will acknowledge that I enjoy The McArdle Takedowns, even if they are ultimately inconsequential since she’ll never change. I still find some joy in seeing a fool’s nose rubbed in their utter foolishness.
Church Lady
@gbear: I’m glad I’m not the only person that thought the carrot looked like it had a P**is. It also has seems to have a few other appendages in that region and a tail as well. Or maybe it’s just in the eye of the beholder. I think I need a drink.
piratedan
@Ija: I dunno, sometimes when you find someone in a position to influence millions of readers and you determine that their opinion boils down to “because I say so” you can feel quite justified on calling them out on it. Then, when you call them out for being lazy, ill-informed and being generally snarky without license, and prove to the audience and their own management that this person is doing a less than stellar job then maybe you get that slacker fired and someone else who does perform due diligence will replace them and the conversation will move forward instead of having to have folks from around the country point out what a shitty job your columnists are doing….. just sayin’ If we want better discourse, then it is up to us to demand a better level of it and expose folks who are posuers and get them ridiculed and off the stage.
Bob
So tired of Megan’s horrific writing and tenuous grasp of facts (and her exhaustive all-day research on kitchens!)
eemom
speaking of the unhealthy obsessions of our FPers, scooooooooop:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02/home-news.html
My $$ sez at least 73 posts tomorrow devoted to this earth-shattering news.
And that carrot is effed. up.
Brian Schmidt
I’d describe her coffee-maker argument as the Unstated Reservation Defense: “when I said X, I really meant X with the following reservations….”
It’s a typical bad argument, like the better-known Slippery Slope, and the reason why they’re both useful arguments for people who have a weak case is that they’re not completely wrong arguments, they’re just usually-wrong arguments.
eemom
more:
This from a guy who doesn’t have a comments section.
Yes, I can certainly see why people spend their lives hanging on his every word.
jwb
@piratedan: Nice in theory. I haven’t seen any evidence that the pundit world works that way.
hamletta
I love the carrot! I want a print for my kitchen!
Oh, and McMegan is an idjit. My mom got a Sunbeam stand mixer for her wedding along with the then-latest edition of the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. This occurred long enough ago that the latter includes a plethora of “regrettable food.”
jwb
@eemom: Well, that explains a lot. Sullivan’s extended “illness” now seems a cover story. And the attitude he had when he came back—he was holed up in planning sessions with the Daily Beast folks. That would make anyone cranky. The question: was he pushed out or was he lured away? Does anyone care?
Crusty Dem
tl;dr. Ok, I did read, and mostly enjoy, but it was still too long. The best retort is a simple requote (from her original article):
There was one completely accurate statement in her first article:
This is indisputably true.
piratedan
@jwb: oops you’re right, there I was thinking that we still had some vestiges of a meritocracy in place.
James E Powell
While I do not believe there was some prior golden age of journalism, I have the sense that the major publications abandoned the standard of factual accuracy in the late 90s. The habit of printing rumors as fact, adopted for all matters concerning the Clintons, was expanded for the War on Gore, then generalized for all matters.
Villago Delenda Est
The problem, for me, at least, with McArdle is her pathological dishonesty. She has all the intellectual integrity of Joseph Goebbels. Or Karl Rove. That is, none at all.
Nylund
For two things (coffee and fruit), her argument is essentially “The McArdles wouldn’t do that, so it doesn’t count.”
This isn’t the first time she’s done that. She bases quite a bit of “analysis” off the tastes and lifestyles of her family (be it, present or past).
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Church Lady:
Naah, I happen to enjoy the mash up! It’s like watching someone without a blindfold smacking a pinata over and over again, yet never breaking it open. You just know that fucker is hollow yet it’s impervious to any blow landed on it.
I doubt it has candy in it but I want to stick around in case it ever breaks open. Whatever is in it ought to be worth the wait to see…lol!
Megan McEstimate will never fail, she can only be failed. The fact that it happens every time she barfs up another worthless pile of words escapes her, every time.
Because she’s blinded by her brilliance.
asiangrrlMN
Love, love, love the carrot picture. Really love it. And, Tom, I know that in the grand scheme of things, battling MM2’s inanity is pretty low in order of importance, but I really enjoy the way you decisively excoriate her as you do here. As a long-winded blogger, I also appreciate your thoroughness. This post was delicious. As is the carrot painting.
@Yutsano: How you doing, hon? I iz sick. I iz sleeping a lot. I iz going to bed soon. You still have a job so you can keep me in the manner to which I’m accustomed?
Anya
I thought the same thing. Clearly, the asthma thing was just a cover. He was meeting with Tina Brown and her team, probably negotiating.
He probably jumped ship. He said he admires Diller.
JWL
Levinson: I’ve re-read it.
What is the point of your post?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN:
For at least one more week. But I’m not holding any hope that a deal gets done here. Too many variables and wild cards can occur by Friday. Of course watch they’ll pass it Saturday and it’ll all be for naught.
It is, however, supposed to snow tonight. And stick. So I might get tomorrow off.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
I for one am glad you posted this Tom because I read this on m-w. com today:
Mumpsimus: a stubborn person who insists on making an error in spite of being shown that it is wrong.
Naturally, I thought of…
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Snow. I wants more. You haz it. You give to me, and then I don’t care so much if you lose your job. Well, I do for your sake. I can’t believe the government is actually going to shut down. Didn’t we already DO this? Sigh.
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Perfect!
Lit3Bolt
There’s a reason Andrew Sullivan and not Megan McAddled is leaving The Atlantic. Just saying. But hey, if she wants to be the conservative token female, there’s always a job slot for that somewhere on some rag.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Here’s the thing that gets me more than anything: I don’t think Boehner has nearly as much control over the situation as Newt did. When this happened under the Clenis, Newt made it a personal fight Boehner just seems like he’s along for the ride and not actually leading his caucus. I’ll laugh my tail off if Nancy SMASH!! actually gets this all done.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
asiangrrlMN: Hope you are feeling better. Last I saw, you were crashing at the unlikely hour of 10pm.
SRW1
@eemom:
My god, Sully is abandoning the mothership because of McMegan. She’s going down. Down, I tell you!
jwb
@Yutsano: Unfortunately, I also doubt Boehner’s ability to deliver much of his caucus. He probably has enough to carry this first continuing resolution across with Democratic support, but I think the vote will expose just how weak he is, and he may opt not to do it just to avoid having that show.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Agreed with you on the Oompa Loompa. He doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing, and the rest of the GOP Representatives are just realizing how inept he is. If anyone can get ‘er did, it’s Nancy SMASH!
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Thanks. I’m still sick. I got up at seven-thirty in the morning, and then took a nap from 4:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. I’ll be in bed by two.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: If I could I’d load you up on a shit ton of Jewish penicillin and tuck you in with the familiars. Hopefully they can spread a little healing energy your way.
And they wanted the Big Orange Satan in charge mostly because he is a drunk idiot. He’d go along with any and all instructions with little or no question. He wasn’t selected for his whipping skills. And Cantor is such a whiny little wuss that he might as well just stay home every vote. They already have shown a tough enough time corralling the teabaggers. I highly doubt they’ll figure it out suddenly in the next few days.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I can’t sleep with my familiars because I’m allergic. I do nap with them, though.
Boehner, I realize that, but did they really think he’d be THIS inept? I mean, they unleashed the massive stupidity and hatefulness, which is not easily reined in. They thought they could control the ‘baggers, but the ‘baggers control THEM.
Here is my silly post on what Obama can do to get the Republicans under control.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: That post could be ever evolving. I know you’re smart enough to come up with more than three examples like that. But you are under the weather, so it’s very good as it is.
And yes Boehner is that inept. Hell he couldn’t even save an earmark for his own constituency. THE FUCKING SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, THIRD IN LINE FOR THE PRESIDENCY, COULDN’T KEEP HIS OWN DAMN FUCKING EARMARK. Have you heard of that happening EVER??
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I know. I will update the post when I feel moar better. I just haven’t blogged in a few days and wanted to see if I could do a shortie (for me, anything under 1,500 words is a shortie) because I’m working on being more concise.
Waitagoddamn minute. I didn’t hear about the Oompa Loompa not holding onto his earmark. Linkie?
TenguPhule
Like all large herds of dumb animals, the GOP needs to be thinned occasionally to remove those least able to survive in this quaint place called reality.
I recommend Hellfire missiles at 400 meters.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Crusty Dem: I can think of one other retort: Her grandparents were cheapskates.
TenguPhule
Megan McArdle, always wrong, always denying it.
We can shorten every post ever about that hack to that one sentence.
asiangrrlMN
@TenguPhule: That’s the drastic attempt at culling the herd. Otherwise known as the last resort.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
1. I don’t know why The Woman Formerly Known As Jane Galt didn’t point out that neither fresh herbs nor gourmet cheeses existed in the 1950’s.
At least, HER mother didn’t buy them. Or, if she did, they didn’t taste very good.
Ms. Galt goes Louis XIV one better “l’univers c’est moi.” If she doesn’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t exist.
2. One of the issues you didn’t raise is her use of the “Ann Althouse Defense”: I didn’t say anything incorrect– you misread my words because you’re mentally deficient.
Whether you believe in Contra Proferentem (the law principle holding that an ambiguous term in a contract shall be construed against the party that included it), or just think a writer ought to be responsible for the clarity, precision and correctness of their work, it’s a ludicrous notion. A mild example being:
“I thought it was obvious why I was specifying drip coffeemakers…”
In reality, it isn’t. Her second and third examples are “stand mixers” and “blenders”, which were both being sold a generation before the 1950’s.
Had she been citing “appliances that produce high-quality food”, she wouldn’t have included her fifth example (“crock pots”).
Crock pots– most of which still lack any type of temperature control (other than “Hi” or “Low”), timed start or automatic shutoff– cook food as capably as a percolator makes coffee.
If you have a basic model, there is only one difference between using a crock pot and putting a casserole dish into an oven: The oven lets you set a precise temperature.
But, if challenged on this point, Ms. Galt would say “of course I meant the programmable crock pot”– even though most of the models in American homes aren’t programmable, and the percentage of 2010 homes with a programmable crock-pot is quite possibly lower than 1950’s homes with stand mixers.
3. As you say, her standard behavior is to make false statements, deny that they’re false and (if pressed) cloud the issue. Like most ultraconservatives, she’s correctly figured out that (a) most readers don’t have the energy to keep cutting through her deception and (b) she doesn’t have to be factual because her employer won’t call her on it.
In other words, that market forces really don’t work.
D. Cloyce Smith
“House-appliances of today … are little better than they were 50 years ago” –William James in 1906 (See: http://bit.ly/dLY5F2)
The entire argument seems silly and trivial to me because I think that both Cowen and Krugman (whose work is usually more thoughtful) base it on their arbitrary “Kitchen Test.” William James made exactly this same argument in 1906–but would any historically savvy person argue that there wasn’t any technological change during the last half of the nineteenth century? (Krugman, to his credit, admits, “you can overstate this case.” And he does.)
So while Levenson and McArdle argue over how we make our coffee or clean our homes, neither convinces me why it really is a sign of technology as a whole. Sure, Megan’s wrong about the innovation of kitchens. Is anyone surprised? But it seems to be today’s real innovations are in how we communicate and how we access information–and especially in how we think. And that’s where the Kitchen Test fails. A century from now (should we survive what we’re otherwise doing to this planet), our descendants will probably marvel over our current high-tech innovations in computing and communications in the same way we pay homage to the steam engine and the Wright Brothers.
Mark S.
I was poking around The Atlantic (boy they’ve dumbed that magazine down) and came across this:
It’s news to me that some people think you can’t cook with olive oil. Damn near every chef on Food Network uses it exclusively. Rachel Ray says “EVOO” about fifty times each show.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Here you be. Money quote is second paragraph:
Please note that GE has a large engine plant in Ohio.
TenguPhule
Well, when we have outright crooks like Walker saying “fuck you” to basic governence in favor of a full sell off to Koch, what else is left? They can’t even impeach these fuckers because of the old 27% which are party over country or humanity.
I do not see this ending any other way then in bloodshed.
Only one side wants to even try compromise and all it got was a bullet in return. With more threatened to come.
Yutsano
@Mark S.: That whole column is ten pounds of stupid in a five pound sack. I bet she’s French trained or else has worked in some of the crappiest kitchens in existence. But dirty little secret: the French use olive oil too, especially in Provence. Wherever she gained her food knowledge, I hope Mario Batali shames her into a wallflower.
D. Cloyce Smith
In my previous post, I should have pointed out that Williams James was quoting H. G. Wells when he made his argument about the lack of innovation in kitchens in 1906.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Mark S.: Amazing.
I’ll be 61 next week and I bought my first bottle of olive oil in the early 70s because I was curious about it. Who are these mysterious people who think you can’t cook with the stuff? And the snobbery about buying only Greek olive oil? Who cares where it was produced?
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Yutsano:”….The olive oil was used for everything: to cook with, to drizzle on salads, to rub on your skin if it was dry….”
I couldn’t help wondering where the Windex bottle was.
asiangrrlMN
@Mark S.: What the? I don’t cook, and even I know that olive oil is used to cook.
Yutsano
@opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland: If her son’s name is Nick I’m skeered.
There are flavor differences in olive oil just as in wine. But they’re usually subtle and for most American uses don’t matter one whit. That whole column is both snobbish and idiotic. It’s like she totally ignored that American food culture had changed in the past 20 years.
Comrade Kevin
@Mark S.: God damn, I have to show that to my brother, who’s a chef. He’d get a big laugh out of it.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Yutsano: I’d put that at closer to 30 years. Lots of foodies and experimentation in the 80s.
I went back forced myself to read the bit about olive oil and she did make a case for why she buys Greek, but she could just as easily buy California oil.
I liked your comment about ten pounds of stupid. Made me laugh.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
I’m sorry, but the world’s tallest female econoblogger was Maxine Udall. Check out her posts and weep for the fact that McFuckup blogged for The Atlantic and Maxine didn’t.
http://www.maxineudall.com
(Pun on Maximum Utility for you non-economists)
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Yutsano: You want a good laugh? The first thing I tried to make with olive oil was tacos. I fried the tortillas in the stuff, and it was very interesting.
I was in my early 20s, my mother was from the midwest so we didn’t grow up with either olive oil or garlic.. well, Mom discovered garlic in the 1960s, not long before I went off to college.
Yutsano
@opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland:
It’s an amazingly ignorant statement. They press perfectly good olive oils in Spain, Portugal, Provence, and Turkey as well. But reading that column you’d think they only came from Italy and Greece. Like olives only grow there as opposed to all over the Mediterranean. Hell I’d go out and buy her an Israeli oil just so she could choke on it.
Ailuridae
@Mark S.:
That piece is doubly awesome/awful. First the author is wrong that other cooks don’t use Extra Virgin Olive Oil exclusively. More importantly even Rachel Ray* realizes there are certain tasks (actually most but w/e) where EVOO is the least appropriate oil imaginable. Frying Chicken? Stir-fry? Sweating an onion? Etc Etc
*I used to eat at the HoJo’s that Rachel Ray worked at in HS nearly every Saturday morning. I’m skeptical she every worked there but my Dad and Uncle insist that she was there for most of the mid to late 80s. Who Knew?
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Yutsano: They use olive trees in freeway landscaping in Southern California. They grow anywhere with a Mediterranean climate. We had a Greek babysitter who used to cure her own olives from the trees in her back yard, in Southern California. She didn’t have a press or I suspect she would have made her own oil.
Ailuridae
@opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland:
I grew up in a restaurant/tourist town and never saw whole garlic at home. We had Italian American friends or I would have never seen it until I started working in local restaurant. My mom’s attempts at spaghetti and meatballs resembled dry ground beef hockey pucks floating in a soupy sea of tomato soup. lots of bay leaves.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Ailuridae: Haha! The first head of garlic I bought was in 1970, and I remember how shocked I was by the smell of raw garlic. I think Mom bought the powdered stuff.
My mom’s “spaghetti” was similar, a tomato sauce with meatballs poured over a type of noodle that was … I don’t know what it was but it wasn’t Italian, it wasn’t spaghetti noodles, something she said was sold as American noodles. Hers was almost more of a casserole dish, and pretty bland. My sister keeps asking me how to make it, probably because our dad is 92 and lives with her and he remembers it as something comforting.
Yutsano
@Ailuridae: Funniest conversation I ever had with the Dawg involved spaghetti. He said he liked it with lots of gravy. I was like, that’s weird, and he comes back with you’ve neer had gravy on spaghetti before? This goes back and forth like this for awhile (me thinking gravy is made from meat juices and stock thickened after a roast) until he explained to me back East gravy we call sauce over here. He didn’t let me forget that one for awhile.
@opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland: California olive oils are quite acceptable and very delicious. They are also much less expensive for Americans, so the olive oil snobbery gets even funnier. Hell even Giada uses California olive oils, and she’s about as Italian as you can get.
PurpleGirl
@Yutsano: “back East”. May I ask where “back East” is. Did he mean the East coast, because in NYC gravy meant brown stuff made from meat juices and in no Italian home would gravy mean tomato sauce.
Pat
So anyway, who are McArdle’s parents again? Or did she claw her way to her perch at the Atlantic?
Ash Can
This. Shame on The Atlantic for continuing to hold this poor little buffoon up for ridicule. It says nothing good about the people running that outfit that they would resort to something like this to attract attention to their publication. One can hardly fault Sullivan for jumping ship, and one wonders how the decent writers there, such as TNC and Fallows, put up with it.
sal
The traditional “intellectual conservative” defense: My facts may be wrong, but my point is correct. Corollary: as the facts clearly show.
Tom Johnson
I think we have in this post the apotheosis of blogging. Surely it is a prime example of the petty and useless mode of blog posting, the product of the equation (time) x (snot) = (5,000 words of righteous indignation).
Here we have the smallest of aspirations wrapped in obese and self-important prose. What makes it a real thing of beauty, though, is that the McArdle post it seeks to dismantle is, itself, thoroughly banal. Seriously: you’re disagreeing with the point that there are more appliances in kitchens today than there were 60 years ago? That isn’t transparently obvious to you?
As they say in television ads: wait! There’s more!
McArdle’s post was, in turn, a response to Krugman’s banal point that much as we might imagine change has been great in our lifetimes, think of the change our grandparents experienced! Automobiles! Refrigeration! Rural-fucking electrification!
That Krugman’s point — the thing that started all of this — is from a column that was, itself, 15 years old — giving the argument all the fierce urgency of debating whether the Mets should have traded Bobby Bonilla in 1995 — well, that just the icing on the cake.
This whole thing is an entirely masturbatory exercise that has nothing to with anything.
Xenos
@Pat: You don’t know? Her father made a fortune building public work projects, jobs he got through political connections. She then got a Chicago MBA, got fired from a series of business jobs, and then built a business as the ultracontrarian ‘Jane Galt’ in the early days of the internet. The woman is zero training as a journalist, zero self-knowledge, married the worst sort of Bushian think-tanking wanker for hire, and is incapable of shame.
Ash Can
@Tom Johnson: In the grand scheme of things, I for one am inclined to agree. The larger issue, however, is that a supposedly respectable publication has no problem either with producing such drek on a routine basis or with keeping such marginal talent on its payroll. Sure, lamenting the state of today’s mass media has been done to death as well, but being hit by glaring examples of this decline is a sure-fire way to get the cork of those of us who remember better. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at the clouds and shoo those damned kids off my lawn.
evap
I got a phone call from the Atlantic a couple of days ago asking me wouldn’t I please, pretty please, oh please please renew my subscription (I tried a free trial about a year ago). I told the person on the phone that as long as Megan McArdle was writing for them, I would never subscribe or buy the magazine. I hope that message got passed on (although I doubt it).
bemused
I love The Carrot & definitely want a print for my kitchen too. I like stuff on my walls that cause people to take closer look. A local water color artist reproduced a drawing for me from “The Illustrated Winespeak” Ronald Searle’s Wicked World of Winetasting. Searle matches overblown wine phrases such as ‘a little sullen’ and ‘has undergone noble rot’ with some amusing illustrations.
I had just been reading about the first modern kitchen, the Frankfurt kitchen, when this 50’s american kitchen blog tempest happened. I had found on NPR an article on the kitchen revolution with a video from 1955, A Word to the Wives, a 10 minute ad to show women all the latest modern kitchen conveniences and how to convince their husbands to upgrade. I was surprised to see Darren McGavin playing the role of one husband.
harlana
I always love the paintings! We have the same taste.
electricgrendel
I have to say- I love your tireless evisceration of the Moron McArdle. However, I would say that continuing to subject yourself to this stupidity is just too much to ask one of person. She’s never going to change. She’s like a child who will continue insisting that the imaginary purple rabbit ate all of the cookies, and there’s no way to disprove it because only se can see what the imaginary purple rabbit does. Nevermind she’s sitting in a pile of crumbles with a cookie in hand while telling you the lie.
And it isn’t that she fails to give a shit. She obviously does care. Otherwise she wouldn’t continue to respond. It’s like her wealth and nepotism has bought her this shiny car, but it’s a stick. And she’s sitting in the driveway wailing and grinding away on the clutch.
Peter A
@74 – “gravy” means “tomato sauce” in Italian American households in New Jersey, and maybe Staten Island, and nowhere else. I don’t recall anyone in my mother’s Italian American community in Connecticut saying “gravy” instead of sauce.
Jennifer
McMegan’s corollary takes on a familiar form: just as conservatism can never fail but only BE failed, McMegan can never be wrong – she can only BE wronged.
Bob
@electricgrendel
Don’t be silly. She wouldn’t even have the car in her driveway. It’d be stuck in Florida and she’d be unable to figure out how to register it.
MonkeyBoy
I think one of McArdle’s problems is a distinction between lower class and middle class. This distinction is usually quite fuzzy with a push since maybe the early 1900s to remove the shame of being in the lower class by moving the boundary downwards. These days it seems that if some tried to define “lower class” it would only consist of people on welfare.
A lot of McArdle’s argument seems to be that lower class grandparents living in the 1950s could not afford anything other than crappy kitchens while their middle class grandchildren now can.
What exactly is the distinction between lower class and middle class? One definition was that middle class families could afford servants to perform the drudge labor of household existence. Technology such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles came to reduce the need for servants but this ‘servant distinction’ still existed at least through the 1960s.
My GGrandmother who lived in Columbus Georgia during the 1950s and 60s was middle class in this sense – her husband had been an engineer for steel companies and she was left modestly well off at his death. She had a black housekeeper who was at her house daily. She didn’t know how to cook and refused to learn because that was beneath her.
These days, having permanent servants seems to be an upper class marker. I don’t know if there is any meaningful lower/middle distinction these days other than a wealth continuum. Though there exists a large difference between people in their willingness to pay other people to perform tasks they could maybe do themselves, and there still exists conspicuous use of ‘hired help’ to display social status – a role that ‘personal fitness trainer’ seems to fill more than actually being about fitness.
soonergrunt
I once saw the following written on a draft Relief For Cause NCOER in the National Guard:
“He is outstanding in his field. This is primarily due to his complete inability to land navigate with map/compass or GPS.”
Also,
“He has a unique interpretation of the word ‘punctual.’ Or he will later, should he bother to make it to formation.”
JPL
McMegan should add a headline to all her posts. Bullshit in. messier Bullshit out.
Tom, I’m shocked that a scientist from MIT could possibly know anything about a 50’s kitchen. hahaha
Persia
McArdle’s assertion that there was no fresh produce available to most people seems baffling at best. I hate to sound like a Real American(tm), but is backyard gardening– must less living near a damn farm– that foreign to her? Was this addressed somewhere in the initial post?
different church-lady
@Brian Schmidt: The problem isn’t whether the argument is “right” or “wrong”. The problem is, “Is the example a strong enough hangar to hold the coat you’re trying to put on it?”
In this case, having debates about the specific nature of how the essential oils are extracted from a roasted seed is completely beyond and beneath the point: she’s originally trying to claim that a 50’s kitchen wasn’t a gadgetland. She then cites examples that are faulty. She then makes a much more shaded description of her examples, and suddenly her wooden hangar is the cheap wire kind you get your shirts on from the dry cleaner’s, and her damn coat just bends the thing all to hell and falls on the closet floor.
So, yeah, fine, this kind of blender was or wasn’t available, and her mother did or didn’t have this or that kind of coffee pot, but it doesn’t damn matter: until you can convince us that — contrary to conventional wisdom, and the historical record — the 50s kitchen was not a playland of time-saving gadgetry of convenience, then Megan, your damn coat is lying on the closet floor, and no debates over the color the wire is gonna fix that.
different church-lady
@Tom Johnson:
In other words, it’s perfect material for the internet!
chopper
@Mark S.:
who the fuck cooks with extra virgin olive oil? what’s the point? all the extra nice nuances of the first pressing go to shit when you heat it up that much.
just use regular olive oil. it’s like making stew with a $100 bottle of red wine.
Susan of Texas
@Tom Johnson: This woman goes on CNN, CNBC, NPR and the BBC to support the people who created economic disaster. She’s a wingnut in Ivy League clothing, has a lot of respect and reach, and is dishonest and ruthless enough to be dangerous. And people forget that a few years ago she was treated with respect and deference by all our baby media stars.
Her current bad reputation didn’t just happen. People pushed back on the lies and after a long time the relentless mocking made it acceptable for the Juice Box Mafia to criticize her as well. The belief that fighting back is beneath one is a fatal mistake.
different church-lady
@different church-lady: To further belabor the analogy: the heart of the problem with McArdle’s response is that it amounts to “Shit, my coat is on the closet floor. I’d better try to convince my mother that I did use a wooden hanger, but the wood was faulty.”
You may now commence with the inevitable “Mommy Dearest” quotes.
different church-lady
@Susan of Texas:
different church-lady
@Susan of Texas:
You have described the arc that all media bullshitters trace through the sky: first the bullshit bedazzles, but then people start to notice the smell.
rockhopper
@Yutsano:
I’m sure it’s bad, bad form to delurk in order to get involved in a holy war, but my Brooklyn grandmothers have got your back (one was first-generation born here, the other made the trip over herself.)
Southern Beale
And there, the answer you find again and again in histories of food was rolling refrigeration …
Ah yes. One of my favorite scenes in John Steinbeck’s amazing literary triumph “East of Eden” is when the protagonist tries to ship frozen lettuce from Salina east. The freight cars get stuck and everything melts, arriving at the station an icky mess.
Loved that book.
McCardle is an idiot. I can’t imagine what the Atlantic is thinking except, “if bloggers are talking about what she’s writing she must be doing something right! It’s a conversation!!!”
They don’t realize we are LAUGHING AT THEM because she is STUPID.
different church-lady
@Southern Beale:
Here’s another possibility: don’t forget that “journalistic” enterprises are very clubby, and once you’re a member of the club they’re not going to throw you out very easily.
This could very well be the Atlantic’s “How do you fire the Muppets?” moment.
Continental Op
Philip Marlowe used a vacuum coffee maker, and he was a character in a series of best-sellers from the 1930s through the 1950s, so the device couldn’t have been that obscure.
different church-lady
@Ailuridae: Hell man/woman, even Jacques Pépin worked at HoJos.
different church-lady
@Continental Op: Yeah, but Marlowe wasn’t a 50’s housewife, so it doesn’t count.
See how this works?
Cliff in NH
@bemused:
Here it is:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129935115
phoebesmother
@PurpleGirl:
Except my rotund Italian neighbor across the hall was always making “gravy” and it was indisputably tomato based. This was NYC in the late 1960s.
karen marie
@Mark S.: Anyone who says they “only” use one type of oil cannot call themselves a chef, or even a good cook.
Different oils have different temperatures to which they can be heated (“smoke point“), and, obviously, different oils have different flavors which affect the flavor of the food being cooked.
For instance, you only want to fry plantain in peanut oil. Using anything else would be a waste of plantain.
Don’t be an oil snob — use the best one for the job.
karen marie
@PurpleGirl: I’m going to pile on the “tomato sauce so too is called gravy” bandwagon.
I’m originally from White Plains, NY, and the Italians in my family all used the word “gravy” when referring to what is commonly referred to as “spaghetti sauce.”
karen marie
@Tom Johnson: Yes, but it’s fun. Certainly more entertaining than debating the meaning of the number 42 all day.
Ash Can
Half of my family is West Side Chicago Italian going back over a hundred years, and we’ve always called it “sauce” rather than “gravy.”
trollhattan
@karen marie:
This. (Except the peanut awhl for those of us for whom peanuts are kryptonite). Other nut oils are verrry important in the kitchen, as are humble corn, safflower, grapeseed…the list goes on.
Also, too, Unlike wine, to which oilive oils are frequently compared, olive oil begins to break down (oxidize) from the day its pressed. We get California olive oil as much as possible because it’s months fresher than the European stuff.
Also, also, too. Olive oil fraud appears common. Because the free marketz demand this mislabeling to meet consumer demand, McMegan likely approves.
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9553
RobNYNY1957
My parents (rather poor Wisconsin farmers) got a Waring blender (still runs), a Sunbeam mixer (finally died about 10 years ago), a set of Revereware (still have it) and a waffle iron (still works) for their wedding in 1954.
Here’s what 10 minutes of research revealed:
Harper’s Magazine, May 1927:
The vacuum cleaner, for example, is an unmixed
blessing. The dish-washers and clotheswashers and egg-beaters I have never experimented with. They are exhaustively dealt with in the “household” columns of all the women’s magazines.
Harper’s Magazine, July 1939:
But whereas grandmother made fifty or a hundred pints of strawberry jam at a time, her granddaughter can count on finding strawberries at the corner grocery during many months of the year … .
Any housewife can mix, knead, cut down, and bake a batch of
from two to six loaves without adding more than a half-hour to her day’s labor, and the manufacturer of dishwashers will be happy to make up that half-hour.
The households of America shriek with vacuum cleaners,
mixers, electric fans, and other appliances … .
Harper’s Magazine, April 1944:
In some ways modern methods do not save time; having to sterilize the baby’s bottles takes as much time in the kitchen as the electric mixer saves, and so on.
Harper’s Magazine, August 1953:
And dishwashers. They are another of the fabulous things in modern kitchens.
Of course, things are much more convenient now. You just push the garbage down the drain (except large bones) and then you put on the cover and then you turn on the water and then you wait.
Harper’s Magazine, October 1953:
Cake mixes and electric mixers make kitchen work lighter, but bakeries still flourish.
Harper’s Magazine, February 1957:
A stylish kitchen today includes besides the obvious basic items: a coffee mill, salt grinder (for coarse sea salt), plus special grinders and choppers for nutmeg, cheese, parsley, garlic; a mortar and pestle for spices; and a vegetable mill (harder to operate than an electric blender
and therefore more desirable). There is a target range of porcelain-clad casseroles and saucepans, plus a carillon of copper-clad pots. There is an arsenal of stainable steel cutlery, including a scalloped knife for tomatoes, shears for dismembering your own poultry, a special knife for
boning it, and a cleaver and block for doing your own butchering. There are larding needles, timbale irons, a marble pastry slab, petites marmites, a Chinese wok, meat planks, an unwashed omelet pan. And then there are the molds
scav
Not much to contribute beyond I’ve loved the kitchen threads, adore the carrot and the assertion that if McM even wandered through a 1950s kitchen, there most certainly was a potty crock in it.
Svensker
@PurpleGirl:
In Hudson Co. NJ (Hoboken), “gravy” means tomato sauce in the Italian homes.
My favorite regional thing tho is in parts of upstate New York, Italian restaurant serve a side of “riggies”. What are riggies, we asked? Looks of astonishment. Rigatoni, of course! We ran across it in two different towns.
RobNYNY1957
I should have added that my parents also received a set of cast iron frying pans and a wonderful cast aluminum stewing pot/dutch oven, all still in use.
RobNYNY1957
I should have added that my parents also received a set of cast iron frying pans and a wonderful cast aluminum stewing pot/dutch oven, all still in use.
Svensker
@JPL: @RobNYNY1957:
Somewhere in my files I have a women’s magazine article, very humorous, from the late 1920 or early 30s where the writer explains how she’s always blowing fuses in the middle of parties because she has the toaster, the waffle iron and the coffee pot all going at the same time. She demands an upgrade to her electric service!
McMegan is sloppy and silly. It’s not like she writes so much she doesn’t have time to research the tiny details.
Yutsano
@Svensker: I suppose I should put things in their proper context: the Dawg is from the Catskills. Old Dutch family. And I mean old. Like older than the US old. It was still funny to tell him my family’s been on this continent longer, but we were all priests. :)
different church-lady
@RobNYNY1957: See, here’s the problem with you: you know how research things. But truly insightful people simply know things. ;)
RobNYNY1957
Seriously, I cited to Harper’s Magazine because I happen to have the website and archive open on my computer. I just put in “mixer,” “blender” and “kitchen appliances” as search terms and that’s what came up. It’s not even a magazine with any particular focus on kitchens and their history.
Alan in SF
In fairness to McMegan — and I can’t believe I would ever write those words — fresh produce in the winter was rare enough in 50’s kitchens as to constitute a significant difference from today. OTOH, virtually every 50s kitchen I ever saw had a food processor — the fact that one had to turn a handle, manually, was not a huge impediment. And yes, we had an electric blender, stand mixer, and coffee maker, and an electric carving knife, can opener, juicer, and ice crusher. Possibly, Megan meant to say “the 1850s.”
Automatic dishwashers were, I believe, the biggest single advance since then, other than the produce.
trollhattan
Because I are slow, it just occurred to me that if McMegan put the energy sunk into her vast and rambling self-defense posts instead into her initial posts, she…oh, who am I kidding?
It how she do.
jl
Late to this thread, but fresh fruit is a bad example to use of reduced cost due to the miracles of innovation. The relative price of fresh fruit and other produce has been rising compared to other food stuffs for nearly 30 years.
Apologies if another commenter pointed this out.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Alan in SF: Fresh produce rare in the winter? Where did you live? It was rare in my Missouri grandmother’s kitchen because she was too tight to spend the money on it, but my aunts who stayed in Missouri bought fresh produce in the 50s.
We lived in California so we didn’t understand the concept of winter very well.
JWL
Levenson: If you end up spending eternity in Hell, you do realize who your roommate is bound to be. Right?
Mo's Bike Shop
But not so much, you know, waterboarding, torture, or actual CAH.
bob_is_boring
@bemused:
I am compelled to point out that:
“‘has undergone noble rot’”
is actually a technical term, not a purple-prose far-flung high-fallootin’ description. Botrytis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botrytis_cinerea
or “noble rot” contributes to many fancy desert wines and high-end Rieslings; without it the exquisite Sauternes would just be goo.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@bob_is_boring: Late Harvest Riesling! Oh yum!
Kent
I really enjoyed this post, as well as most of the other ones taking on the insufferable one. She really, really, really needs to be dismissed from The Atlantic already.
EJ
@Tom Johnson:
And now the post is complete with a wordy, pompous comment about how pointless it is. Truly, the internet in a nutshell.
Aconite
Given the tiny genitalia, the limbs, and the suggestion of a face, it appears Royen conflated the carrot with the mandrake. What an interesting salad that would have made,
Tom Johnson
@EJ
Actually, it’s not that wordy.
Tom Johnson
Oh, wait: I forgot. Nazi.
lawsipan
She thinks percolated coffee tastes awful? What planet is she living on? My percolator can make even Folgers taste great.