TIL that Germany created synthetic butter from coal during WW2. It was described as nutritious and of agreeable taste.
Margarine - Wikipedia
I know a girl who thinks of ghosts,
She'll make you breakfast, she'll make you toast.
But she don't use butter.
And she don't use cheese.
She don't use jelly, or any of these.
She uses Coooooooooaaaaaal
I'm dying (from eating carcinogens?) from laughter here! Brilliant!
I see you there, Tim Burton =)
The Flaming (butt)Lips.
it's funny seeing people struggle to handle the fact that we and our food is primarily made of carbon and hydrogen, which is exactly what coal and other fossil fuels are made of as well.
this, and margarine in general, aren't some horrid "chemical" product, it's just carbon and hydrogen (and some other stuff) assembled into fat!
The problem with a lot of synthetics it produces molecules that are chirally or structurally different from the target molecules. People forget like WW2 is like 10-15 years after a bunch of people were poisoned by "wonder supplements" like radium. People should be skeptical of a WW2 recipe.
Ok, let’s not compare something objectively bad for you like consuming energetic ionizing radiation and a hydrocarbon made from an objectionable fossil fuel.
They’re still trying to make things with coal, like protein, and of course butter and margarine. I could find no references to chirality of molecules in coal “butter”, only that the difficulty in separating out the unwanted things like gasoline make the process inefficient and difficult.
And we’re not done with people consuming stupid things under the auspices of it being healthy for you. Doesn’t matter if it’s “polarized water” or consuming dewormer to ward off covid, people at perfectly happy to do dumb things.
Nile Red has a lot of videos that show these concepts and the power of chemistry and what you can do with it if you have enough understanding.
I wish I had scene videos like these in high school. It would have made chemistry so much less abstract.
Yeah, but Germany WWII quality control wasn't exactly the greatest.
We eat the same stuff we're made out of?!
Impossibru!
I envy the faith you have in process and quality control, especially knowing these products are produced by the profit seeking capitalist class who definitely do NOT feed it to their own families.
Sounds better than Soylent Green. Because that's made of people
Yeah, but at least Soylent Green is organic.
"I can't believe it's coal!"
Now with more Carbon!
“Nutritious and of agreeable taste” seems like such a German way to describe it
Sounds like a NileRed video.
I wish he'd make a video on how to remove aspartame from diet soda and replace it with regular sugar so I can finally drink this stupid hard mountain dew I bought before I realized they idiotically ONLY released it in nasty zero sugar flavors
I'm the exact opposite actually. I never liked the taste of regular coke, too sweet, so I've been drinking Diet Coke since I was a kid. Drink a couple of liters per week (although I've cut down since inflation has made it cost as much as liquid gold). I dislike the fake sweet flavor of Coke Zero, but I love the more refreshing taste of Diet Coke. It's like sparkling water with caffeine.
I do realize the taste of Diet Coke varies quite a lot over the world, but in Western Europe it tastes perfect for me.
what is the deal with people saying aspartame is nasty? it tastes slightly different from sugar lol
60kg of coal to make 1kg of margarine!
I don't know the chemistry behind it, but I suspect even if I did I wouldn't want to eat it
Given how many people here in Australia love to suck up to coal and petrol companies, I suspect they would want to
i am assuming they used some loose definition of nutritious
And "agreeable taste".
Margarine is nasty and I can't imagine that's the best version of it.
TBH World War II was . . . kind of a bad time.
margarine is absolutely fine, i don't understand where you all get this idea that it's "nasty" aside from it being cheaper and thus associated with poor people
it feels like how jamie oliver raged against chicken nuggets as some lower quality food, which is pretty clearly just him being a classist shithead.
During ww2 the alternative was hunger
For reference see the British WW2 delicacy "Toast Sandwich"
S/hunger/meth
Margarine was synthesized as cattle food but deemed too unhealthy for them to eat.
This article about margarine doesn't say that, and contradicts that. I've seen videos that agree it was originally made for humans.
After the French Emperor Napoleon III issued a challenge to create a butter-substitute from beef tallow for the armed forces and lower classes, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès invented margarine in 1869.
...Okay... What does that have to do with humans eating it?
"Something something capitalism"
Something like that knowing this place.
I wonder if the concept of “plastip” in Future Boy Conan came from this. They recycle it into food, weapons, and fuel.
If you make it from coal it is vegan because coal is just plants. If it's made from petroleum it is not vegan because it is made from dinosaurs.
made from dinosaurs
False, it's from trees that grew, died, and fell down into piles and got buried, for millions upon millions of years, before anything on the planet evolved to eat their corpses.
edit: Seems I was working off outdated knowledge. Apparently scientists currently believe that almost all of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life such as algae and plankton. It still ain't dinosaur juice though!
Petroleum is also from plants/algea/bacteria/etc. All fossil fuels come non-animal living things things.
In general my understanding is coal was trees, oil was mostly algae and plankton, and mostly started forming well before the first true dinosaurs.
Technically some of that plankton would be considered animals, though probably not something you'd easily recognize as being an animal (side-note: I'd be curious to hear some vegetarians/vegans weigh in on the theoretical ethics of eating zooplankton)
I'm sure there's some edge cases, traces of more complex animals and such getting mixed in with dead plankton, and at the end of the day carbon is carbon regardless of where it comes from
So, more sinthetic margarine?
You might find https://lemm.ee/post/36819921 interesting.
Holy shit, one kilo of butter from 60kg of coal?!
That's some pretty spenny butter for "agreeable taste"
"The Germans preferred Ersatz."
(Or at least that's how I remember that quote from Catch-22 when I read it 25 years ago...)
Especially when they had problems getting the coal they could mine, where it needed to be used.
They used something else instead...
You might be surprised what the material and energetic footprint of dairy is.
i wonder how much emissions turning coal to butter creates. Maybe we should turn world's coal to butter so planetkillhappy bastards cant burn it.
Given it seems to generate 59kg of waste product, I don't think it is going to be that great for the environment
You don't have to waste the other hydrocarbons when you crack something. You just use em for something else or burn them for power. Though the flare towers in refineries prove me wrong to a degree.