- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
- roughromanmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
- roughromanmemes@lemmy.world
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Explanation: The Romans used lead-lined cookware not in ignorance of its dangers, but wholly cognizant of them - the Romans recognized lead poisoning from various sources, and regarded lead as ‘unwholesome’ to human health.
They used lead widely in many applications that they could be forgiven for thinking were not dangerous - they understood how to prevent lead leaching in pipes, and used lead in writing tablets. Less forgivably, in cosmetics. But most dangerous of all was the use of lead pots in making ‘defrutum’ - sweet wine
jellysyrup, which wealthy Romans loved to put on everything. The thing is, the process uses lead specifically because other materials won’t do - copper and iron leave an aftertaste, while lead vessels actually make it sweeter, as leaditselfacetate is slightly sweet.What’s a little harmless poison in your condiments, after all?
The explanation is practically perfect, so focusing on two small tidbits:
Defrutum is not a jelly, it’s more like a syrup: grape juice reduced to a half of its volume, to concentrate flavours and as a preservation method. I’m almost sure that it was available for a wide range of people, not just wealthy ones.
(It’s also easy to prepare at home. And as long as you do it in a normal cooking pot it’s completely safe. Great to use over vanilla ice cream.)
Lead itself isn’t sweet; lead acetate is. There’s a bit of acetic acid even in grape juice, and as you boil it in the lead container both things react together.
Defrutum is not a jelly, it’s more like a syrup: grape juice reduced to a half of its volume, to concentrate flavours and as a preservation method. I’m almost sure that it was available for a wide range of people, not just wealthy ones.
I’ve seen it referred to by various terms and I’m not culinarily educated enough to tell the difference between any of the words. Syrup, jelly, must; it’s all Greek to me! I’ll fix it in my explanation though!
It was available to a wide range of people, but it was a frequent visitor primarily to the tables of the wealthy.
Lead itself isn’t sweet; lead acetate is. There’s a bit of acetic acid even in grape juice, and as you boil it in the lead container both things react together.
I’ll correct that too.
Syrup, jelly, must; it’s all Greek to me!
The main difference is texture: a jelly is firm and lumpy enough that you can hold it with the side of a knife and spread over something else (like a toast), but you’d have a really hard time pouring jelly over something by tilting the container. In the meantime a syrup is a thick liquid, so it’s runny and you can pour it over.
Traditionally, the source of that difference in texture is a substance called pectin, found in plenty fruits. Grapes do have pectin, but once you squeezed them into juice most pectin went to waste with the pomace and skins, so even if you reduce the juice for defrutum it’ll be still a runny liquid.
Must is simply grape juice, ready to be fermented into wine, although in Latin the word mustum also sometimes pops up for young wines. Additionally, in the context of Catholic masses it’s grape juice suitable for communion.
Details and extra information like this are why I come to these topics.
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TIL Romans knew leads are bad …
Yep!
“Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.”
- the Roman engineer Vitruvius, in De Architectura, written between 30 BCE-20 BCE
That’s honestly just kind of sad. Knowing the problem but ignoring it for the convenience afforded. Human nature at its finest.
In two thousand years,while we have grown immensely as a species, in some ways we really haven’t changed, making this meme painstakingly appropriate.
They were also using asbestos and knew it was causing respiratory issues.
They had cloths made of asbestos that they were cleaning by throwing them in a fire. However they knew that slaves in asbestos mine were getting sick because of it
‘Defrutum’ is exactly what I would name an alcoholic fruit syrup if I was a drunk Roman.
I would have gone with “IV Loco”
We also put lead in gasoline knowing damn well it would come out the tail pipes and people on the streets would have to breathe it. Several decades of leaded gasoline passed until someone developed an alternative to fix engine knocks. If that had never been invented we would still be pumping lead into our streets today as a “cost of life” or more realistically, a cost of doing business.
Piston aircraft still use it. Which makes it doubly annoying when some tit in a cesna decides to circle around town at 1000’.
Not just making a noise, also cropdusting with TEL.Luckily that is beginning to change. But it is crazy that it has taken so long to do.
There seems to be two octane ratings that now have an unleaded replacement. (I don’t know how many there actually are in use.)
Cars still offgas other heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel), and rhe wear from their tires also distributes heavy metals. Tractors do the same in our fields and have for decades. It’s not good. Instead of developing drones for the military, we should develop them for our food supply first.
The industrial revolution and it’s consequences
Thank you Clair Patterson!
Obligatory Veritasium link
We use Teflon-coated cookingwear even though we know it’s poison.
Yes, yes, I know, technically it’s not a problem if you don’t scratch or over-heat it. But in my experience, 99% of non-stick pans get scratched and over-heated.Technically scratches should not be an issue, since teflon is very inert and will go through your systems without affecting anything. Over-heating it will make toxic without a question and I’ll throw out any overheated cookingwear and just get new ones.
If you’re paying attention it’s not difficult to keep the temp below the temperature where teflon starts breaking down (260°C / 533 K): sunseed oil starts smoking at 230°C, butter below 200°C and heating oils to their smoke point is already something you should avoid if you care about your health.
Problem is how they make that shit. These factories have been dumping pfas into the environment for decades. And many factory workers got sick or infertile. That shit will give you cancer if have a lot of it in your bloodstream.
When you scratch it you’re making microplastics though, and they’re going right into your food.
Boy do I have something to tell you!
https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/visualizations/microplastics/index.html
If it does get scratched you can use sandpaper to turn it into a normal pan.
Teflon isn’t poison. The decomposition products are, but so long as you aren’t a moron and don’t leave your pan on the stove with nothing in it you’ll be fine
Me using my scratched teflon pans.
That’s every “non-stick” pan after 1-2 months of daily use.
All non-stick, “scratch resistant” pans are a marketing gimmick designed to have the average consumer-moron buy 30 pans in their lifetime, than simply learn how to season pans properly and hand 2 or 3 Iron/steel pans down their family lineage for generations, across hundreds of years.
Ceramic ones are a bit better but for the most part this is correct. There really isn’t a clear reason not to cook with steel or iron, they tend to be the best options for 99.9% of applications. Only thing that I can think of is cooking eggs at a lower temp, but iron does that fine if the seasoning is really good.
My scanpan has been in use for at least 6 years unscratched
I don’t even know what my pans are.
pfas!
😏 be like me and use a cast iron skillet that weighs a ton, never is slick like you see on the internet, and is a removed (really Lemmy? Auto censor?? FFS) to clean
In all seriousness, I just made scrambled eggs on the ol’ beast and they turned out decent. Far from non stick but it’s non cancer at least.
(really Lemmy? Auto censor?? FFS)
That’s your instance, ml is a turd like that.
I have no clue how Lemmy works. I made an account and just assumed that was that.
Each ‘instance’ has slightly different rules that apply. Mostly it doesn’t affect users, as you can interact with other instances just fine.
Lemmy.ml censors a number of common curses and is run by Uyghur genocide deniers.
Well that’s unfortunate. What are more ideal instances of Lemmy? Thanks for the explanation, by the way.
I’m on sh.itjust.works and haven’t heard of any issues with it, it’s been working pretty well.
You know anyone can just go to Xinjiang, there’s no travel restrictions. Every Muslim country, including some of America’s puppets sent delegations which concluded that there was no genocide.
A decade ago, they were telling us that millions of Uyghurs were being sent to death camps or forced sterilized or w/e. Today we’ve not seen any massive demographic change. To me that says I was lied to by western media the same way I was lied to about literally every other enemy of the US. Is there any kind of evidence or just time period passing that would make you reevaluate whether you’ve been lied to?
Is this a joke? What country is providing materiel and political support for an actual genocide as we speak?
It’s strange how almost no predominantly-Muslim country has signed up for these supposed Uyghur human rights violations. It’s largely the imperial core countries that have. Is it because Muslims don’t value human life, or is it because it’s largely bullshit?
https://twitter.com/un_hrc/status/1578003299827171330#HRC51 | Draft resolution A/HRC/51/L.6 on holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of #China, was REJECTED.
The population control nonsense is especially silly when even NATOpedia says otherwise. As part of China’s affirmative action policies, the Uyghurs and other ethic minorities were excepted from the One-Child policy, and in Xinjiang they have grown in numbers relative to Hans as a result, and this happened similarly with other ethnic minorities.
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Genocide denialismReporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Genocide denialWe do indeed deny this US psyop bullshit. The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and once those efforts failed, it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop.
- The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
- The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
- Uyghur genocide allegations
- American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
- US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- The blueprint of regime change operations
.
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
I believe the ML there stands for Marxist Leninist (one of the flavors of communism)
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You say this like we don’t still have kitchenware with lead (or other nasties like cadmium) in them, often for purely aesthetic reasons. Most of these are discontinued products still in circulation, but some are still being produced (in theory they’re “safe for use” because the heavy metals are sealed behind something nontoxic, but scratches and chips may expose them).
AESTHETIC reasons?? girl lead poisoning isn’t worth a pretty pot.
Everyone makes fun of California’s prop 65 warnings, but this is exactly the situation they exist for: knowing which colorful plate sets to avoid at Crate & Barrel.
The problem is it doesn’t have a minimum quantify before reporting is required, so 1 pay per trillion of any of 10,000 different substances triggers the warning, so there isn’t anything that doesn’t require the warning.
The standard essentially requires an unachievable level purity along every step of the manufacturing and distribution process in order to NOT have the label.
The result is over-labeling, which results in products that we should actually be concerned about sneaking into our homes because we ignore warning labels.
Interesting.
Wouldn’t it have been better to have the manufacturer state the amounts? That way, you just need to read the fine print. Like one does for food products.
Ok but can we make fun of the fact that they aren’t required to specify which material? Like let me decide if it carcinogenic enough
Except the law was really poorly worded with no downside for false reporting. As a result literally everything has the label on it, up to and including a generic message at the front doors of the store telling you that going in the building will cause cancer and reproductive harm.
But it doesn’t work when every manufacturer puts those stickers on literally everything just in case.
Would you be talking about plates, spoons and such, when saying, “kitchenware”?
Because I don’t see something like a wok having a heavy metal being sealed behind something else, since the surface needs to be some metal anyway and I don’t know of any transparent metals.On another note, I recently got gifted a melamine crockery set, by the company. And since this is a product that could easily be problematic if the manufacturing process were not perfect (and I don’t see the company not cheaping out), I only use the stuff for keeping peels and other waste, before throwing it out.
Wait you guys don’t cook with asbestos?
Would that be bad? I though it was only a problem when it is air born.
Yeah kinda brings some texture to the dish. Don’t see what the big deal is, specially if you sprinkle some lead and uranium 14, to counterbalance
I though it was only a problem when it is air born.
Also Uranium 14 doesn’t exist to my knowledge
Probably thinking of radioactive Carbon-14. Uranium-238 and -235 are the most common isotopes of that element. Uranium-14 would be tricky, since the negative 86 protons (electons?) would make it highly unstable, and also a different element.
Also you are correct that asbestos is dangerous when you breathe it in, but it’s banned widely because it’s brittle and very easy to get particles of it into the air through accidental damage.
Neutrons
Jimmy?
Well you know. One is WAY worse. Like we still have not found that much proof of plastic being very bad
Someone correct me if I’m remembering this incorrectly but I do remember seeing a article explaining how we have discovered that plastic has been making men infertile due to the male body collecting micro plastics in the balls to the point that if not stopped in time the plastic will start killing sperms and making the man sterile Edit I think I found the video that informed me https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IoH41Qzv__0 Upon searching I’ve found a lot of the sources claiming that there is a correlation between plastic count and sperm count seems to be coming from India which is odd but yet again if you want to study people surrounded by garbage India is the place to get a large sample size but I’ve also found some sources saying that plastic is more specifically affecting hormone production https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXq1Sm95GlQ&pp=ygUYcGxhc3RpY3Mgc3RlcmlsaXppbmcgbWVu
Correlation is not causation. There is currently no definitive proof of anything. It sure as hell is not good for us. But I’ll take the plastic over the lead poisoning every day.
I’m just saying one is acutely more dangerous.
Edit: while I have not watched the entire video, she even says the studies are incredibly small. You can not say shit if you test less than 20 people. These small studies’ results may point to a larger study being interesting to do, but nothing else.
Lead is more dangerous to humans. Plastic is worse for the planet
That is indeed what I meant to say. Though if we want to talk about worse things we can just at both farming and climate change. THOSE are really really bad
People downvoting this comment are just mad that you’re right.
There aren’t any islands of lead in the ocean, and lead items aren’t single-use. Yes yes, both are bad, but one is obviously worse.
I meant when it is in our bodies. One is WAY worse then.
Well, in that case, I might agree. Lead is worse for our bodies, plastic is worse for nature.
What the fuck are you on, it’s already done untold damage to our ecosystems
I meant microplastics in our bodies. Not the environment. Though you could argue that farming as a whole is the worst thing we are doing
In terms of our bodies probably too early to say, could be some bad long term effects though I’m not sure on that one
micro-plastics in the brain
The article I read said Alzheimer patients had 10x the amount of plastics in the, compared to peoples ithput Alzheimers.
Edit: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/microplastics-brain-pollution-health
In the study, researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples.
You cook with plastic pan?
Ever cooked microwave food in it’s plastic packaging?
