This post was brought to you by people who have never worked a manual labor job in their life
Ah, I miss it. Just me, an offset serrated knife, a bag of onions the size of a child, a slippery floor, a nearby open flame, music that hurts my ears… And not an email in sight.
I loved cooking in a professional kitchen. The job itself was great. Some of the coworkers were all over the place, but I fucking loved the good ones.
And there’s something immensely satisfying about the teamwork behind turning a bunch of raw ingredients into multiple delicious meals, perfectly timed out with each dish hitting the table at the right moment. (The frustration of a kitchen that isn’t doing this is a separate story.)
But the industry itself has so much toxicity. Bad managers, bad owners. Substance abuse problems. And the real reason I left wasn’t actually the bad pay. It was the miserable hours. I was always a night owl but I couldn’t deal with the isolating separation from my family and non-industry friends from working nights, weekends, and holidays when everyone else was building memories and reinforcing bonds.
I don’t miss it at all. Physically I was busy enough, but it was excruciatingly boring.
That applied to my work, but I imagine that building, landscaping and other trades that require actual skill can be engaging, if one chooses to learn an improve.
It was just because jello was new and exciting so they tried to use it everywhere. Kinda like how everything is Flamin’ Hot or Extra Sour these days.
So. Much. Hot. Honey. Lately.
It is everywhere.
Ok that’s true, but flaming hot and extra sour are both delicious, Jello is just kinda… Meh.
Gelatin doesn’t really have a flavor on it’s own though, and I agree that the box-mix stuff is all kind of mid. This is why you make flaming hot and sour jello, instead.
Jello is just kinda… Meh.
Prior to the development of instant gelatin aka Jello, gelatin was extremely labor intensive and thus expensive. It was rich folk food that suddenly had a massive crash in price and difficulty to make. So it was in everything for a while, until it stopped being seen as this super high-class thing that the poors finally had access to.
Imagine the price of caviar suddenly plummeted to $0.01/oz, and what the next couple of years of cooking would look like as a result.
Would you rather have flaming hot Jell-O or extra sour?
Why limit yourself.
Both.
I mean it’s gotta be extra sour right? At least then it kinda goes with the fruit themes I associate with jello, heck it might even be pretty good…? Maybe I should go make extra sour jello.
Extra Sour Flamin’ Hot Jell-O. 🤤
This will give me nightmares I fear.
8 hour workday of doing fuck all
I’m not going to argue in favor of 50s gender roles, but
fuck offc’mon.I’ve worked with many many people this decade that got paid more than me to do literally fuck all for the whole shift and got approved for overtime more frequently where they continued to be absolutely useless but they kissed the correct asses and sucked the right toes.
Are you describing cops?
Maybe it’s just the kind of people I work with, but I know very few who wouldn’t prefer to be stay at home parents, given the option.
Well, yeah. Most people would much rather spend their time and energy taking care of their children than laboring away for someone else’s profit. They may not phrase it like that, but raising children is far more self-fulfilling than working a job could ever be for most people. I imagine in most cases, people prefer tons of hard work raising a child when compared to working the easy cozy job, because at the end of the day the job is just a means to an end.
Pretty much nobody in my friend group (and we’re all parents) would prefer to be a stay at home parent. Personally, that’s a bad fit for me, my skill sets, and my preferences. I’d be miserable and bored, and feel that it would be a waste of the things I’m good at. My wife would feel the same way in that kind of caretaker role.
Like, I think if we won the lottery and didn’t have to work to maintain our lifestyles, we’d still send our kids to school and camps and things like that to get them out of the house and socializing with other people, while we’d probably still choose to work in some capacity, for some kind of public interest or passion project we’d do for reasons other than the money.
Staying at home with kids just doesn’t sound appealing as a day to day routine. I like my weekends with them, but I also like that we use the time to catch up, too.
I’d kill to be at home with my kids instead of working.
I think that’s true of many people.
But I suspect that the numbers are pretty evenly split between “would thrive in either role,” “would be miserable in either role,” “would much prefer being in the paid workforce,” and “would much prefer being a stay at home parent.”
My wife and I are squarely in the “would much prefer being in the paid workforce,” because we like our jobs, and because we want our children in an organized school environment (and paying for after care is fine for them and for us). Most of our social circle are in the same boat. But most of us are mid-career white collar professionals and have better than average flexibility over work hours and location (at perhaps the cost of a blurred boundary between work and home). So our jobs are easier to balance with parenting.
On the flip side, home situation matters a lot, too. How much you enjoy different types of household work (cooking, cleaning, home improvement/maintenance), different functions of a caretaker (feeding kids, scheduling out activities, being that first line as an educator or first aid or driver, etc.), how well your hobbies and interests fit into a lifestyle as a full time caretaker, etc.
One of my friends gave up his main career to take care of his kids, but now that they’re in school he went back to personal training at a gym. He lines up clients and is only available for sessions between school dropoff and pickup (10am to 2pm). It’s a good intermediate holding pattern for him, and he’ll likely go back to his main white collar career once his kids are old enough to be latchkey kids. That being said, I know he wasn’t super happy not working outside of the home, and this personal trainer thing has him in a much better spot than when his kids were too young for school.
big nope unless the ‘kid’ is a dog
Yeah, they were working their asses off actually making stuff. Unlike nowadays where we don’t even have many tool and die people.
The reason the workplace death rate for men is 100x that of women is because they are most certainly not doing “fuck all”.
We’re not talking about an average man. We’re talking about a man whose wife puts unholy things in jelly. There is something wrong with that man.
Or it could just have been the benzos
More like “fuck safety” amiright?
Men mostly had office jobs. Office workers do not “do” much. Sitting at a table with a plastic box and a phone is not particularly strenuous. Their diets paired with excessive smoking, drinking and inactivity for most of their days caused the high death rate. Office workers, even now, do not “do” very much in comparison to other professions.
The largest occupational percentile for men in the 1950’s were jobs in manufacturing/production.
Yep. The 50’s was dudes working in the asbestos plants, chemical plants and automotive plants without any sort of PPE. I mean, folks in general were eating off of actually radioactive dinner plates made of (depleted) uranium and lead was in everything down to kids toys.
Health and safety for workers was better than the 1800’s, but certainly a far cry from what we have today.
Don’t forget there were a lot of war vets in the mix too, with a good proportion of them that lost comrades in D-day and Market Garden. Mental health, were it tracked like it is today, would have clocked somewhere between “uh-oh” and “abysmal.” Everyone self-medicated with alcohol, more work, and motorcycles… if at all.
lol what
Even today, the workplace death rate for men is something like 20x that of women.
deleted by creator
How old are you? 😆
Mid 40’s. Not an office worker
When and where?
Mad Men, all seasons. Obviously.
The real reason behind all the gelatin salad abominations is that after gelatin was first discovered/isolated, it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.
Isolating gelatin requires long cook times (which require lots of fuel) at ideally fairly low temperatures. Then there needs to be some level of filtration to make it as flavorless as possible, and then dehydration to sheets or a powder.
Finally, to actually make one of these “salads”, you need refrigeration.
Production of gelatin was industrialized to make it much cheaper, and refrigerators became normal household appliances. You went from gelatin being only really used in “fine dining” to something you could do at home. In the same era, pineapple went from being a fruit that only the rich could get to something anyone could, so it went through a similar explosion of popularity.
The alternative funny answer is that the company that sold gelatin, Knox, was run by a husband and wife, and all the crazy stuff didn’t start until the husband died, so either he was holding her back, or once she lost her husband, she thought everyone else should, too.
Grief does weird things to a person. Some mourn their entire lives, some force other people to eat gelatinous creations. So sad.
it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.
Applies to basically anything shortly after WW2.
I sometimes wonder where we’d be tiday technologically if WW2 didnt happen
Or we could just fund scientific study without the weapons part but at the same funding level.
Drive technology and civilization into the future without killing a bunch of people?! That sounds like SOCIALISM!!!
Are you saying this
wasn’t cooked up by a pure well-meaning heart?I mean… I’d try it. I might not like it, but I’ll give it a go.
Mayonnaise. Salad. I just…can’t.
Don’t worry, the recipe offers a seafood variant!
🤢
You’ll be delighted to know that the seafood version includes boiled hot dog chunks!
When did the definition of delighted change?
The ‘/s’ here is silent.
Around the same time the definition of “literally” was expanded to include “figuratively”
Are mayo and sour cream based salads not a thing where you come from?
I’ll agree they don’t deserve to be called salads but they’re pretty common here. The OG potato or pasta salads everyone used to make for every occasion of course have no lettuce or cabbage in them, the greenest thing you may find is peas. The least salady salads of them all.
Of course, we have potato and pasta salads. Those are mostly potatoes or pasta, along with other ingredients, and the mayonnaise forms the base of the dressing, which the solids are tossed in. That photo just looks straight up like the whole thing is a brick of mostly mayo.
What’s wrong with tuna salad? Potato salad? Macaroni salad? Coleslaw (a kind of cabbage salad)? Mayo isn’t really all that different than many other salad dressings either. Also, pretty much any decent deli sandwich is basically a salad with meat and cheese dressed in mayo between two slices of bread.
You’re missing out.
The exclamation marks in “Surprise!” evoke the same energy as “Oops! All Berries,” like you’re biting into a “salad” and discovering it’s Oops! All Mayonnaise.
Sometimes, I don’t know how America avoided a collective heart attack before Kennedy was assassinated.
So do I understand cirrectly that this gelatine enables you to take any broth/soup and turn it into a cake?
They were all called “salads” for some obscene reason, but yes.
It was because aspics were meant to ‘contain’ stuff, not just be gross, savory Jell-O. Like, a traditional aspic salad would have various fruits suspended in it.
I think when gelatin became common in grocery stores, people were just all about the novelty. If you read cookbooks from the 50s that have these recipes in them, you see a commonality — people were just chuffed as chips that they could make a cake that jiggles lol.
Solid soup defijitely must have sounded sci fi hack in the 50s
The first time I had Thanksgiving with my first wife’s family, one of the dishes was blackberry jello with green grapes in it. I was never a big jello fan, but I took some of everything to be polite. I put a fork full in my mouth, bit down, and thought “oh no, something is rancid!” The texture was wrong, too. I was just going to spit it into my napkin when I realized it wasn’t rancid, but it took a moment for me to place the flavor. It was a green olive.
That should have been a warning that there was something wrong with that family.
Everything about jello is off. The texture, the look, the taste, not to mention what it’s made from.
Jells?
Is that some new slang for bones?
If it is, pls credit me in a footnote
I just read it like you bit down on the fork and now my front teeth hurt.
Ugh, sorry!
workday of doing fuck all
Oh fuck right off with this bullshit. I suppose you think the attractive secretary’s remarkable physique as exposed by their tight cardigan is just going to ogle itself? Presumably by the same magical fairytale critter that smokes all those cigarettes while knocking back a liquid lunch? And I suppose this wonderful creature takes care of water-cooler conversation as well, recounting golfing bon-mots, making sexist jokes and espousing low-grade racism while the man just does “nothing”? Get a grip.
Hi, I’m here for the job interview.
My mum was pissed when work from home started and found out the job my dad does is mostly just having leisurely conversations all day while she works her ass off as a primary school teacher for far less money and far less respect. Stg if you do a job where you have to stand up and walk somewhere, your job is more demanding than the people who make the most money.
You are correct that office jobs are less physically strenuous, but they come with their own unique mental horrors. Nobody at a factory spends a week working on a report, only for their boss to decide on a Friday afternoon that everything is wrong and needs to be redone by Monday with no overtime pay, or any opportunity to say ‘no, I can’t take that job.’
Especially with Work from Home, there is no separation between the stress of needing to perform and the relaxation associated with home. You are on, ALL THE TIME, and most people who work at offices for salaries are expected to be available to chat / meet at any time of day, including at 2 or 3 AM if you are working with Indians or Hong Kongers.
Yeah I am not destroying my knees, but my self-confidence and mental health are absolute dogshit.
Don’t be classist, folks. If someone needs to work to survive, they are more alike you than they are not like you. Separating ourselves from each other only serves the wealthiest among us.
“Nobody at a factory spends a week working on a report, only for their boss to decide on a Friday afternoon that everything is wrong and needs to be redone by Monday”
This is absolutely not true. Mechanics, factory workers, labourers all get fucked over like this all the time. The mental strain of a job isn’t greater for people who work at a desk it’s just the only strain they experience as opposed to someone who works with their hands who has to deal with the physical and mental demands of their labour.
hey its hard. sometimes i have to get up and go to the bathroom
Office jobs are mostly bullshit.
sublimated
Angry women transformed directly into a cloud of fury
As much as I love that, it’s likely this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(psychology)
It’s how couples communicated in the 50s. If he showed her ass pic to his friends, she put chopped hot dogs in the next aspic.
I can’t hear the word “aspic” without thinking of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
How much have you had today? Too much makes your teeth go grey!
I think of the King Crimson album, Larks Tongues in Aspic
Eastern Europe is so behind that they still regularly eat that kind of stuff today
Excuse me ser… bian a European doesn’t automatically make you civilized.
These people were obsessed with eating canned food. They thought that they could make it palatable with stuff like slathering it in mayonnaise or suspending it in jello.
Boomers are sociopaths. Years of leaded gas exposure gave them lifelong cognitive decline and propensity towards erratic behavior.
It was mostly Silents/Greatest generations who were doing that kind of cooking. They were only feeding it to Boomers. In fact, Greatest gen should probably get more flak for making Boomers the way they are. They were super horny and literally fucked the Boomers into existence, but didn’t know what to do beyond that.
Yeah, their WWII PTSD really boosted the canned food craze. But the Boomers (no pun intended) ate it up, and carried it along and put it all in plastic.
Yep, Greatest Gen grandparents raised me. Mom made all sorts of jello and casserole abominations. I’d probably be an inch taller if I could have stomached that garbage as a kid.
I was reading the other day that Gen X technically got the highest lifetime lead exposure. Boomers didn’t grow up with it.
Boomers for sure did, leaded gasoline began being used before Boomers were even born.
What likely leads to greater exposure is how many cars there were by the 70s and 80s. But lead exposure is cumulative over a lifetime. So I would be curious to see that research, as Boomers had roughly 40 years of exposure from 1950s to 1994. Gen X wouldn’t have that much by decades.
Not just leaded gas but also becoming adults in the easiest time and place in human history to live comfortably.
https://youtu.be/CM5LQuy72kA for a wonderful wonderful overview. And a song!
