Dead Sexy NPCs

[Doc_Scorpion]

5 hours ago, srmalloy said:

And wars over salt -- the earliest recorded war over access to a supply of salt was over a salt lake in China in 3000 BC. There were others, in 1304, 1482, 1540, 1556, 1680, and 1877, among others.

Wars over salt, taxes on salt, a barrier built right across a heckin' continent to control access to salt.  And the salt fish trade in the Baltic and across the Atlantic a couple of centuries later.  Sitting 'above the salt' and 'below the salt'.  The Union's targeting of Confederate salt works during the Civil War...

And no Roman soldiers were not paid in salt.  That's an urban legend.

(Can you tell I recently write a short paper for a presentation on the history of salted meats and ended up going down all sorts of rabbit holes in the process?)

[Healix]

[Scarlet Shocker]

12 hours ago, Healix said:

 

 

Oi! Healix!   No need to get salty! 😂

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

And no Roman soldiers were not paid in salt.  That's an urban legend.

Amusingly, it was the Romans themselves who created that etymology. Pliny suggested that the word salarium (salary) came from salarius (salt), and said this was because in the old days soldiers were paid in salt. But he, writing in the middle first century, was referring to a nonspecific and hazily remembered distant past, not to a documentable practice ("Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived." -- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book 31, Chapter 41 ). The Roman writer Suetonius also wrote about soldiers being paid in salt in his "Lives of the Caesars".

[Doc_Scorpion]

5 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Amusingly, it was the Romans themselves who created that etymology. 

Yup.  I knew that, but decided I'd derailed the thread enough.  🙂

[AmeliaHealYa]

Good old Pliny. That guy loved to just, like, say stuff.

[Luminara]

23 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

decided I'd derailed the thread enough.

 

Blasphemy.

 

Guards, take him to the dungeon!

[AmeliaHealYa]

On 3/6/2025 at 4:28 AM, High_Beam said:

I do like sausage.

🤜🤛

[AmeliaHealYa]

On 3/6/2025 at 5:39 AM, Andreah said:

When people are truly hungry, starvation level, they'll try to eat surprising things. The body is basically saying "We're gonna die otherwise. What's the worst that could happen?"

I think it was Danse Macabre where Stephen King talked about a story he'd been pitching for years that no publisher wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole. The premise is that a guy survives a shipwreck, gets stranded on a desert island, and winds up

Spoiler

cutting off pieces of his own body and eating them to avoid starving to death.

(o_O)

[Healix]

I guess he was pretty full of himself to do that....

[Snarky]

On 3/5/2025 at 4:06 PM, Luminara said:

 

Actually, no.

 

Sausage-making has a long and interesting history, and is a fascinating process in and of itself, but the most fundamental aspect of it is that it relies on spices, a high fat content, and mold to prevent spoilage.

 

Traditionally, sausages are made by taking shavings and otherwise unpalatable or unusable pieces of meat, mixing them with fat and spices, stuffing the resultant mixture into the intestines of an animal (washed, of course), then hung in root cellars, caves, barn lofts or even in out-buildings, where they'd very slowly dry while a layer of mold would grow on the outside.  The mold would actually prevent bacteria from attacking the meat (you know how penicillin was discovered?  same basic idea, and many of the same species of mold) while the meat dried, and since the casing kept air out, the fat also dried without spoiling, and the spices not only flavored the meat/fat mixture, they also increased the drying action and reduced the likelihood of spoilage further.  When left undisturbed, the sausages would eventually dry to a very low moisture content and become extremely resistant to spoilage in the long term.

 

Also of note, spices weren't just to help with the preservation.  Sometimes those unpalatable pieces of meat were right on the verge of spoiling.  Other times, the meat might be too gamey, or particularly unpleasant (from what i've read, opossum tastes like a dumpster smells).  The right spices could make the difference between inedible and downright delicious.

 

Sausage-making and consumption was necessary because it wasn't until the 20th century that refrigeration became ubiquitous.  There were many places where ice couldn't be easily acquired, or saved in ice holes/ice houses/caves, so people learned to make foodstuffs which were less prone to spoiling.  Sausage, cheese, dried grains or flour, smoked meats, salted meats, cured meats, pemmican, the human species created numerous ways to preserve food when food preservation was much more difficult than "stick it in the freezer".  Learning to preserve foods allowed us to travel farther, work longer and harder, and survive better.  Food preservation is one of the cornerstones of our ability to thrive as a species.  Without it, we'd likely still be living like paleolithic people.

 

Farm-fresh eggs which haven't been washed yet can be left unrefrigerated for several months, too.  This allowed people to harvest eggs when chickens were laying frequently and save them for the months when egg production slowed or stopped (late fall through early spring), even without refrigeration of any kind.  Consequently, sausage and eggs became a very common breakfast across much of the United States and Europe (i have no idea about Asian practices, i haven't gotten that far yet), because they were always available, even in seasons when other foods weren't, and because they were resistant to spoilage, could be eaten with less risk of spending the entire day puking instead of working... or dead, which is always a bummer.  No-one likes to spend a day dead.

Thanks.  Also, never getting sausage again lol. 

[Luminara]

20 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Thanks.  Also, never getting sausage again lol. 

 

Blutwurst.

[momentarygrace]

On 3/7/2025 at 4:40 PM, AmeliaHealYa said:

I think it was Danse Macabre where Stephen King talked about a story he'd been pitching for years that no publisher wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole. The premise is that a guy survives a shipwreck, gets stranded on a desert island, and winds up

  Hide contents

cutting off pieces of his own body and eating them to avoid starving to death.

(o_O)

 

In One Piece, Sanji's mentor and rescuer Zeff and a young Sanji are shipwrecked and stranded on a rock in the ocean that extends too high up for them to reach the water to fish. Zeff gives Sanji a bag of food, keeping a larger bag for himself since he's a grown man and sends Sanji to the other side of the rock to watch for ships passing so they can try and signal for rescue. Eventually Sanji eats all his food and after starving for a while, he determines to take some of Zeff's food at knifepoint. He discovers that the bag Zeff kept was treasure - he'd given the boy all the food. Zeff was still alive, but he was missing the lower half of one leg.

 

(yes they got rescued and Zeff started a floating restaurant where Sanji worked until he left for his own pirate adventure.)