Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930) is from smack in the middle of Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922-1943). Mussolini was anti-pasta (HAR!) on national self-sufficiency grounds: it takes hard durum wheat to make pasta, and relatively little of Italy is good land for it.

Yep. This is the modern day. Powerful cameras are cheap; post-processing is easy. It still may be necessary to resort to product-photography tricks to get things like an in-camera shot of steam rising off a cup of coffee, or an ice cube splashing into orange juice—but for a routine web-ready shot of a well-presented…

Note that this is based on quite old data—pre-COVID-19. From https://2020-presidential-candidates-tax-policy.urban.org/ :

Buyer Beware: Pitfalls in Toxicology Laboratory Testing has an interesting list of things that cause false positives, as well as false negatives—stuff that one might expect to provide a positive, but a common urine immunoassay may well miss. (The one that just surprised me the most was Fentanyl.)

An early version of the assignment somehow managed to misspell Malcolm X’s name,

Air pollution is complicated, so there are some things to be aware of when trying to make sense of what all them little numbers mean:

“The jalapeños add what we call ‘entry-level’ spice,”

one relaxing flavor, blackberry lavender

Remember: when all days are special, no day is special. So the calendar has to include frequent entries such as Despair Thursday, Disappointment Sunday, and Get Your Own Dinner, Daddy’s Going Into The Garage Whatever-Today-Is. 

I have to wonder if the junk food started selling better because people were using it for meal replacements more often—when a consideration is many calories, now, for cheap.  

I want to be encouraging, but there’s a certain amount of ambiguity in saying something that might be taken as “You do U.”

This is America. We do not carp at expense when it comes to our soda experience. Besides, many of the people whining about safety are “expert” “scientists” and “doctors.”

“Our ice melts more slowly,

Sexism in the pseudosciences adds insult to injury.

made of a protein called cellulose

“complements notes of wild strawberry, cherry and beetroot in this silky limited-edition red wine.”

Look, she’s a lady woman with a professional degree and big breasts. I don’t see how this could be clearer.

Extrapolation is a good way to achieve high confidence in an incorrect answer.

I just wish they had titled it something else. I keep seeing Ammonite in close proximity to “lesbian” and thinking “Cool, it has its flaws, but Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite has a lot going for it.”

“Mandatory” would be likely to prove tricky. There’s an entire political party in the USA that lauds being unpersuadable in the face of inconvenience.