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…
Butter
I can’t believe it’s not coal!
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
Unless the waste product is cheese…
It would probably be some synthetic American government cheese-like product.
Which I’m sure if the Germans had come up with it and not the Americans would also be described as being nutritious
That “waste product” isn’t just thrown away.
They’re still hydrocarbons. Which are used in other places or burned for fuel… Which isn’t actually all that great for the environment…
Actually, tossing the waste product in a pit might be better, environmentally speaking.
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.
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.
separating out the unwanted things like gasoline make the process inefficient and difficult.
🫠
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.
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.
We eat the same stuff we’re made out of?!
Impossibru!
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.
I like regular “Mexican” coke we have here in the states, ig Coca-cola reduces the sugar used in Latin-america or something.
But I can taste the aspartame immediately and it disgusts me. It doesn’t come across as a “sugar, but less sweet” it comes across as “Trying to be sugar but tastes like a metallic chemical compound instead”
Mexican coke has cane sugar instead of corn syrup, which is the main factor in it being better.
HFCS, specifically, which is very different from corn syrup.
Corn syrup is about 60% as sweet as sugar, by weight. HFCS is more sweet by weight, (if I remember right), because of the concentration of fructose.
If only Coke would take a queue from Pepsi and release cane sugar versions nationwide, I was a big fan of the Pepsi real sugar.
I’ve never really had a problem finding Mexican cokes here in Michigan. They’re not at every gas station but they are at many grocery stores.
what is the deal with people saying aspartame is nasty? it tastes slightly different from sugar lol
To me, aspartame tastes plastic-y and reminds me of how hot asphalt smells. It has more of a chemical taste than a sweet one. Toothpaste gets a pass only because of all the mint that masks it.
Sucralose (Splenda) can taste rather like aspirin in the right concentration. Again, it’s “sweet” in a way but isn’t quite right.
It’s the creepy valley of sweeteners. It tastes like wrong sugar.
sure, it’s a slightly different flavour and you might find that a bit weird, but it’s not nasty. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, i basically only drink sugar free soda and now i find that regular sugared soda tastes a bit strange and slightly too sweet.
My perception with artificial sweeteners is that my body knows something is wrong. It tastes sweet but it can’t extract any energy from it.
Uncanny valley?
Googling “creepy valley” does hit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley as the first resultI ain’t no valley scientist.
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
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!
That’s coal. Petroleum is from a variety of things that died in certain conditions where the carbon in their bodies was unable to escape into the short carbon cycle. It’s less dinosaurs and more Paleozoic though. That’s why you have stuff like the Permian basin
Interesting. I knew how coal was formed but also thought a lot of our oil came from Carboniferous forests. After reading your comment I had to go read a few papers and articles! Apparently the consensus these days is that most of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life (diatoms, plankton, algae) that died and was buried in de-oxygenated water. The sheer amount of them that had to live and die to create these vast reservoirs of oil is mind blowing.
Its both.
It’s not.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not!™
(dinosaurs)
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
Does that make China the most vegan energy producer in the world?
China makes their fake cooking oil out of sewage
Technically they are collecting discarded cooking oil from gutters. Potato/potato.
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 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.
Understatement of the thread.
You could add that many people had kind of a bad decade 35 to 45 as well
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.
margarine is absolutely fine
It’s hydrogenated cooking oil; trans-fats. It is absolutely not good to eat regularly.Apparently that’s no longer true. Thanks fellow lemmings for setting the record straight.
That said, I do appreciate it for it’s long shelf life and availability when better foods are expensive or unavailable.
Margarine these days is mostly a mix of either palm or coconut oil with something like soybean or canola oil. I wouldn’t be surprised if butter had more naturally occurring trans fats.
The Wikipedia article linked on top states that most margarine has moved to lower trans-fats since the turn of the century. It’s probably at least as healthy as butter, if not moreso.
this is outright misinformation, the swedish food safety department specifically says that modern margarine has basically no trans fats whatsoever.
Because I’ve tasted it and it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever eaten.
and i eat margarine all the time and it tastes like exactly what it is: solid fat
it has no flavour beyond that of generic fat, i can only assume that anyone claiming otherwise is getting a product with something else in it, or they’re making shit up.
There is no “generic fat”. The texture isn’t the same. The flavor isn’t the same.
If you serve me margarine like it’s butter, I will spit it in a trash can in front of you, and it will take an extended period of time and mouthwash to get that nasty grimy shit out of my mouth. You pretending “it’s just fat” is fine, but I’m telling you, people are disgusted by margarine because it’s really fucking disgusting, and if you try to sneak margarine by me, it will destroy the entire meal.
ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about motor oil
You’re the one acknowledging the consensus that margarine is disgusting and arguing it’s some big conspiracy instead of the fact that it’s more disgusting than serving someone a bowl full of actual shit.
During ww2 the alternative was hunger
For reference see the British WW2 delicacy “Toast Sandwich”
S/hunger/meth
I wonder if the concept of “plastip” in Future Boy Conan came from this. They recycle it into food, weapons, and fuel.
So, more sinthetic margarine?
You might find https://lemm.ee/post/36819921 interesting.
