Found in a 1954 copy of "The Demand for Meat," by Elmer J. Working [JSTOR], published by the University of Chicago School of Business' Institute of Meat Packing.

Note that while the demand for pork ebbs and flows between the war years with the economy as a whole, whole ham's popularity never reached the pinnacle of sliced bacon. No surprise there.

However, salt pork seems to remain the "red-headed stepchild" of the pork family, never matching the elegant Post-War cachet of chops. In fact, its levels drop below the horizon by the early 1950's, suggesting salt pork carried the shameful whiff of poverty.

An interesting find from the age when Meat was King in Chicago. I love the font used to caption the graphs: wouldn't that make a great T-shirt?

Labels: books, chicago, food, history, science

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  Via Neil Gaiman's blog, a delightfully tongue-in-cheek webtoy that turns product recommendation portals on their head. Tired of having books, movies, and music shoved under your nose by nosy computer algorithms?

Try the UnSuggester: when you choose a book or author it returns the inverse, titles you likely wouldn't enjoy based on your search entry. The UnSuggester is more useful than you'd think - consider how many bad holiday gifting choices you can avert if you know what books to avoid!

As an experiment, I entered Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (a wonderful, phantastic fictionalized memoir inspired by Bradbury's childhood in 1920's Waukegan, Illinois) as as book I enjoy. Based on this selection, the UnSuggester predicts I wouldn't like these books; oddly enough they mainly deal with conservative Christian theology and knitting:

• The knitting experience : inspiration & instruction by Sally Melville
• When Christ comes : the beginning of the very best by Max Lucado
• Vogue Knitting on the Go: Socks Two
• Recovering biblical manhood and womanhood : A response to Evangelical feminism by John Piper
• Knitting on the road : sock patterns for the traveling knitter by Nancy Bush
• The five points of Calvinism : defined, defended, documented by David N. Steele
• A quest for godliness : the Puritan vision of the Christian life by J. I. Packer
• Mason-Dixon knitting : the curious knitters' guide : stories, patterns, advice, opinions, questions, answers, jokes, an by Kay Gardiner
• The master plan of evangelism by Robert Emerson Coleman

and...drumroll, please...

• I kissed dating goodbye by Joshua Harris

I haven't laughed this hard in days.

Labels: books, humor

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