Like fish sticks, fried squid rings are an invention of the modern era, made possible by refrigeration and mechanized manufacture. The history is recounted in various places online. For a snapshot, read the following:
Fried calamari first came into the public eye through a written article published by the New York Times in 1975. Since then, the American people have kept this welcomed dish in high demand. Although, the New York Times was the first media publication to recognize calamari as an ultimate game changer, calamari did not reach popularity until the early 1980’s. During that interim time, calamari remained a very exclusive dish, being offered only in high class and exotic restaurants in prominent cities such as New York and Boston.
That is a kindly, fluffy treatment from a seafood site. Looking elsewhere, one might find a dank piece from The Daily Beast that blames calamari on a consortium of pols and gangsters in Rhode Island:
With virtually no sales of squid in the ’70s, by 1989 127 million pounds had sold nationwide, according to the American Institute of Food Distributors, Inc. By 1994, squid sales were up to 215 million pounds.
Calamari, as everyone who’s been to a white tablecloth Italian restaurant or a TGIFridays knows, eventually became as ubiquitous on menus as chicken. The New York Times has even used its meteoric rise in popularity back in the ’80s to create an index for measuring food trends, called the “Fried Calamari Index.” The time it takes for a food item—say, quiche, pesto, hummus, quinoa, kale—to go from total obscurity to mainstream mania is denoted as one Standard Calamari unit. In the case of the namesake unit, it took about 16 years, as measured by the rise in the number of mentions “fried calamari” or “fried squid” in The New York Times.
Few states know of the now-insatiable demand for squid better than Rhode Island.
The Rhode Island squid-fishing fleet is the largest on the East Coast, accounting for about 54 percent of all the squid landings in the Northeast. It takes in nearly 17.5 million pounds of squid landings per year, valued at $18 million, making it hugely profitable, especially considering the after-catch profits for seafood processors, dealers, and restaurants throughout the state.
The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has picked US Senator Tom Cotton to make war against Iran, amid the Obama administration’s efforts to negotiate peace with the Islamic Republic, an American military analyst in New York says.
In an interview on Tuesday, the freshman Republican senator from Arkansas said he wants the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a war he believes would only take a few days to win outright.
The US military campaign against Iran “would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days’ air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior,” Cotton said.
Commenting to Press TV, Michael Burns said on Thursday, “This jingoistic saber-rattling by Senator Tom Cotton is really the outer edge of the folly of American foreign policy.”
“This man, who had one term in the House of Representatives – he is from the southwest Arkansas – squeaked out an election against a longtime Democrat, Mark Pryor from Arkansas,” Burns said.
“He was funded basically by the Jewish lobby, by AIPAC, the whole crowd of them put tremendous amount of money into his campaign, and as a reward this fellow is out in front to try and make war against Iran,” he added.
Last week, the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – reached an outline of a potentially historic agreement with Iran over Tehran’s civilian nuclear work that would lift all international sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic in exchange for certain steps Tehran will take with regard to its nuclear program.
A framework agreement was reached between Iran and the P5+1 group in Switzerland on April 2. (AFP Photo)
The understanding is considered a major breakthrough in the West’s 12-year standoff with Iran over its nuclear energy program.
Burns said that “after the sad, dolorous, painful record of our ventures in war-making in the Middle East … now when we have a chance to reach an accommodation, an agreement to tighten the tethers on the dogs of war with Iran, what does this crazy senator from Arkansas propose? A quick bombing of another sovereign country.”
“And the funny thing is after centuries of history, we know that the wars don’t end very easily,” he said. “Shakespeare said, ‘the hand that picks up the armament of war so quickly finds it much more difficult to put it down.’”
“So the absurdity of this man, who has by the way great educational background — Harvard College, Harvard Law, he’s a senator, he was an army lieutenant — you think that there would be a little common sense attached to his escutcheon, but no with that Jewish lobby – AIPAC — behind him, he’s been anointed, indeed charged with trying to get this country into war,” he noted.
Cotton reportedly received one million dollars from the Emergency Committee for Israel, a neoconservative group associated with Israel lobby, just before the last US election. The group was founded in mid-2010 by William [Bill] Kristol, a US neoconservative political analyst.
William [Bill] Kristol, the founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel
A group of 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to Iran’s leaders last month, warning that whatever agreement reached with the Obama administration would be a “mere executive agreement” and that Congress could ultimately walk away from any deal with Tehran upon review.
The White House has denounced the GOP letter as an “unprecedented” and “calculated” attempt to interfere with the Iran nuclear talks.
Senator Cotton claimed that he had drafted the letter. However, independent analysts say the letter was actually written by Kristol, his main financier.
“The idea of this man out in front is the worst sort of bizarre theatre. Hopefully, someone would put a shroud over him, like the falcons, to keep him the perch, because I can’t imagine any policy maker, anyone who is significant, certainly the American citizens, taking this guy very seriously,” Burns said.
“The only people that really take him seriously are his AIPAC masters who fund him. And perhaps that’s all what he wants out of this term in office,” he noted.
Military and economic analyst Michael Burns assesses the Drone question on PressTV.
From the PressTV site:
A military analyst in New York says unmanned aerial aircraft (UAV) that are operated domestically inside the US have the potential to be “extremely dangerous” and must be regulated.
UAVs, commonly known as drones, have been used around the world by the United States to cause a “lot of damage,” Michael Burns told Press TV on Tuesday.
“We’ve yet to have an incident were any major damages were caused by a drone domestically, we certainly used them internationally to do a lot of damage,” Burns said.
Drones are “potentially, extremely dangerous” and “the degree to which we’ve let them develop without regulation is simply astounding,” the analyst warned.
Sometimes one’s thoughts are so dry and barren that one has ceased to notice the fact. Then, like a brightly colored cactus fruit, an immensely silly thought appears. Look! There it is! At your feet! A capering clown of a question, viz., What’s the deal with fish sticks anyway? And your trek through the desert is ended! A light rain falls, and you are again a child, dancing in the heady delights of investigation and research. The following excerpt is pretty good by itself; to get the full article (see notes at bottom) you’d better have university or library access to JHU.
The Ocean’s Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick Paul R. Josephson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: “Der Mensch ist, was er isst.” —Ludwig Feuerbach
The fish stick—the bane of schoolchildren who generally consider it an overcooked, bread-encrusted, cardboard-tasting, fish-less effort of lunchrooms and mothers to deceive them into consuming protein—is a postwar invention that came into existence as the confluence of several forces of modernity. These forces included a boom in housing construction that contained kitchens with such new appliances as freezers; the seeming appeal of space-age, ready-to-eat foods; the rise of consumer culture; and an increasingly affluent society. Yet the fish stick arose during the 1950s not because consumers cried out for it, and certainly not because schoolchildren demanded it, but because of the need to process and sell tons of fish that were harvested from the ocean, filleted, and frozen in huge, solid blocks. Consumers were not attracted by the form of these frozen fillets, however, and demand for fish products remained low. Manufacturers believed that the fish stick—a breaded, precooked food—would solve the problem. Still, several simultaneous technological advances had to take place before the product could appear.
These advances occurred in catching, freezing, processing, and transportation technologies. The postwar years witnessed a rapid increase in the size of merchant marines in many countries, with these merchant fleets adopting new, almost rapacious catching methods and simultaneously installing massive refrigeration and processing facilities onboard huge trawlers. Sailors caught, beheaded, skinned, gutted, filleted, and then plate- or block-froze large quantities of cod, pollock, haddock, and other fish—tens of thousands of pounds—and kept them from spoiling in huge freezing units. Once on shore, the subsequent attempt to separate whole pieces of fish from frozen blocks resulted in mangled, unappetizing chunks. Frozen blocks of fish required a series of processes to transform them into a saleable, palatable product. The fish stick came from fish blocks being band-sawed into rectangles roughly three inches long and one inch wide (~7.5 3 2.5 cm), then breaded and fried. Onboard processors eventually learned to trim fish into fillets and other useable cuts before freezing. Processors considered these other cuts the “portion,” which found a home in institutional kitchens (schools, hospitals, factories, and restaurants). Fish sticks had a largely retail success, however, because demand for them in schools and elsewhere waned as more manufacturers entered production and quality declined.
From: Technology and Culture / Volume 49, Number 1, January 2008 / pp. 41-61 | 10.1353/tech.2008.0023
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v049/49.1josephson.html
John Quine, writes The Independent, was head of counter-intelligence at the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 in the 1960s, and one of the team that extracted a confession of treachery from the double agent George Blake. Blake, a member of MI6, was, of all the spies uncovered in the Cold War, the one who did most damage to Britain. [More]
George Blake, conversely, is doing quite well these days. Age 90, he still looks much as he did in this old photo with Kim Philby. Here’s a Daily Mail interview from last Fall.
Kim Philby with George Blake, c 1977. Blake, alias Behar, was twelve years younger than Philby and did not drink two pitchers of martinis every evening.
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That is a kindly, fluffy treatment from a seafood site. Looking elsewhere, one might find a dank piece from The Daily Beast that blames calamari on a consortium of pols and gangsters in Rhode Island:Calamari, as everyone who’s been to a white tablecloth Italian restaurant or a TGIFridays knows, eventually became as ubiquitous on menus as chicken. The New York Times has even used its meteoric rise in popularity back in the ’80s to create an index for measuring food trends, called the “Fried Calamari Index.” The time it takes for a food item—say, quiche, pesto, hummus, quinoa, kale—to go from total obscurity to mainstream mania is denoted as one Standard Calamari unit. In the case of the namesake unit, it took about 16 years, as measured by the rise in the number of mentions “fried calamari” or “fried squid” in The New York Times.
The Rhode Island squid-fishing fleet is the largest on the East Coast, accounting for about 54 percent of all the squid landings in the Northeast. It takes in nearly 17.5 million pounds of squid landings per year, valued at $18 million, making it hugely profitable, especially considering the after-catch profits for seafood processors, dealers, and restaurants throughout the state.
Sometimes one’s thoughts are so dry and barren that one has ceased to notice the fact. Then, like a brightly colored cactus fruit, an immensely silly thought appears. Look! There it is! At your feet! A capering clown of a question, viz., What’s the deal with fish sticks anyway? And your trek through the desert is ended! A light rain falls, and you are again a child, dancing in the heady delights of investigation and research. The following excerpt is pretty good by itself; to get the full article (see notes at bottom) you’d better have university or library access to JHU.
