Feeling Rum

I don’t consume a lot of alcohol of any kind. My alcohol consumption was immodest for a spate in my 20s, after which I became a near teetotaler for more than a decade, but both behavior patterns proved to be (extended) phases. For the past score of years it has been fairly modest, at least by the standards of the CDC. The CDC guidance for an adult male of average size is no more than 14 drinks per week and no more than 4 in any one day. (A standard “drink” in the US is defined as 14 grams of alcohol, which is the amount in 1.5 ounces [44.4 mL] of 80-proof [40%] spirits.) I haven’t met, much less exceeded, either CDC limit in the current century, and rarely came close. But when I do pour myself a little ethanol, it is usually a high proof bourbon or rye. Neat: no ice, no mixers. I don’t care much for sweet or mellow alcoholic beverages: the burn is part of the point, much as the heat of a chili pepper is the point.
 
This wasn’t always the case. In my college years (legal drinking age was 18 then as it still is in most of the world today) I didn’t like the harshness of unmixed spirits, so I either opted for wine or would disguise spirits in cocktails aimed at those with a sweet tooth: white Russians (long before The Big Lebowski), grasshoppers, screwdrivers, Southern Comfort & Coke, and the like. (Aside: sweeter than bourbon, Southern Comfort is pretty awful by itself IMHO, but it is quite good as a mixer in lieu of bourbon.) Eventually for simplicity’s sake I came to favor rum and Coke (aka Cuba libre) as my go-to cocktail, rum being a spirit actually made from sugar and from sugar byproducts such as molasses.

This hasn’t been my tipple of choice since Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi was in theaters for the first time, but nostalgia for that era likely influenced my decision last week to pick up a copy of And a Bottle of Rum: a History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis. I like thematic histories. On my shelves I have dedicated histories of salt, pork, cod, plagues, textiles, shipping, and even rust, among many others. The elements of history – even seemingly minor ones – are so intertwined that each can have profound impacts in unexpected ways. Salt, for instance, may seem to have little to do with the American Civil War, yet it was a strategic material necessary (in those pre-refrigeration days) to preserve food to feed the troops, and its shortage in the South was a real hardship; coastal Southern salt production facilities were among the first targets of the Union Navy. This reveals the strength and the weakness of histories that place one element – even a big one be it class, race, ideology, or what-have-you – front and center. It really is illuminating to view history from each of those perspectives, but we mislead ourselves if we think that only one lens is correct or that it gives us a full view. A few hundred years ago it would have seemed normal to regard religion as the central mover of history. By the late 20^th century, however, the historical world view of statesmen and academics on both sides of the Cold War had become so thoroughly secularized that the Islamic Revolution in Iran (which had nothing to do with class, liberalism, Marxism, capitalism, or democracy) completely blindsided them. Rum is not remotely as important as anything mentioned so far, not least because lots of substitutes for it always were and are available. Yet neither is it negligible.

Sugar is not an indigenous New World crop. It is native to Papua New Guinea from which it spread slowly westward in ancient times. Alexander the Great in 325 BCE encountered it in India, and the plant was carried further west in Hellenistic times. It was not abundant in the West, however, until introduced to the Caribbean islands, which proved to have the perfect climate and soil for it. It was the crop that put the islands on a paying basis for French and English colonists in the 17^th century. It wasn’t a bonanza comparable to the gold and silver treasures flowing from the Spanish territories, but (unlike the French and English colonies on the mainland, which were a serious drain on homeland resources) it was something. It was something with dire consequences: slave labor on the sugar plantations. Sugar production creates a lot of waste in stalks and molasses. We don’t know who first decided to ferment and distill alcohol commercially from the waste, but the where is probably Barbados. The oldest mention in print of the stuff (called Rumbullion by the author) is by a visitor to the island in 1652. The earliest surviving example of the short form “rum” is also from Barbados in a 1658 deed that mentions “cisterns for liquor for rum.”

 
Rum caught on quickly in England and the English colonies. It didn’t suit the French and Spanish, who continued to prefer wine and brandy at home and in their colonies, but they were happy to export their excess molasses to the East Coast of North America where it was distilled into rum in copious quantities. Rum helped spark the American Revolution. In 1763 England began to enforce the previously flouted Molasses Act and followed it with the Sugar Act of 1764, which placed tariffs on sugar and molasses thereby threatening American rum distilleries. The uproar was so great that the tariff on molasses was reduced in 1766 to a paltry 1 penny per gallon, but by then the Americans were stirred up about other things as well. When rebellion broke out, the molasses trade was disrupted anyway, of course, so the colonists became whiskey distillers. Whiskey still dominates the output of American distillers, though in 2021 Americans drink much more imported vodka than their own whiskey.
 
Despite that Yo Ho Ho song, which we owe to Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island, rum wasn’t big among Caribbean buccaneers until the later years of the classic age of piracy. It wasn’t available in the early years. Blackbeard, however, was an inveterate rummy (he mixed it with gunpowder of all things), so at least there is one notable conformer to stereotype. Grog (3-to-1 mix of water and rum plus a splash of lime) wasn’t a pirate thing at all but a Royal Navy thing. Admiral Edward Vernon (nicknamed Old Grogram) decreed the watered and limed rum ration, which was specified in the naval code in 1756.
 
Rum for its first two centuries was a rough, raw, and ragged drink. Facundo Bacardi y Maso changed that when Bacardi’s distillery opened in Santiago Cuba in 1862. The rough edges were smoothed out with aging and a filtration process that is still technically secret (but probably uses sand and charcoal, much like Jack Daniels whiskey). The result is a rum that is pleasant without a mixer. Other distillers soon followed.
 
Santiago is also the birthplace of the Cuba libre (rum and Coke). The time and place are pretty certain though the details vary with the teller. Since its introduction in 1886, Coca-Cola had been tried as a mixer for various spirits. In the most common version of the story, during the Spanish-American War in 1898 American troops in bars mixed rum and Coca-Cola and toasted their rebel allies, “Por Cuba libre!” In the US it did not become a common cocktail before World War 2. During the war, however, it was the drink of choice of sailors on Trinidad where there was a major US naval base and no shortage of Caribbean rum. An island entertainer with the charming name Lord Invader took note and modified a calypso tune originally written by Trinidadian Lionel Belasco in 1906 with new lyrics and a new title. The locals and the sailors liked it. Comedian Morey Amsterdam (readers of a certain age will recognize him from The Dick Van Dyke Show) heard the song when on a USO tour, got professional help back in the States to polish the score, and introduced it to various singers. The Andrews Sisters recorded Rum and Coca-Cola in 1944. It was the flip side of the single One Meat Ball, which they expected to be a hit; instead Rum and Coca-Cola made a splash and One Meat Ball just a ripple. One couldn’t ask for better advertising. Whether called a rum and Coke or a Cuba libre, it’s been a very common bar order ever since. Side note: after the war the aging Lionel Belasco sued and won for copyright infringement.
 
Rum sales in the US have about 10% of the market for hard spirits. The percentage varies a little from year to year as rum based drinks (Mai Tai, Piña Colada, Daiquiri, Mojito, etc., each of which has its own connection to social history) go in and out of fashion, but only the very expensive high end rums show any long term trend upward in sales. I’m too cheap for those. I don’t see myself ever ordering any of the more complicated rum cocktails either. Just for old times’ sake though, perhaps one night I’ll once again toast “Por Cuba libre!”
 
 

The Andrews Sisters – Rum and Coca-Cola

Just Deserts

I had a curious encounter outside a barber shop toward which I was headed because my hair had somehow succeeded at the neat trick of being both thin and shaggy. On the sidewalk before I entered a complete stranger, quite a bit younger than I, stuck a finger in my face and said with what appeared to be genuine anger, “You’re going to get what’s coming to you, buddy.”
 
From the “buddy” rather than a name, I gathered this was not someone whom I didn’t happen to recognize but who knew me from somewhere. I suspected (and still do) that it was just completely mistaken identity. Perhaps someone on the street who looked vaguely like me had made some remark to him or bumped into him or stolen his parking spot or something and he assumed I was the fellow. Or perhaps he meant my type of person, whatever type that might be, rather than me personally. Whatever the case, I was too taken aback to respond before he sneered and walked off. Evidently he was prepared to let karma wreak its own vengeance. Another approaching pedestrian who had overheard this eyed me with a raised eyebrow. “It really would be pretty awful if we all got what we deserved, wouldn’t it?” I remarked to him as he passed. “Yeah, that is a scary thought,” he said. “Can you imagine?” Neither of us commented further. I shrugged and entered the shop.
 
The anonymous passerby and I were being wry but serious, too. In some ways this evinced an old-fashioned world-view. This is a narcissistic age, and more than a few us seem to think that what we deserve is admiration and mountainous swag rather than anything alarming. For them, the words of the finger-pointer would be heartening. I don’t think there is much risk of either outcome – not from karma anyway. I’m not a believer in cosmic karma. We get away with some transgressions and are falsely accused of others. We may be over- or under-rewarded and over- or under-punished for what we do – or don’t do. Good and bad things happen to us, sometimes earned by our own actions and sometimes randomly. Nor is there any guarantee of balance to those outcomes: one or the other can predominate for no particular reason. There are few observations triter than “life is not fair.”
 
Fairness itself is a notoriously tricky ethical concept anyway, especially for secularists. (If one has faith that morality is inherent in the universe, then that is that.) Some thinkers such as John Locke tried to derive ethics from nature. The atheistic Ayn Rand went further and devised a severely rational system of ethics (Objectivism) that is self-consistent from the fundamentals up. However, as in any rational system, her conclusions follow only if you buy her premises; one first has to hold some “truths to be self-evident.” Not everyone does, at least not the same ones. Marx certainly didn’t. A nihilist has little patience with either. Nietzsche regarded competing ethical systems to be simply tools to achieve or maintain power: those in power devise moralities that will justify keeping them there (as a matter of fairness) while those out of power devise moral definitions that will justify deposing the powers-that-be in favor of themselves (as a matter of fairness). Then there is the age-old simple proposition that might=right. It is extraordinarily difficult to dispute this formula on a purely rational basis. I am not a Platonist (for many reasons that are off-topic here) but Plato was pretty good at putting into the mouth of Socrates strong refutations of other philosophers – typically by getting them to refute themselves. Yet one of his least satisfactory counters (despite Plato having written both sides of the argument) is to the “might is right” assertion of Thrasymachus in Book I of The Republic. Thrasymachus argued that justice is whatever the stronger party says it is, whether the nobles in an aristocracy or the demos in a democracy or, for that matter, a shepherd and his sheep: “and by the same token you seem to suppose that the rulers in our cities – the real rulers – differ at all in their thoughts of the governed from a man's attitude towards his sheep.” Socrates counters that a shepherd must look after the interests of his sheep (in essence, act justly) in order to do well for himself; an abusive (unjust) shepherd soon won’t have a flock. Yet, this really doesn’t answer Thrasymachus’ point that the shepherd eats the sheep, not the other way around. Existentialists also dismiss codes of ethics as anything other than human-made and insist that none of us can escape the freedom to choose his or her own, whether pre-packaged or original, but that we act in bad faith if we refuse to accept the consequences of our choices.

Well, I do have some ethics to which I try to adhere with varying degrees of success, though I freely admit that choosing the premises for them had more to do with taste than anything more solid. They are rather old-fashioned on the whole, which is why I chose the ominous interpretation of the sidewalk prophecy rather than the auspicious one. However, since the prophet was someone with whom I had no history of interaction, what’s coming to me (with regard to him) would be nothing. Even were this otherwise though, the world is too chaotic a place to be sure of outcomes most of the time.
 
The Joker’s comment in The Dark Knight nonetheless comes to mind: “The thing about chaos? It’s fair.”
 

Dorothy – What's Coming to Me

You Bet Your Asphalt

While running errands yesterday on a roundtrip drive of no more than 20 miles (32km) I bypassed three road repair crews: two simply patching potholes and a third stripping the road surface in preparation for repaving. At all three sites the familiar aroma of asphalt was in the air. Getting the work done now is a sensible precaution. There is not much more than a month of more or less reliably favorable weather in this corner of the world. You never know about November; it could be anything from a heat wave to a deep freeze with any variety and quantity of precipitation. Emergency repairs aside, roadwork not done by then had best wait until spring.
 

Last week while working outside my house I was approached by a fellow about the asphalt on my own driveway. You know the pitch. Anyone with a blacktop driveway has heard it: “I see your driveway is in bad shape. We’re redoing your neighbor’s around the corner. Hey, we’re here, we have the equipment. So, we’ll make you a special offer.” I passed on the multi-thousand dollar special offer. I’m a cheap old bachelor. I don’t replace things like windows, countertops, or appliances unless the current ones are actually broken. (Unfashionable doesn’t count as broken.) Also, when repairs are within my skill set I do them myself. The same goes for my driveway. I patch it when it needs patching. It is not in bad shape overall despite the remarks of the pitchman: there were no loose chunks or potholes except for one spot where the driveway meets the road. Snow plows in the winter sometimes catch there and cause damage. It has happened before and will happen again. It is an easy fix. The special offer did at least prompt me (belatedly) to make it.

Some professionals distinguish among bituminous concrete, blacktop, asphalt, and several other terms, but even the experts are inconsistent in their usage. The words are used interchangeably in everyday speech. It’s fair enough to call pretty much any thick hydrocarbon sludge “asphalt” (with or without aggregate and whether mostly dry or mostly liquid) though there are different mixes for different purposes. A more significant distinction is the source. Natural asphalt can be can be found at or near the surface in areas where it has gurgled up from deeper petroleum reservoirs. These natural deposits range in viscosity from hard and crumbly to wet and sticky. So-called “tar pits” such as those at La Brea are asphalt, not tar. Non-natural asphalt is a byproduct of petroleum refining. When you crack crude oil by successively separating out the various fuels and lubricants (kerosene, gasoline, diesel fuel, etc.) you are left at the end with a residue of asphalt. You can’t help it. Fortunately there is a market for that, too. Further, the formulations of asphalt from refineries can be adjusted to suit specific needs. The kind you dig out of the ground is catch-as-catch-can; each deposit has a unique admixture of sand and other substances.
 
Natural asphalt deposits were exploited by the earliest civilizations for waterproofing. From Sumerian times onward asphalt was used to secure cisterns, sewers, and boats against leaks. The Greek word “asphaltos” means “secure.” It supposedly waterproofed the reed basket in which the future King Sargon as a baby was set adrift in the Euphrates in 3800 BCE. Its first recorded use as pavement was 625 BCE in Babylon for a road from King Naboppolassar’s palace to the north gate of the city. His son Nebuchadnezzar paved more roads from the palace. The idea didn’t catch on more broadly in ancient times however. The Romans, inveterate roadbuilders though they were, ignored the stuff as a paving material. They used it to line baths, aqueducts, and drains. They used it to caulk hulls. They didn’t surface roads with it. The reason was that Romans were aware of asphalt’s weaknesses. They intended their roads to last, and last they did. As late as the 18^th century most of the best roads in Europe were still the old Roman ones with their multilayer bases, proper drainage, and fitted paving stones. Asphalt pavement is relatively inexpensive and provides a great surface, but it does suffer from weather and traffic. It requires maintenance. It doesn’t last.
 
Today our calculations are different. The upfront cost of building a four-lane interstate highway to Roman standards would be prohibitive, and it still wouldn’t hold up to pounding by modern heavy vehicles. We expect constantly to maintain and repair our roads, so relatively cheap asphalt makes economic sense, as it has for well over a century. There is some competition from concrete, which, though more expensive than asphalt initially, lasts longer, but eventually concrete must be repaved, too. It is repaved with asphalt. Asphalt is not only affordable straight from the refinery, it also is endlessly recyclable. It can be torn up, heated, and laid right back down again. It is, in fact, the most recycled material – more so than aluminum cans. In the US, the EPA’s position since 2002 is that asphalt by itself is not a significant pollution hazard.
 
As that may be, I patched that pothole in the driveway yesterday. I had a couple of bags in the barn. One was enough. If snow plows damage the driveway again this winter, I’ll patch it again next spring. If only we could repair the potholes in our lives so easily.
 
 

Randy Newman – Potholes

Bacon Makes It Better

An unabashed carnivore (well, omnivore actually), I had lunch last week at a local smokehouse. The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter was playing on the oldies station. I commented to the 18-y.o. waitress while thumbing at the radio, “I missed the past 20 annual Farewell Tours by these guys.” She shrugged and answered, “I don’t even know the band.” Sigh. Fortunately she had delivered porcine goodness to the table to distract me from the generation gap: candied bacon and a pulled pork sandwich with a fiery bbq sauce. Distract me it did.
 

As Katherine Rogers explains in her book Pork: A Global History, pigs (Sus scrufa) were among the earliest animals to be domesticated. (Dogs were first by far, but as hunting companions.) It was once thought that farming and husbandry (the Neolithic revolution) preceded the appearance of permanent settlements and villages – that agriculture provided the prerequisite food surpluses. The archaeological record reveals this to be backward. Today the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers exist in extreme and marginal environments, but this was not the case 10,000 years ago. They throve in temperate regions rich in game and edible plants. In eastern Anatolia as early as the waning days of the last ice age they could and did settle down in permanent villages while exploiting only the local wildlife for food. They were well-fed enough to build impressive stone monuments such those at Göbekli Tepe. Yet, the growth of these settled populations did put a strain on wild resources, so the deliberate planting of grains and the deliberate taming of farm animals eventually began. Two of the most significant animal domestications were cattle from aurochs and pigs from wild boar: both events occurred about 10,000 years ago. (DNA studies show all modern cattle to be descended from an original stock of only 80.) At very nearly the same time as this was happening in the Near East (and for very much the same reasons) pigs also were domesticated independently in China.
 
Pigs were easier than cattle (which also had other uses such as dairy) for settled people to raise on small plots and farms for food, so pork became the more prevalent meat in relatively densely settled regions until very modern times. Pork products have another upside: properly smoked or cured, they can be preserved up to a year without refrigeration. (The smoking/curing process is rushed and incomplete for ham, bacon, and sausages sold in supermarkets today, so they do not last long even with refrigeration; traditionally smoked meats are still available from craft producers but they are pricey.) The very fact that pork was so ubiquitous in prehistory, the ancient world, and the medieval world made the prohibitions against it by some religions (notably Judaism and Islam) a greater mark of distinction than otherwise would be the case.
 
Pigs were once a far more common sight than they are today. In the ultra-urbanized 21^st century it is easy to forget that for the bulk of history the overwhelming majority of the world’s population was not only poor but rural. In 1900 (according to Our World in Data) only 16% lived in cities. In 1800 it was 7%. Rural folk raised pigs and chickens even on very small plots and many of them were allowed to wander freely. In wooded areas of Europe and North America pigs could feed themselves. The free-ranging omnivores would run “hog wild” eating acorns, mushrooms (they have an excellent nose for truffles), small animals, and just about anything else. Even penned, however, pigs happily live on leftovers that otherwise might be thrown away: table scraps, whey, brewers mash, etc. Samuel Sydney in The Pig (1860) writes, “There is no savings bank for the labourer like the pig.” He explains that a piglet can be bought for a trifle in spring or summer and grown on household scraps. The owner then can sell the hams the ensuing winter for more than enough “to buy another pig, and the rest will remain for his own consumption, without seeming to have cost anything.” I know this advice was followed at least into the 1930s since my paternal grandparents in the Depression did just that.
 
Nowadays (since the mid-19^th century actually) pigs on commercial farms are mostly corn-fed. This leads to the peculiar hog/corn price cycle, of which elementary Economics textbook authors are so fond as an illustrative example of price interactions. When corn (maize) prices are high, hog farmers sell their pigs rather than pay for the pricey feed. The rise in pork supply on the market drives down pork prices. The drop in demand for feed from pig farmers in turn drives down corn prices, which soon prompts farmers to withhold their pigs from market in order to fatten them up with cheap corn. The consequent reduction in pork supply in markets drives up pork prices which prompts farmers to raise more pigs. This increases demand for corn feed, which pushes up corn prices. So, hog and corn prices constantly cycle in opposite directions. Barring some other major disruption (e.g. bumper crops or crop failures) when one price is high the other is low.
 
By the late 19^th century in Europe and the Americas, beef shouldered aside pork not only as the preferred meat dish (as it already long was among those who could afford it) but as the more common one. This shift to beef hasn’t happened everywhere. In China the pig has held onto its #1 position in the 21^st century. As yet, the (steadily rising) annual per capita consumption of all meats in China remains below US levels, but for pork consumption in particular China has the edge: 38kg in China vs 28kg in the USA. Either number is a lot of pork. For myself, I’m as happy with a braised pork chop as with a prime rib – sometimes happier.
 
There are those of a certain age who may chalk up to nostalgia the seeming memory that commercially sourced hams and chops were tastier in their youths. They really were. North American supermarket cuts are leaner today – typically by 19% compared to half a century ago – in order to address health concerns that a large portion of the public started taking seriously beginning in the 1960s. (Remember “the other white meat” industry ads?) This does reduce the calories in pork products, so there is that, but since fat enhances flavor it comes at a cost. Ironically, there have been some second thoughts about dietary fat among medical researchers in the past decade (see analysis published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), but these haven’t yet changed what is on the shelves.
 
I’m aware of the concerns of vegetarians and vegans. (Those who know me personally know just how close to home those views are.) I don’t intend to engage in that debate here. Whatever it says about my moral choices, however, while menus like that of the above referenced smokehouse still exist, I’ll be ordering from them.
 
Not many large animals (i.e. excluding mosquitos and worms and such) reciprocally regard us as lunch at present. Though our proto-human ancestors were prey as often as predator, in the modern world fewer than 2000 humans are killed and eaten by large animals annually. As a point of interest, however, it’s long been noted that humans taste like pork. Anthony Burgess, for one, confirmed this. He wrote about his attendance shortly after WW2 at a ceremonial feast in New Guinea; there, he partook of an offering “very much like a fine, delicately sweet pork, which is what I thought it was.” He was shaken to learn it was a warrior killed in a skirmish. He didn’t ask for seconds. Perhaps, however, this flavor profile explains the aliens’ enthusiasm in that famous Twilight Zone episode.
 
 

The Dorsets: Pork Chops (1961)