Fritinancy

ChiQin and other odd birds

I’ve written frequently about the names of vegetarian and vegan substitutes for animal-based foods: the apostrophes (Turk’y, Chick’n), the negatives (Nada Moo, Beef-less), the kree8tiv misspellings (Mylk, Krab). For more, see this post and “Phood for Thought,” my 2011 Vocabulary.com column.

Here’s a recent entry in the Name That Phood sweepstakes: ChiQin Nuggets, a new product from Quorn (“Home of Meatless”).

The protein source is fermented Fusarium venenatum, a fungus found naturally in soil.

 

This isn’t Quorn’s first foray into not-chicken; you can still find Quorn Chik’n products on Amazon and elsewhere. I haven’t found an explanation for the new name—perhaps it’s a new recipe, or maybe Quorn is doubling down on the initial letter of its corporate name, which here is pronounced identically to the /ck/ in chicken (or Chick’n). A third possibility—that the spelling is a coded message about the QAnon conspiracy—is too unappetizing to consider.*

Lest you think “Only in America!”—well, think again. Around the world, producers of plant-based products are having phun with their phood.

Last week OrenH tweeted from Jerusalem about “kmozzarella.”

Word of the week: Soused

Last week marked the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the “practically unsinkable” H.M.S. Titanic, which struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 14, 2012, and sank the following day. If your knowledge of this event is limited to the romanticized 1997 movie*, you may be unfamiliar with some basic Titanic lore, such as what the first-class passengers ate.

Here’s the menu of the last luncheon, from a postcard that I bought at the splendid Molly Brown House Museum in Denver.

 

It’s a real time capsule, isn’t it? You don’t expect to see baloney—excuse me, bologna sausage—on a first-class menu. And you don’t see brawn on any menus these days; in fact, I had to look up its culinary meaning. (“Fleshy part of a boar’s leg”; from Old French braon. It’s related to German braten, as in sauerbraten.) I had to look up brill, too, but that’s probably because I’m not British: Brill is a flatfish, related to turbot, that swims around the southern and western coasts of England and presumably is still eaten in those parts.

But the item that most piqued my curiosity appears in the Buffet section, under “potted shrimp” (which I’d heard of but never eaten): soused herring. I knew “soused” only as one of a gazillion slang terms meaning “drunk.” What was its connection to herring?

March linkfest

Masha Gessen writes in the New Yorker about how “Z”—a letter that doesn’t exist in Cyrillic alphabets—became the symbol of the new Russian politics of aggression: “Graphically, the ‘Z’ is clearly closer to the swastika than to any prominent Soviet symbol, such as the five-pointed star, the hammer and sickle, or the red flag. Its use seems to require a double inversion: first, the people of Ukraine—a nation that suffered some of the greatest losses at the hands of Nazi Germany and one that is currently led by a Jewish President—are rendered as Nazis; then, the Russians, who claim to be fighting for peace and ‘de-Nazification,’ adopt a visual symbol that appears to reference the swastika.” In late March two German states outlawed public displays of the letter “Z.” (Read about earlier, merely annoying meanings of “Z.”)

Russian truck in Ukraine marked “Z.” Via Wikipedia.

*

Ukrainians who loathe their aggressor neighbor refer to it as “Rashka.” Benjamin Moser writes that the word is “derived from the English pronunciation of Russia, complete with the diminutive suffix to convey extra venom.”

*

On the Visual Thesaurus: Talkin' Vegan

The “plant-based food industry,” which makes alternatives to meat and dairy products, is thriving and growing: The U.S. market was valued at $7 billion in 2021, and is expected to grow another 50 percent by 2027. That means lots of competition for product names as well as for shelf space. How can brands tell customers what their products are—and, more to the point, aren’t?

That’s the subject of “The Vegan Versions,” my February column for the Visual Thesaurus. As usual, the column is paywalled for three months. (Please subscribe!) Here’s a free and animal-free taste of one branding strategy: 

How Prego spaghetti sauce got its name

I’m ashamed to confess that until I read her New York Times obituary over the weekend I’d never heard of Laurel Cutler, who had a distinguished five-decade career on Madison Avenue and was named both “Woman of the Year” and “Man of the Year” by the American Advertising Federation. (Quite an achievement!) She died at age 94 on November 28, 2021.

The obit reads like a mini-history of mid-20th-century advertising, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. (My link bypasses the Times paywall.) One bit, though, stood out for me: the story of how Prego spaghetti sauce got its name:

The most important role she played in the Prego campaign, she told Inc. magazine in 1987, “was convincing them to change the name from Campbell’s Very Own Spaghetti Sauce, which was very much a 1970s concept, to Prego, which was much more ’80s.” The day before she had to present her proposal for a name, she scanned an English-Italian dictionary and plucked out “prego,” which means both “please” and “you’re welcome.”

Grazie, Laurel Cutler!

 

Ms. Cutler was also a futurist whose many accurate predictions included the “high-low” shopping trend: “‘The very same people would buy at Neiman Marcus in the morning and Kmart in the afternoon,’ she told Inc.”

It was quite a rise from an 80-cents-an-hour entry-level job as a contest judge at the marketing firm Reuben Donnelly.

Ms. Cutler’s 2016 memoir was never published. Maybe that oversight will be corrected now.

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

*

 

Memo to self

Think!

Think! protein bars (spotted at Trader Joe’s). The company slogan is the anthimeria-esque “Stand for Strong.”

 

Think!

Think! shoes, “designed in Austria, handcrafted in Europe,” found in my closet, via eBay.

 

ReThink

ReThink “tummy-friendly ice cream,” via Grocery Outlet. Not so tastebud-friendly, IMO.

 

Think Think Think

“Think” IBM slogan. From the IBM website:

THINK was a one-word slogan developed by IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. It appeared in IBM offices, plants and company publications in the 1920s and in the early 1930s began to take precedence over other slogans in IBM. It eventually appeared in wood, stone and bronze, and was published in company newspapers, magazines, calendars, photographs, medallions -- even New Yorker cartoons -- and it remained for years the name of IBM's employee publication. You can still find echoes of Watson’s motto in the brand name of IBM's popular notebook computers: the ThinkPad. This photograph shows a number of THINK signs rendered in a variety of languages for display by IBM employees around the world.

More thinky posts right here.

Word of the week: Nikkei

A massive new rooftop restaurant called Chotto Matte is coming in 2022 in San Francisco’s Union Square, in the building that used to house Macy’s men’s store. According to a September 1 story in SFist, the restaurant—the latest in a chain with origins in London—will be San Francisco’s largest, with prix-fixe menus ranging in price from $75 to $155 per person.

The part of the story that interested me, though, was the description of the menu: “the very best of Nikkei (Japanese-Peruvian) cuisine.”

This usage of Nikkei—the word is often capitalized, for reasons unknown—was new to me and, it turns out, inaccurate. (More on that in a bit.) New to me but not new-new: it’s actually been around for at least 20 years. I knew a different Nikkei: the Japanese blue-chip stock index founded in 1950, which has a distinct etymology. And neither of these Nikkeis is related etymologically to another Japanese word familiar to many of us: nisei, or “second-generation.”

The menu at Nikkei restaurant at Mandaluyong (metro Manila), Philippines, has Peruvian influences.

 

Battle of the not-milks

If you’re avoiding dairy for reasons of health or principle, you have more choices than ever, and some of them even taste good. There are dairy substitutes made from soy (Silk, introduced in 1977, is one of the oldest soy-milk brands, and still one of the most elegantly named), oats (Oatly, based in Sweden and famous in the U.S. for its whatever advertising), nuts (Texas-based MALK, whose weird all-caps name may have been inspired by that episode of The Simpsons), or peas (Ripple, based in the Bay Area, and aren’t you glad they didn’t name it Pea Milk?).

“Malk: Now with Vitamin R.” Via Simpsons Wiki

 

Then there are the dairy alternatives that tell you only what they aren’t: Not Milk, NotMilk, and “Shh … This Is Not MLK,” with a white droplet replacing the I in milk, to ensure that you don’t confuse it with not–Martin Luther King Jr.

That’s right: Three brands with three virtually identical names—none of them telling you what the product is, only what it’s not.

Word of the week: Lollipop (and lollypop)

Tomorrow, July 20, has been deemed National Lollipop Day, probably by the confectionery-industrial complex. No one seems to know when this faux-liday first appeared on calendars, which is fitting, because no one is quite sure where the word lollipop comes from, either, or whether it’s spelled with an I or a Y.

See’s Candies, which celebrates its centenary this year, has it both ways: lollypop in promotions for its “sweet-stakes,” lollipop in the sweet-stakes URL.

I love “sweet-stakes.”