Out of the Leavenworth Archives, here’s a publication (PDF) from 1959 to celebrate Lincoln’s 1859 visit to Kansas.
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Category Archives: History
Yellow Jacket Soup
Nearly ten years ago on Reddit, a user posted this recipe for Yellow Jacket Soup.
Yellow Jacket Soup – (OO-GA-MA)
Hunt for ground dwelling yellow jackets early in the morning or in the late afternoon. Gather the whole comb. Place the comb over the fire or on the stove with the right side up to loosen the grubs that are not covered. Remove all of the uncovered grubs. Place the comb over the fire or on the stove upside down until the paper-like covering parches. Remove the comb from the heat, pick out the yellow jackets and place in the oven to brown. Make the soup by boiling the browned yellow jackets in a pot of water with salt. Add grease if desired.
Simple enough. Bake the insects, then boil them with fat and… eat soup.
Apparently the recipe was actually found and posted to the web first by a Tiny Pine Press blog, from a 1951 cookbook they found in a shop.
Five years later in 2017, the idea showed up again on Twitter, and caught the eye of a chef “Barlowe”.
“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” I ask him. “Yellowjacket soup,” he says, smiling from ear to ear. … The idea sprouted by way of chef Sean Brock posting a centuries-old Cherokee recipe on Twitter. “I’m dying to try this,” Brock wrote.
The Twitter version of this story as published by Vice (which really was an Instagram post) goes on to erase not only Reddit and Tiny Pine as prior and better written sources than Brock, but also obliterates the cookbook too. Somehow it cites the book as Brock’s written source while saying it doesn’t count.
The recipe was last written down around 1860, and Barlowe took a quick interest in the idea of recreating it.
Such misinformation, the Web looked better in 2009 on that original Tiny Pine blog post.
Wasps for soup maybe sounds far fetched and ancient, given the Twitter misinformation treatment, yet the Japanese certainly still do it.
After we got a good pile going, Sayoko simmered the larvae in a pot with sugar, sake, chopped ginger, and soy sauce. That method of cooking is called tsukudani—people make all kinds of things that way… so much of wasp culture in Kushihara is centered on being in the present moment: in a certain place at a certain time. Wasps are, more than anything, a fleeting mark of the fall season. You spend months cultivating the nests just for that moment when you pop a raw larvae into your mouth and it bursts into a flash of honey butter.
…and also residents or tourists in Yunnan, China.
…we dipped them in water to wash them off, them placed them in a bowl together. Then, heating some oil, we deep fried them…. My Italian friend went a step further and sautéed them in butter with some sage.
And of course there’s science to support the nutritional value.
The high amounts of unsaturated fatty acids in the lipids of the hornets could be expected to exhibit nutritional benefits, including reducing cardiovascular disorders and inflammations. High minerals contents, especially micro minerals such as iron, zinc, and a high K/Na ratio in hornets could help mitigate mineral deficiencies among those of the population with inadequate nutrition.
The science certainly gets a shout out as well in Africa.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, edible insects with high consumption rates have been identified as beetles (31%), caterpillars (18%), bees, wasps and ants (14%) and grasshoppers, crickets and locusts (13%). Across the central Africa region, insects still provide more than 50% of dietary protein, and their commercial value is higher compared to animal-derived protein. This can be attributed to the superior nutritional profile of numerous insects coupled with the ease of insect production and the low carbon footprint associated with insect rearing.
Super interesting, really, why Americans aren’t more familiar with their own delicious variations like Yellow Jacket Soup.
Peter Thiel Exposed in Nazi Rant, Planting J.D. Vance to Overthrow Democracy
It’s no secret Peter Thiel’s grandparents were Nazis who sent their family fortunes after losing WWII into South African apartheid, then somehow endied up with him meddling in the “business” of promoting American fascism.
In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed…as the historian Adam Tooze put it in his landmark book on the period, …that German industrialists [like Thiel] were “willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism…”. In return for their [1933 end of democracy] donations, Tooze wrote, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level. Corporate profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment. Fascism turned out to be good for business – until it wasn’t.
Who can forget?
…Thiel’s high profile role in the Trump transition is ripe with conflict of interest issues… Thiel’s reported proclivity for fascism and white nationalism adds another layer of concern to the red flag reported…
Many in the Thiel family apparently have been known for making headlines because of things like being caught as Nazi spies in America, trying to sabotage democracy, and for denying the Holocaust. (Notably, Thiel family members who dared to disagree with Nazism were killed).
As if the 2016 Trump disaster for America wasn’t enough of a red flag, Peter now has been caught, yet again, elevating himself even higher on the ignoble pile of generations peddling hate, disinformation and vile theory.
…the podcast was reposted on… Twitter, by user @jimstewartson… who said that Thiel’s comments about liberalism and democracy being exhausted were the same rhetoric Nazis used in Germany.
“This was precisely what the Nazis tried to sell to Germans, that Weimar was ‘too liberal’ and needed ‘strong leadership’ to save it from degeneracy,” Stewartson wrote. “I cannot emphasize enough that this psychopath will be running the country if we don’t protect this election.” The reposted clip was viewed over 1.4 million times by Monday morning.
It reminds me of this clip.
Police Expert Calls xTwitter “Wild West”, Blames Elon Musk for Stoking UK Violence
Worth a listen: Many people are pointing out how this expert’s mic was shut down just as he started to explain the real cause of violent riots. Elon Musk is accused of curating the extremist platform xTwitter like a modern Dearborn Independent.
That’s a former chief superintendent of the Met Police saying out loud that Elon Musk’s spread of extremist right-wing content poses a direct threat to national security and public safety… if you listen closely.
When Sky flipped to their next guest, apparently again it was said that Elon Musk has undermined safety by pushing toxic hate speech on xTwitter, intentionally stoking conflict.
‘A polarisation engine’: how social media has created a ‘perfect storm’ for UK’s far-right riots
Keep calm and carry on… calling out Musk for being a threat to society.
I’m hoping the UK terrorism teams are able to trace and expose the links between Russia and xTwitter, uncovering riots and social media hate campaigns as Putin’s typical game plan.
The PM has already hinted at the coordinated nature of Musk’s weird role.
“What we’ve seen in this country is organized, illegal thuggery which has no place on our streets or online.”
Organized and orchestrated by… Musk or Putin… or both?
This summary analysis published in The Guardian is perhaps what Putin knows best and is exploiting with his American “business” contacts.
Lord Walney, the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, has suggested that the current legal and regulatory framework is insufficient when faced by this kind of “rolling rabble-rousing”. How to tackle this manufactured chaos is among the biggest challenges now facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
Rolling rabble rousing is a nice phrase to describe Elon Musk’s role. Manufactured chaos is another nice phrase. The British really do have a way with words.
But it looks like a cartoon by The Onion has said it best of anyone lately.
And that’s really just a new take on an actual 1930s cartoon.
Or as the associate editor of the Financial Times just put it:
