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How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centuries"?

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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by tlb   » Tue Dec 06, 2022 6:33 pm

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Theemile wrote:Remember the old joke folks - "No matter how many years pass, we will never get the lead out of Plumbing.".
The latin word for lead is "plumbum" and the use by the Romans of lead to make pipes gave us the word "plumbing".

People might wonder whether all the ancient Romans suffered from lead poisoning, but they probably did not because their water supply was very hard. So only their new pipes exposed the water to lead, all the rest had a protective limestone coating.

If lead alloys are exposed to acid, then the lead will leach out; which is why no one should serve acidic foods (like tomatoes) in pewter. Our modern practice of putting halogens in the water results in that water being slightly acidic.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by phillies   » Wed Dec 07, 2022 1:14 pm

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tlb wrote:
Theemile wrote:Remember the old joke folks - "No matter how many years pass, we will never get the lead out of Plumbing.".
The latin word for lead is "plumbum" and the use by the Romans of lead to make pipes gave us the word "plumbing".

People might wonder whether all the ancient Romans suffered from lead poisoning, but they probably did not because their water supply was very hard. So only their new pipes exposed the water to lead, all the rest had a protective limestone coating.

If lead alloys are exposed to acid, then the lead will leach out; which is why no one should serve acidic foods (like tomatoes) in pewter. Our modern practice of putting halogens in the water results in that water being slightly acidic.


The Romans had a boiled wine dish. The wine was boiled in a lead container to accent the sweet taste. Readers should understand that eating this dish is a very bad idea.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by tlb   » Wed Dec 07, 2022 3:07 pm

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phillies wrote:The Romans had a boiled wine dish. The wine was boiled in a lead container to accent the sweet taste. Readers should understand that eating this dish is a very bad idea.

Both the Romans and Greeks (and later Middle Ages Europeans) would take wine that was not good enough to drink by itself and add spices to it and boil the mixture, adding honey for sweetness. The result we know as mulled wine. Here is a recipe from a 5th- or 6th-century Roman cookbook:
Apicius, 1.1 wrote:Conditum Paradoxum

Put six sextarii of honey into a bronze jar containing two sextarii of wine, so that the wine will be boiled off as you cook the honey. Heat this over a slow fire of dry wood, stirring with a wooden rod as it boils. If it boils over, add some cold wine. Take off the heat and allow to cool. When it does cool, light another fire underneath it. Do this a second and a third time and only then remove it from the brazier and skim it. Next, add 4 ounces of pepper, 3 scruples of mastic, a dragma of bay leaf and saffron, 5 date stones and then the dates themselves. Finally, add 18 sextarii of light wine. Charcoal will correct any bitter taste.

I did not find mention of lead cookware, although it is possible for the bronze to contain some lead. I did read that bronze should not be used to prepare acidic foods, which I suppose could include cheap wine.

PS: why would anyone cook in a lead pot for sweetness, when it is always possible to add honey?
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Dec 07, 2022 8:53 pm

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phillies wrote:The Romans had a boiled wine dish. The wine was boiled in a lead container to accent the sweet taste. Readers should understand that eating this dish is a very bad idea.


I'm pretty sure this applies to simply living in Roman or Greek times. For that matter, living at any time in our history prior to the early 20th century.

I'm sure in 100 years we'll look back and think that living in the early 21st century was unsafe/unhealthy because we didn't have the necessary automation to detect mistakes, wear-outs, and other simple things that could lead to accidents or contamination.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by tlb   » Fri Dec 09, 2022 3:05 pm

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phillies wrote:The Romans had a boiled wine dish. The wine was boiled in a lead container to accent the sweet taste. Readers should understand that eating this dish is a very bad idea.

I have now found what Phillies was talking about; however it is not wine, but unfermented grapes that were subject to this process:
Lead Poisoning and Rome
Rather than encrusted lead pipes, the probable cause of chronic lead poisoning (plumbism or "saturnism" because its symptoms seemed indicative of the god's melancholic and sullen character) was the consumption of defrutum and sapa. The elder Cato, Columella, and Pliny all describe how unfermented grape juice (mustum, must) was boiled to concentrate its natural sugars. "A product of art, not of nature," the must was reduced to one half (defrutum) or even one third its volume (sapa) (Pliny, XIV.80), although the terms are not always consistent. Columella identifies defrutum as "must of the sweetest possible flavour" that has been boiled down to a third of its volume (XXI.1). Isidore of Seville, writing in the seventh century AD, says that it is sapa that has been reduced by a third and imagines that defrutum was so called because it has been cheated or defrauded (defrudare) (Etymologies, XX.3.15). Varro reverses Pliny's proportions altogether (quoted in Nonius Marcellus, De Conpendiosa Doctrina, XVIII.551M).

The thickened syrup was used to sweeten and preserve wine and fruit that otherwise was sour or would spoil. Cato recommends that quinces and pears be preserved in boiled must (On Agriculture, VII.3) as does Varro (On Agriculture, I.59.3). Columella insists that defrutum always be boiled with quinces or some other flavoring (XII.20.2). Apicius offers directions for preserving quinces in defrutum and honey (De Re Coquinaria, I.21) and added the rich syrup to almost a fifth of his sauces to enhance the color and flavor of almost every dish. (That color was added indicates that red, rather than white, wine was used in the reduction.)

Defrutum and sapa were dangerous not in themselves but in their preparation. In De Agricultura, the earliest example of Latin prose (c.160 BC), Cato gives directions for reducing must in "a copper or lead vessel" over a slow fire, "stirring constantly to prevent scorching; continue the boiling, until you have boiled off a half" (CVII). Writing in the first century AD, Columella elaborates on the process.

"Some people put the must in leaden vessels and by boiling reduce it by a quarter, others by a third. There is no doubt that anyone who boiled it down to one-half would be likely to make a better thick form of must and therefore more profitable for use....But, before the must is poured into the boiling-vessels, it will be well that those which are made of lead should be coated inside with good oil and be well-rubbed, and that then the must should be put in....The vessels themselves in which the thickened and boiled-down must is boiled should be of lead rather than of brass; for, in the boiling, brazen vessels throw off copper rust, and spoil the flavour of the preservative" (XII.19.1, 19.6, 20.1).

Pliny, too, recommends that the must be prepared in lead vessels.

"Also boiled-down must and must of new wine should be boiled when there is no moon, which means at the conjunction of that planet, and not on any other day; and moreover leaden and not copper jars should be used, and some walnuts should be thrown into the liquor, for those are said to absorb the smoke" (XIV.136).

It would seem therefore that must was boiled in lead cauldrons. But Scarborough is reluctant to weaken his case, insisting that "one needs to read these texts carefully which mention a 'preference' for lead over bronze to realize that the Romans most often used bronze cauldrons (copper and tin in alloy), not those of lead" and that the short boiling time would not have contaminated the juice in any event. But copper and bronze are suspect as well. Not only, says Pliny, was the best bronze alloyed with 10% lead and tin (XXXIV.95) but "When copper vessels are coated with stagnum [a lead alloy], the contents have a more agreeable taste and the formation of destructive verdigris is prevented" (XXXIV.160).

The verdigris about which Pliny complains is copper acetate, a bitter salt first described by Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, in De Re Metallica (IX), that is formed when acetic acid (the component that gives vinegar its sour taste and pungent smell) reacts with copper oxide. Commercially, it was manufactured by exposing copper plates to strong vinegar or the soured grape skins and lees of wine dregs (Dioscorides, Materia Medica, V.91). Acetic acid also reacts with lead oxide (litharge) to create another metallic salt: lead acetate or sugar of lead. Although as sweet as sugar (which was unknown to the Romans), it actually added very little to the sweetness of the defrutum, which derived from the concentrated glucose and fructose of the grapes themselves. What it did import was an onerous burden of lead.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Dec 09, 2022 4:05 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm sure in 100 years we'll look back and think that living in the early 21st century was unsafe/unhealthy because we didn't have the necessary automation to detect mistakes, wear-outs, and other simple things that could lead to accidents or contamination.


Plus lead in petrol and pollution in general. And nuclear bomb testing in open air?

Not to mention intentionally inhaling carcinogens such as tobacco. "Look, they even put these signs saying it was known to be bad by the State of California!"

Hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes we are wilfully blind too.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Sun Dec 11, 2022 9:31 pm

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Theemile wrote:Surprisingly, none of us has mentioned the Flint water crisis, where public administrators ignored specialist's recommendations and decided to save money by not including certain chemicals into the water supply which were required to protect the lining of century old water mains. Mains, which would later leach toxic levels of lead into the water system because their protective coatings had dissolved, and poisoned the water system for a city of 150,000 inhabitants.

Remember the old joke folks - "No matter how many years pass, we will never get the lead out of Plumbing." Only now, this appears to be a grim double entande.


How much of this was due to trying to make do with insufficient funding?
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by tlb   » Sun Dec 11, 2022 10:18 pm

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Theemile wrote:Surprisingly, none of us has mentioned the Flint water crisis, where public administrators ignored specialist's recommendations and decided to save money by not including certain chemicals into the water supply which were required to protect the lining of century old water mains. Mains, which would later leach toxic levels of lead into the water system because their protective coatings had dissolved, and poisoned the water system for a city of 150,000 inhabitants.

Loren Pechtel wrote:How much of this was due to trying to make do with insufficient funding?

If they knew that the chemicals were needed to prevent lead leaching into the water system, then that is not a sufficient excuse. Suffering in silence is not a good option. Publicity of their problem, might have freed up money before it became a disaster.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by kzt   » Sun Dec 11, 2022 11:37 pm

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tlb wrote:If they knew that the chemicals were needed to prevent lead leaching into the water system, then that is not a sufficient excuse. Suffering in silence is not a good option. Publicity of their problem, might have freed up money before it became a disaster.

I think it was more of a group-think problem. They didn't want to pay for imported water and they didn't want to pay for chemicals that that water didn't require, but the alternate water source did. Typically in these sorts of situations there is some shady stuff going on with money too.
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Re: How to avoid "they haven't fought a real war in centurie
Post by ZVar   » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:06 am

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Loren Pechtel wrote:
Theemile wrote:Surprisingly, none of us has mentioned the Flint water crisis, where public administrators ignored specialist's recommendations and decided to save money by not including certain chemicals into the water supply which were required to protect the lining of century old water mains. Mains, which would later leach toxic levels of lead into the water system because their protective coatings had dissolved, and poisoned the water system for a city of 150,000 inhabitants.

Remember the old joke folks - "No matter how many years pass, we will never get the lead out of Plumbing." Only now, this appears to be a grim double entande.


How much of this was due to trying to make do with insufficient funding?


None of it was because of funding. We aren't talking millions of dollars here. We are talking 300-600 a week depending on usage that week.

(Speaking as someone, that while I don't live in Flint, I do live in the same Genesee county, so I was here from the start.)
Oh, and I have to keep water bottles on hand because my daughter's best friend, who does live in Flint will not drink tap water now, not that I blame her.
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