Are you tired? Run down? Listless?
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 09:25 amI recently reread Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise (thank you again,
muchabstracted!), and one of the early-20th-century products that figures prominently in the book is "nerve food".
The specific version that comes into the plot is a fictitious brand called Nutrax. But any reference in books to "nerve food" always calls to my mind C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which opens with the memorable line "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it", and goes on to say of Eustace's parents, "They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes." As many of you will recall, there's this bit a little later in the exposition where Caspian has rescued the three children and orders them spiced wine, and Eustace "began to cry again and asked if they hadn't any Plumptree's Vitaminised Nerve Food and could it be made with distilled water and ....".
( Sidebar on the embedded cues as to Lewis' opinion of modernity )
Anyway. So the point is, I have always wondered, ever since reading the Narnia books as a kid: what the hell WAS this stuff? Clearly a minor industry of some kind, a nutritional supplement, a patent medicine -- but what exactly? I tended to picture it as something like Bragg's Liquid Aminos, or maybe some kind of herbal tincture.
Now, this won't be news to all you Moxie fans, but I found this article on Nerve Food as a class of beverage that clearly identifies them as phosphate beverages. In other words: the direct precursor to the common soft drink. Or, y'know, as they still say 'round these parts, tonic.
Modern soft drinks are heavily based on phosphoric acid, or else citric acid. But right up through the 1950s you would commonly get phosphate sodas at the soda fountain.
( Quick sidebar on the nutritional evils of soda ) Instead of "tonic", we ought to start calling it "toxic".
All of this also makes me think how completely lost all the cultural overtones of *our* modern consumer society will be on readers even a century hence. Suppose you write a story where one character reaches for a can of Mountain Dew and another a pomegranate SoBe Lifewater... in a few decades, who's going to grasp the difference? (One can hope.)
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The specific version that comes into the plot is a fictitious brand called Nutrax. But any reference in books to "nerve food" always calls to my mind C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which opens with the memorable line "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it", and goes on to say of Eustace's parents, "They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes." As many of you will recall, there's this bit a little later in the exposition where Caspian has rescued the three children and orders them spiced wine, and Eustace "began to cry again and asked if they hadn't any Plumptree's Vitaminised Nerve Food and could it be made with distilled water and ....".
( Sidebar on the embedded cues as to Lewis' opinion of modernity )
Anyway. So the point is, I have always wondered, ever since reading the Narnia books as a kid: what the hell WAS this stuff? Clearly a minor industry of some kind, a nutritional supplement, a patent medicine -- but what exactly? I tended to picture it as something like Bragg's Liquid Aminos, or maybe some kind of herbal tincture.
Now, this won't be news to all you Moxie fans, but I found this article on Nerve Food as a class of beverage that clearly identifies them as phosphate beverages. In other words: the direct precursor to the common soft drink. Or, y'know, as they still say 'round these parts, tonic.
Modern soft drinks are heavily based on phosphoric acid, or else citric acid. But right up through the 1950s you would commonly get phosphate sodas at the soda fountain.
( Quick sidebar on the nutritional evils of soda ) Instead of "tonic", we ought to start calling it "toxic".
All of this also makes me think how completely lost all the cultural overtones of *our* modern consumer society will be on readers even a century hence. Suppose you write a story where one character reaches for a can of Mountain Dew and another a pomegranate SoBe Lifewater... in a few decades, who's going to grasp the difference? (One can hope.)