The Fenceposts are in Bloom Again
Once again I begin my essay without an idea of an interesting subject. Maybe that's overstating it a bit. I don't have any subject in mind, interesting or not. So you can relax if you're worried that I'm blowing smoke and will shortly pull out a time-worn chestnut from my early training as a Baptist Lay Minister, which is also not a fact.
No, I'm afraid I'm on my own here. The one thing I do have going for me is a freshly opened, waxpaper stack of Ritz crackers, the fuel of the great and nearly-great authors throughout the ages. Perhaps you read Hemingway's laudatory passage on the stimulating effects of Ritz on the sluggardly mind from his 1935 work, "Things that I Like".
Ritz Crackers were first introduced to the public in 1934, but had been available to an elite group of explorers, artistes and hardy folk in the know since 1926. They were originally created by the Bayer Pharmaceutikaliste Fabrische of Barmen, Germany in 1924 during their development work adding acetic acid to various substances. They tried it with just about everything. The acetylation of saltines was found to yield a powerful new snack-cracker that was originally called "Fitzenrechtungkeit" after The chemist-organist Hans Frederich Pubelheiser's daughter.
The new cracker was found to impart a sense of wellbeing and strength to those taking as little as 1/2 wafer. The process was changed when several lab assistants were found in a comatose state after an all-night "Fitzenrechtungkeit Frolic", lowering the amount of sugar in the formula and making up for it with coca leaf. This change decreased the severe depressant effect of the cracker and increased the human tolerance for various cheese spreads.
When word of Bayer's new "Wunder-Kracker" got out, the German, French, and British armed forces competed for exclusive rights to the snack. It was used by the medical corps as a replacement for ether and chloroform in field surgeries. Later on, Bayer released the acetylated morphine substitute which they called "Heroin", which was supposed to replace the Fitzenrechtungkeit-tines for medical treatment of melancholia and vapors but was found to be best suited to teething pain, female troubles, and a substitute for light novellas while on holiday.
During that same time, the Nantucket Bituminous Corporation of America, also called Nabisco purchased the worldwide rights to the Fitzenrechtungkeit formula and production and renamed it "Ritz" after the Ritz-Carlton Tea Room (and Opium Den). Later that year, the Chinese Province of Wang-Chung was repurposed to produce only an experimental imitation spreadable cheese-type food named after the Whiz-Ping peoples of the north known for their lactose-intolerance, among other things.
Hemingway became a Ritz addict in 1934 but his publishing company covered up his moral failings by insisting that he was an alcoholic and used heroin for teething pain. His close friends knew only too well about his unnatural reliance on the Ritz to suppress the inner demons that drove him to write sappy poems and love songs. A vocation for which he was, demonstrably unsuited.
It is also well-known that other adherents to the Ritz cult included creative geniuses such as; Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Frank Baum, Steinbeck, Maugham and Theodore Geisel, and Frida Kahlo, Marjorie Main, Picasso, Oppenheimer, Norman Rockwell, Wallace Beery and Carmen Miranda.
So you can see that we, as a peoples and as a cultures, owe much to the diminutive snack cracker called Ritz, and who knows where we might now or later be, in the future and/or the past, if our civilization had not stumbled onto this miracle of nature.
Thank you. Are there any questions?
Wait. Did I fail to mention Sir Edmund Hillary? Shit.
***
Originally Published on Rising-Gorge on 6/13/2016
 |
| The View from the Top of the Acropolis in Athens |
Ritz Crackers were first introduced to the public in 1934, but had been available to an elite group of explorers, artistes and hardy folk in the know since 1926. They were originally created by the Bayer Pharmaceutikaliste Fabrische of Barmen, Germany in 1924 during their development work adding acetic acid to various substances. They tried it with just about everything. The acetylation of saltines was found to yield a powerful new snack-cracker that was originally called "Fitzenrechtungkeit" after The chemist-organist Hans Frederich Pubelheiser's daughter.
The new cracker was found to impart a sense of wellbeing and strength to those taking as little as 1/2 wafer. The process was changed when several lab assistants were found in a comatose state after an all-night "Fitzenrechtungkeit Frolic", lowering the amount of sugar in the formula and making up for it with coca leaf. This change decreased the severe depressant effect of the cracker and increased the human tolerance for various cheese spreads.
When word of Bayer's new "Wunder-Kracker" got out, the German, French, and British armed forces competed for exclusive rights to the snack. It was used by the medical corps as a replacement for ether and chloroform in field surgeries. Later on, Bayer released the acetylated morphine substitute which they called "Heroin", which was supposed to replace the Fitzenrechtungkeit-tines for medical treatment of melancholia and vapors but was found to be best suited to teething pain, female troubles, and a substitute for light novellas while on holiday.
During that same time, the Nantucket Bituminous Corporation of America, also called Nabisco purchased the worldwide rights to the Fitzenrechtungkeit formula and production and renamed it "Ritz" after the Ritz-Carlton Tea Room (and Opium Den). Later that year, the Chinese Province of Wang-Chung was repurposed to produce only an experimental imitation spreadable cheese-type food named after the Whiz-Ping peoples of the north known for their lactose-intolerance, among other things.
Hemingway became a Ritz addict in 1934 but his publishing company covered up his moral failings by insisting that he was an alcoholic and used heroin for teething pain. His close friends knew only too well about his unnatural reliance on the Ritz to suppress the inner demons that drove him to write sappy poems and love songs. A vocation for which he was, demonstrably unsuited.
It is also well-known that other adherents to the Ritz cult included creative geniuses such as; Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Frank Baum, Steinbeck, Maugham and Theodore Geisel, and Frida Kahlo, Marjorie Main, Picasso, Oppenheimer, Norman Rockwell, Wallace Beery and Carmen Miranda.
So you can see that we, as a peoples and as a cultures, owe much to the diminutive snack cracker called Ritz, and who knows where we might now or later be, in the future and/or the past, if our civilization had not stumbled onto this miracle of nature.
Thank you. Are there any questions?
Wait. Did I fail to mention Sir Edmund Hillary? Shit.
***
Originally Published on Rising-Gorge on 6/13/2016
Comments
Post a Comment