The philoso­pher Giambat­tista Vico had quite a few ideas, but we remem­ber him for one above all: Verum esse ipsum fac­tum, often short­ened to the prin­ci­ple of verum fac­tum. It means, in essence, that we under­stand what we make. In accor­dance with verum fac­tum, then, if you want to under­stand, say, ancient Mesopotami­an beer, you should make some ancient Mesopotami­an beer your­self. Such is the path tak­en in the video above by Max Miller, host of the Youtube series Tast­ing His­to­ry.

We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Tast­ing His­to­ry here on Open Cul­ture for its humor­ous and as-faith­ful-as-pos­si­ble re-cre­ations of dish­es from the past, includ­ing peri­ods as recent as the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and as dis­tant as the dawn of civ­i­liza­tion. No mat­ter the era, human­i­ty has always been eat­ing and drink­ing — and, just as soon as the nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy became avail­able, get­ting drunk. That we were doing it 4,000 years ago is evi­denced by the recipe Miller fol­lows in his quest to re-cre­ate Mesopotami­an beer, for which even the research proves to be no sim­ple mat­ter.

In fact, he begins with not a recipe at all, but a hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumer­ian god­dess of beer. But this holy text con­sti­tutes only a start­ing point: Miller goes on to con­sult not just oth­er infor­ma­tion pre­served on archae­o­log­i­cal arti­facts, but at least one expert in the field. The result­ing beer-mak­ing pro­ce­dure isn’t with­out its ambi­gu­i­ty, but you can cer­tain­ly try it at home. You can try it at home if you’ve got about a week to do so, that is; even ancient beer need­ed to fer­ment. (If you’re any­thing like Miller, you’ll use the wait­ing time to research more about Mesopotami­an soci­ety and the sig­nif­i­cant place of beer with­in it.)

How does the final prod­uct taste? Miller describes it as not car­bon­at­ed but “effer­ves­cent,” with a “nut­ti­ness” to its fla­vor: “I’m get­ting, like, a lit­tle bit of a car­damom.” (Mod­erns who pre­fer a sweet­er beer will want to add date syrup.) Per­haps it would go well with a Baby­lon­ian lamb stew, or one of the oth­er ancient dish­es Miller has re-cre­at­ed on Tast­ing His­to­ry. Such a meal would pro­vide a fine occa­sion to test the prin­ci­ple of verum fac­tum — or an even fin­er way to test the Sumer­ian proverb “He who does not know beer, does not know what is good.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out

Watch a 4000-Year Old Baby­lon­ian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Har­vard

5,000-Year-Old Chi­nese Beer Recipe Gets Recre­at­ed by Stan­ford Stu­dents

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What is the most Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion of all? The mind first goes in the direc­tions of church, of the mil­i­tary, of foot­ball. But if we con­sid­er only the sys­tems of mod­ern life devel­oped on Unit­ed States soil, the most influ­en­tial must sure­ly be fast food. That influ­ence man­i­fests in not just the home­land but the rest of the world as well, and like every robust Amer­i­can cre­ation, fast food both changes and adapts to the for­eign lands in which it takes root. Though unknown in the U.S., the yel­low motor­cy­cles of McDon­ald’s deliv­ery­men are an every­day sight in the cap­i­tal of South Korea, where I live. That could hard­ly have fig­ured in even the far­thest-reach­ing visions Richard and Mau­rice McDon­ald had for the entire­ly new mod­el of ham­burg­er stand they launched in San Bernardi­no, Cal­i­for­nia, in 1948.

Back in post­war Amer­i­ca, “car cul­ture reigns supreme. Dri­ve-in movies and dri­ve-in restau­rants become all the rage, tak­ing con­ve­nience to anoth­er lev­el.” So says the nar­ra­tor of the clip above, from the fast-food episode of the Net­flix series His­to­ry 101. But before long, dri­ve-ins would be rel­e­gat­ed to the sta­tus of his­tor­i­cal curios­i­ty, and fast food on the McDon­ald’s mod­el would become near­ly omnipresent.

As with much else in Amer­i­can indus­tri­al his­to­ry, the key was effi­cien­cy. Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly run a dri­ve-in, the McDon­ald broth­ers under­stood well how cum­ber­some such oper­a­tions could be, and how they encour­aged cus­tomers to linger rather than spend their mon­ey and be on their way. The stripped-down menu, the stream­lined cook­ing process: every ele­ment was now engi­neered for speed above all.

McDon­ald’s did not, how­ev­er, invent the dri­ve-through. That hon­or goes to a Texas estab­lish­ment called Pig Stand, which first erect­ed that pil­lar of the Amer­i­can way of life back in 1921. In Fast Food: The Fast Lane of Life, the His­to­ry Chanel doc­u­men­tary above, the pres­i­dent of Texas Pig Stands says that the chain’s founder Jessie G. Kir­by “was famous for his quote of say­ing that peo­ple with cars are so lazy that they don’t want to get out of them to go eat. That prophe­cy proved to be very true.” Even as the spread of car own­er­ship across Amer­i­ca and then the world made dri­ve-through fast food into a viable propo­si­tion, it put (and con­tin­ues to put) greater and greater pres­sure on the busi­ness­es to deliv­er their prod­uct in short­er and short­er times.

“Beyond the chal­lenges of tech­ni­cal hard­ware that deliv­ered things fast, the indus­try had to deliv­er a pipeline to deliv­er the food,” says the doc­u­men­tary’s nar­ra­tor. “Through­out the eight­ies, the burg­er giants set about design­ing a net­work of sup­pli­ers that could deliv­er mil­lions of tons of foods to thou­sands of restau­rants at exact­ing stan­dards of uni­for­mi­ty.” This uni­for­mi­ty — ham­burg­ers that cost and taste exact­ly the same, every­where — enchant­ed Andy Warhol, that maven of Amer­i­can mass cul­ture. It has also, arguably, done its part to triv­i­al­ize the rit­u­als of prepar­ing and con­sum­ing food, to say noth­ing of the health dan­gers posed by fre­quent indul­gence in salty, sug­ary, oily meals, espe­cial­ly in the con­text of a seden­tary auto­mo­tive lifestyle. But if you don’t under­stand fast food — and all the tech­no­log­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and social fac­tors that have made it not just pos­si­ble but world-dom­i­nant — can you claim under­stand Amer­i­ca?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whop­per — While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

30,000 Peo­ple Line Up for the First McDonald’s in Moscow, While Gro­cery Store Shelves Run Emp­ty (1990)

How Eat­ing Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en Became a Christ­mas Tra­di­tion in Japan

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

McDonald’s Opens a Tiny Restau­rant — and It’s Only for Bees

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.