You Eat Funny

You take a totally normal trip to the supermarket to buy some totally normal meat. But what you purchase comes in a geometric shape that looks nothing like the animal that it originally came from. In this episode, we learn that modern meat-buying is utterly bizarre when compared to the meat-acquisition experiences of virtually all humans for virtually all of our species'  past.

Discover how and when our animal products turned into disks. And cylinders. And cubes. And oozy concentrates. And--hot soda?

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

TRANSCRIPT

YAAW Podcast | Episode101 (pilot) | Doug Sofer

©2022 Doug Sofer

Pilot: You Eat Funny

[Cold open]

Welcome to this shiny new podcast about the power of history to understand the Strangeness of Now.

It’s about how we know what we know about the past.

And it’s about how when you really start to understand history, you learn—that you are a weirdo.

The simple fact is that you, as a person of today, live an unprecedentedly weird life: You talk, read, write, dress, sing, dance, socialize, move, pray, eat, drink, sleep differently than almost everyone who ever lived before.

Your family? Your friends? Your casual acquaintances? Your favorite new podcasters? All weirdos.

I’m here to invite you to get in touch with that weirdness—maybe even embrace it. To find just how weird you are when you understand yourself in historical perspective.

Until you really grasp your weirdness, you’re lost—and not lost in the usual sense where you can ask that Siri lady or her sister Googlia for directions.

No—you, my friend, are lost in time.

This podcast helps you find your way back home. It’s about harnessing the genuine, evidence-based discipline of history to make more sense of the weird world in which we live. 

Hey look, I get that this is a lot to take in. But it’s going to be okay: I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to help people in situations exactly like yours.

My name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo. Just. Like. You. 

[Theme music]

Interested in supporting this project? Come check us out at https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors for information about how you can help keep these episodes coming.

Eating today

You are a weirdo—

[dive bomb effect]

—is the name of this podcast.

Thank you for stopping by for the very first pilot episode. It’s called “You Eat Funny.”

You need to eat. Along with breathing air, drinking water, and maintaining your body at a temperature of somewhere between blood-freezingly cold and pants-on-fire hot, food keeps you alive.

Because you consume food more-or-less every day, the ways that you eat feel normal, regular—that is to say, non-weird.

Okay then, let’s consider what your normal looks like by taking a little trip to a supermarket to your actual home town of Examplesboro, USA.

You arrive at the store and motorized doors automatically open up for you. [Supermarket doors sound]

Without talking or making eye contact with anyone, you walk over to a row of electrically refrigerated coolers where a red, raw mound of hamburger meat catches your eye. This ground-up cow flesh is marbled with just the right proportion of fat, sitting on an absorbent pad made of plastic filled with vegetable cellulose or silica gel that soaks up all the blood, condensation or other liquids.

Under the pad sits a polystyrene tray created through a chemical process that’s younger than your grandparents—or your parents—or you.

Over that mass of shredded bovine is a clear plastic film. The film is sealed by a machine that also sucks out the regular air and replaces it with a blend of other gasses. That gassy cocktail which in the US includes carbon monoxide, is known as Modified Atmosphere Packaging.

The delicious gasses slow spoilage and also preserve the red color of the meat, making the meat appear as fresh as the day the cow was killed.

On top of the film is a sticker with laser-printed writing on it, listing the precise weight of its contents and the price per weight unit.

Also printed on the label is a code in a mysterious language that HUMANS DO NOT ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO READ but that is the native cyber-tongue of the computerized laser scanner at the automated cashier station.

At that counter, you swipe the code on the glass–covered scanner that connects to some computer somewhere that checks your code with a database to confirm the price.

 You pay with a plastic card with a computerized microchip embedded in it, maybe type in a personal ID number onto a number pad or touch screen at which point another database somewhere subtracts the price of your ground beef from your account and adds it to the account of the supermarket.

You head for home in some kind of wheeled machine with no animals attached to it, mission accomplished.

You fire up a couple of yummy burgers and get on with your normal, normal life.

Except here’s the thing: What you just did was fundamentally weird. 

The way you get food today in the industrialized world is just bizarre to almost all human beings who ever lived in the past, and many, many more people who are alive today but who live in places where supermarkets are less common.

For starters, even though you’re eating part of a cow, it’s very likely you didn’t see or touch or otherwise interact with a living cow today—or maybe ever.

Sure, maybe you’ve made a mooing amigo or two at petting zoos, but if you’re a city-dweller or a suburbanite, you just don’t live alongside many cows.

 It’s even less likely that you’ve ever seen a cow killed. And like it or not, that action is a prerequisite for creating that small package of ground-up beef you just brought home.

Many of us—maybe most of us—live in denial about this obvious-but- unpleasant truth about meat. In the US, we’re usually sold fish without heads so we can’t see the eyes peeping back at us; poultry is almost never sold with the heads or feet attached—we even remove the heads of shrimp in the US. We live in a world of boneless, skinless chicken breasts; chicken shaped into nuggets, or “fingers,” or sometimes into fun-dino-shapes for kids. Strips of bacon; circles of bologna; rectangles of ham; and other animal foods that don’t look like animals at all—like patties—or mounds of hamburger.

Now contrast our animal-invisible meat experience to what has been normal for most of the human species’ existence.

For the most part, ‘normal’ people acquired their meat—and many continue to get meat—by living near actual, breathing animals.

 For the majority of the human past, animal flesh came from animals that you would have come to know in some way. At certain times of the year or on special occasions, you’d slaughter one of the domesticated animals that you and your family raised from birth. You’d see those animals alive on a regular basis, and then they’d become meat. The act of killing it was just part of life for most human beings.

The point is simply this: 

We have become distant from our foods.

 Turning meat into something non-animal emotionally and psychologically distances us from its source; it makes our food into a kind of illusion.

And illusion prevents us from thinking—really thinking—about just how weird we are when we get our food this way.

But you and I are going to smash through this illusion today by figuring out how we got here.

Like all good research of any kind, our journey starts with asking good questions. Here’s one.

How, why and when did the transformation from animals into geometric-shaped meat take place?

Let’s take a crack at answering this question by exploring sources from the fourth dimension—which is to say, the past.

[Beefy history]

We could start our journey at many different points in time.

But the biggest changes to meat came out of what’s called the Second Industrial Revolution—starting in about the 1880s through, let’s say, 1914.

The first Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th century and it was mostly about textiles and coal and steam engines. That first one was mostly British—with some places like the newly formed USA, France and a few other parts of Western Europe also getting in the game.

The second Industrial Revolution was broader and bigger and took place in the newly formed country of Germany, and also the USA, Britain, continental Western Europe and also Japan.

It started with those coal and steam engines from the first industrial revolution but ended with gasoline-powered internal combustion engines, telephones, electric lights, phonographs, movies, and a whole host of other things.

From the perspective of factory owners, it was an opportunity to make loads of cash through invention, organizational innovation, and discovery.

And beef was part of that trend.

If beef is not the first thing you think of when you hear “industrial revolution,” you’re not alone.

When you imagine the ‘Industrial Revolution,’ you might picture factories with molten steel in glowing volcanic foundries in, say, Pittsburgh.

Or maybe you might think of Henry Ford’s giant factories and assembly lines, building cars with interchangeable parts.

Or maybe electric light bulbs.

In short, you may imagine heavy physical steel things or electrical things that glow or help with communication.

You probably DON’T think of a field full of cows.

But cows, light bulbs and steel have something in common: Chemistry.

The second industrial revolution was as much a revolution of chemistry as it was about electrical invention or new ways of organizing manufacturing.

You’ll see what I mean when we look at some of the documentary evidence left behind by the people of before.

[Separator music]

I’m looking at an advertisement from 1881 that appeared in many different newspapers around the U.S. and beyond. This particular one is in a digital reproduction of the Sacramento Daily Union. The all-text ad starts with a title that reads:

“Liebig Co[mpany]’s Coca Beef Tonic”

Wow. Hey I know that’s just five words but they’re ones we don’t often hear stuck together; I think that means we need break it down.

Let’s start with the last word. It’s a tonic—a concoction that’s supposed to make you feel energetic and invigorated.

And it’s made from coca—the plant where cocaine comes from. Coca leaves contain small amounts of the psychoactive alkaloid cocaine; when chewed they supposedly have a mildly stimulating effect.

We’re not going to discuss the coca part today; that’s for a later episode. But yes, it’s fair to say that cocaine has an energizing effect on one’s nervous system.

But wait: This tonic is also made from—beef? Like—cow meat—beef?

Yep, that’s exactly what it means: This ad is for a cocaine-and-cow-pick-me-up. And these kinds of tonics were for sale all over the industrialized world.

So that’s the last three words of this ad—coca beef tonic—but those first two are also important: “Liebig Company”

This tonic is named after Justus von Liebig who lived between 1803 and 1873. Liebig was one of the most important pioneers of the modern field of organic chemistry—that is, the study of compounds with carbon—for the most part, the chemistry of things that are or were once alive.

Liebig’s work with fertilizers, for example, changed the world; along with other scientists, his research helped increase the amount of food that could be grown per acre of land.

You know what else he invented? Something that would be called Liebig’s meat extract.

And that invention led to the creation of the not-at-all-creatively-named Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company in Britain.

An 1848 translation of one of Liebig’s books explains the gist of this wonderful product:

“From 32 Lbs. of lean beef, free from bones and fat… there is obtained 1 lb. of true extract of flesh.”

The final product is a thick, dark brown paste.

[Slime sound]

 Like the weird geometric shapes in our modern supermarket, a jar of sticky goo does not look much like a cow.

And it wasn’t cheap; Liebig himself recognized that since it took 32 pounds of meat to manufacture, his new cow concentrate could “…hardly become an article of commerce…”

But the company bearing Liebig’s name had a powerful marketing team behind it, and built a global reputation based on the German chemist’s worldwide fame. Liebig’s cow-sludge was sold to armies to keep fighting men in beefy fighting shape around the globe.

After Liebig’s death, the company searched for ever-cheaper ways to make new versions of condensed bovine.

The game-changer they developed was among the most non-animal-shapes you can imagine: A more-or-less perfect bit of geometry shaped like a dotless six-sided die.

That’s right: The mighty Bouillon Cube.

The new cube was cheap to make and became wildly successful.

Its success came despite the fact that nutrition experts of the day and early government food regulatory agencies all agreed that the cubes contained barely any of the nutrition of Liebig’s original pasty extract.

Investigators complained that bouillon cubes were mostly salt with cow flavoring.

But they had just enough beefy flavor in them that Liebig’s company became wealthy selling them.

After Liebig’s death the company changed its name to Oxo—which was—and still remains—a household name in the UK.

After the mid-1910s or so, you could buy bouillon cubes seemingly everywhere all over the industrialized world.

Like at the hot soda fountain of your local pharmacy.

I’m looking at another ad from an August 1914 issue of the Southern Pharmaceutical Journal, a trade magazine for pharmacists. It’s from the J. Hungerford Smith Company out of Rochester, NY. It includes a drawing of a man and a woman standing next to each other at a counter, enjoying mugs of a hot beverage.

They’re both young, attractive and up on the latest trends; the woman wears a stylish coat and a hat with a large feather shooting from the top. 

The man wears a trench coat and on the brim of his cap rests a pair of driving goggles; he clearly owns one of those newfangled automobiles.

Ford had begun mass-producing the Model T just five years earlier.

The text of the ad reads:

“You Can Thoroughly Equip a Hot Soda Department…”

Buy a hot-soda-fountain-starter-package for your pharmacy, complete with a brand-new water heater—all for just $35.00.

It promises that this package is “Everything You Need To Be Successful!”

Included in this hot soda package are some hot beverages that we’d recognize today, like coffee and cocoa.

But it also includes four pints of clam bouillon, another two pints of tomato bouillon, and best of all, 100 beef bouillon cubes.

A related article in a different issue of the Southern Pharmaceutical Journal describes the cutting-edge, whirlwind success of the hot soda department.

“The marvelous increase in the popularity of hot drinks at soda fountains has surprised even the most optimistic. Hot beef bouillon continues to hold first place, due undoubtedly to the promptness with which it can be served.”

In the U.S., the largest player in the fast-paced, thrilling world of hot soda was the Armour company. They marketed their Armour Bouillon Cubes to be as simple as “ABC.”—for the words Armour, Bouillon and Cubes.

An October 1913 article asserts that just a few years earlier, soda fountains had been just a summertime business; pharmacies basically had to shut down their soda fountains during the winter. Now in 1913, though, thanks largely to the popularity of Armour’s ABC cubes, “a soda fountain proves quite as profitable in the cold weather as in the hot.”

And Armour didn’t just sell to pharmacies; the company also targeted many of its bouillon cube ads directly to housewives. One such ad reads:

“Things every Housewife ought to know

“That hot water is wholesome. 

“That a cup of hot water with an Armour Bouillon Cube stimulates the circulation and drives away that tired feeling and the nervous let-down that comes to all workers.

“A cube to a cup.

“Free samples on request

“—Armour & Company, Chicago”

Just like with the coca beef tonic, it’s clear that Armour sold its salty, approximately-cow-flavored cubes as having healing and restorative properties.

But how did this company in urban Chicago become a powerhouse for the sale, distribution and marketing of cow-related products? After all, cows live on open grasslands—not in cities, don’t they?

In fact, both cow cubes and cow goo alike were both part of larger changes taking place in the global beef industry.

The same Second Industrial Revolution that had allowed great innovators to reduce cows into jars of brownish ooze or into tiny cubes, also prodded other massive changes for the production and consumption of beef.

So let’s stop all this loitering at the hot soda fountain and explore some of these other changes to the beef industry. That way we can grasp just how much the production and consumption of meat changed during this era.

[separator music]

[Turning Cows into Cold Cash]

In fact, that story does begin with grasslands—out West.

Here’s another document from the past—a book from 1880 called The Beef Bonanza, Or: How To Get Rich on the Plains, Being a Description of Cattle-Growing, Sheep-Farming, Horse-Raising and Dairying in the West.

Its author is James S. Brisbin, who had been a Union General in the U.S. Civil War.

General Brisbin asserts that during his present-day of 1880—that the West was changing at a breakneck pace.

A great deal had changed since the early third of the 1800s. Back then, many sources had characterized the Great Plans as the so-called “Great American Desert.”

Before we go on, we need to be a little careful with language here. The word “desert” did not necessarily mean a dry, sandy place with cactuses and/or camels and/or horned lizards and/or cool looking animal skulls strewn about everywhere.

In fact, the 1831 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary defines desert simply as meaning “a wilderness, an uncultivated region.”

Even so, many writers popularized and reinforced the idea that the West was basically a barren wasteland.

For example, the British author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle characterized much of the U.S. West as “…an arid and repulsive desert which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization.”

…He added…

“In this stretch of country there is no sign of life, nor of anything appertaining to life.”

Doyle published this description of the West in his second Sherlock Holmes novel before actually visiting the United States. And that’s precisely the point; people around the world and in the US alike understood this region as a ‘desert’.

In fact, many people understood grassy plains in general to be mostly lifeless places; that description did not only apply to the U.S. West, but also to many treeless grasslands all over the world.

Take, for instance, the famously fertile plains called the Pampas of South America.

The Pampas make up a big part of Argentina, a small chunk of Brazil and pretty much all of Uruguay: 

19th century observers described those lands too as desierto—desert.

For that reason, Argentina’s bloody wars from 1878–1885 against that country’s indigenous populations is called La Conquista del Desierto—the Conquest of the Desert.

The U.S. waged equally bloody wars against its own indigenous populations during the same era.

By 1880, as Brisbin’s book makes clear, the idea that the U.S. West was a place of opportunity—a place to get rich—had replaced any remaining illusions about the West being a wasteland.

He warns that young men living thirty or more years in the future will wish they took advantage of this amazing opportunity to become Western cattle ranchers.

He predicted—correctly as it turns out—that the so-called Western frontier would disappear quickly.

So Brisbin promised that cattle was key to unlocking a better life—just at the same time as Liebig’s innovations with beef extract received worldwide attention.

Beef prospectors bought up land in the US West, and also in places like Argentina, Canada, Australia and New Zealand too—all of which had huge grasslands perfect for grazing.

In fact, Liebig’s extract of meat company attributed much of its early successes to having built a factory near the Uruguayan Pampas in a town called Fray Bentos to take advantage of cheaper cattle grazing opportunities on this rich land.

Back in the U.S., cattle towns were springing up all over the West in the 1870s and 80s, and they gained mostly-deserved reputation for violence and lawlessness.

In U.S. cities, readers couldn’t get enough stories about these towns full of cowboys. Cheap ‘dime novels’ as they were called, flooded bookstores; they were followed by illustrated magazines and comic books—and, by the early 1890s, movies from America’s first movie production company, Edison Studios.

And speaking of Thomas Edison, remember how we said earlier that cows and the Second Industrial Revolution went hand-in-hoof?

That connection does not only apply to the invention of cow-flavored blocks.

Industrial innovations also encouraged and transformed the Western cattle business itself.

In the 1880s, increasing demand for beef and other bovine products led to big cattle drives across the open plains of the U.S. West.

The animals would be herded on long journeys until they could be shipped by rail in cattle cars, bound for places like Chicago.

But a cattle drive is an extremely inefficient way to get cows from grassy places to the butcher shop.

Riding on horses, wearing cool-looking, wide-brimmed hats with a six-gun at your side while you git the various little dogies along—that means getting herds of cattle to walk along with you—and it’s a big waste of energy.

 A long-distance walk is probably as good for cows’ physical fitness as it is for people’s. But it’s a lousy way to fatten the animals up.

And other problems occur when you finally get the live animals into overcrowded cattle train cars for final shipment.

The cars’ stressful conditions meant that many cattle would arrive at their destination skinny, and diseased; many died during the journey. 

It was bad news all-around, not just for the cows but also for the people hoping to turn those cows into something that consumers would pay a lot of money for.

The whole point of an Industrial Revolution is to find new and exciting ways to make economic production more efficient.

That new and exciting way was the refrigerated railroad car.

[separator music]

In 1880, the same year that Gen. Brisbin published his get-rich-in-the-West book a cattle dealer and entrepreneur in Chicago named Gustavus Swift revolutionized the meat industry by creating a fleet of refrigerated railroad cars. 

Instead of a combination of cattle drives and unhappy, unsanitary cows, beef cattle could be killed near the railroad, and their dead carcasses could be loaded up into a rail-riding fridge on wheels, and then transported to Swift’s meatpacking plants in Chicago.

Those facilities utilized a ‘disassembly line’; carcasses are hung from hooks connected to a track on the ceiling and pushed around to different stations to cut into conveniently sized pieces. Those pieces would then be further butchered into steaks, roasts and hamburger, among many other things.

Swift’s ideas were so revolutionary that his industrial meatpacking archrival, Philip Danforth Armour—of later ABC bouillon cube fame—copied the idea and procured his own large fleet of cold railroad cars.

And these new refrigeration technologies weren’t just for trains or even just for the U.S. West.

In that same year of 1880, the first-ever refrigerated commercial ship successfully brought frozen beef to the British market for the first time.

It had carried its chilly cargo all the way from New Zealand.

For the first time in human history, humans could eat meat that had been killed halfway around the world without having to process it into sticky science gloop or converting it into jerky.

Soon after, would-be beef tycoons created new refrigerated processing plants at ports all around planet earth, all serviced by new fleets full of refrigerated cargo ships.

For example, in Oxo’s Uruguay meat extract plant, and also across the border in Argentina, and Brazil, similar refrigerated meat processing plants and warehouses called Frigoríficos—brought in a stampede of cash into these countries’ ports.

In fact, led by its new beef industry and by a concurrent global demand for Pampas-grown cereal grains, Argentine exporters thrived. Argentina became one of the world’s fifteen wealthiest countries by the second decade of the 20th century.

[separator music]

[ABC: America’s Beef Consumers]

Back in the ‘States, Swift and Armour’s massive meat businesses turned into trusts—huge mega-companies that owned and controlled virtually all aspects of their industries—from grazing lands to transportation by both rail and ship, to processing plants, warehouses and meat retailers.

This change became apparent to carnivorous consumers of all kinds.

Retail butchers who once had operated independently, became agents of Swift and/or Armour’s meaty empires.

By the 1920s, almost anyone in the U.S. could afford meat in at least some form.

And the meat industry affected virtually all U.S. society—sometimes in surprising ways.

Here’s one especially strange example:

The former college athlete Curly Lambeau went to work as a clerk at a successful meatpacking company in his Green Bay, Wisconsin home. 

When he needed a sponsor for his new professional football team, he convinced his boss to buy uniforms and lend them the use of the company’s field.

The Green Bay Packers, like the Pittsburgh Steelers, took their name from their cities’ main industry during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The meat biz transformed many other aspects of U.S. society too—including the complex relationship between government, consumers, and technology.

And that change came about by turning meat into yet another geometric shape: a cylinder.

Along with bouillon cubes, canned meats of many varieties—corned beef, deviled ham, and various other similar products—flooded the markets and could be purchased for modest prices.

Most of these canned animal products eventually came from Swift and Armour.

But one older firm founded in Boston in 1822 called the Underwood Company, managed to stay in business by getting in front of one of the most important new technologies of the day: food safety.

William Lyman Underwood showed up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fair city of Cambridge, MA, in 1895, trying to find a scientist who could help him with a problem he was having:

It seems that some of his company’s cans of clams smelled like the septic tank of Death itself.

And they’d also occasionally explode.

A young organic chemistry professor at MIT named Samuel Prescott helped to school Underwood about the latest theories of bacteria.

Underwood not only prevented many future clam-splosions, but also became famous for the sanitary quality of the company’s deviled ham spread.

Dr. Prescott, meanwhile, switched fields to microbiology and is today recognized as a pioneer in the field of food sanitation science.

And just a decade later, food sanitation science began to matter a great deal, spurred on by the author Upton Sinclair.

Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, famously describes the lack of cleanliness in the meat industry in his 1906.

Subsequent popular outcry led to the creation of new government meat inspection protocols in the Pure Food and Drug act of 1906, followed by the creation of the Food and Drug Administration—the FDA.

FDA changed the way retailers labeled food and led meat industry magnates to find new ways to generate profit while also attempting to restore consumer confidence.

The industrial meat industry changed how people ate; how chemists and food scientists interact with industry and the public.

It pushed U.S. expansion into the West, and changed concepts of the economic value of grasslands.

It even altered the relationship between the U.S. Federal Government and the American people.

It made some rich, and brought important nutrition into the diets of many, even while poisoning some others.

It inspired wars that forced indigenous peoples off their lands in both the United States and Argentina.

It transformed the economies of the United States, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other nations around the globe.

And it allowed young, cool people to share a steaming cup of bouillon together at their local pharmacy’s hot soda fountain.

That mound of refrigerated hamburger meat, sealed in plastic with special gasses to keep it fresh-looking, is the inheritor of these once-weird innovations and transformations that came out of the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the early decades of the 20th century.

All of these changes made meat cheaper and more plentiful—and less animal-like than ever before in human history. That shopping trip we took that would be completely unrecognizable to most past generations of humans, turned this new, weird way of producing and consuming meat,  into something normal.

And that is profoundly weird.

[Teaser, Credits, Outro]

[Outro vamp begins]

In our next episode: Have you ever been hanging out with people when someone told a joke that made everyone laugh—but you had no idea why it was funny? 

Did that experience make you feel odd? Strange? Maybe weird?

Join me for the next episode called “You don’t get the joke” and we’ll figure out just how weird your sense of humor is when compared to all the normal things that made people laugh in the past.

You can find references to the historical sources used in today’s episode at findyourselfinhistory.com.

Special thanks to Matt Trimboli, Phillip Sherman and Sherry Brewer who took time out of their busy lives to listen to earlier versions of this episode and give incredibly helpful feedback.

Thanks also to freesound.org , an online sound library that provided additional sound effects. Specific sounds used today are acknowledged also on findyourselfinhistory.com .

If we ever get any sponsors, please support them; I bet they’re awesome whoever they are.

This podcast pilot was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2022 Doug Sofer. The theme song was also written by Doug Sofer, with Doug Sofer on lead guitar and bass and with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Matt also helped me with the mix and pointed me in the right direction to find more information about what mixing actually, for example, is. Check out Matt and his DC-area small-big-band—yes, that’s actually a thing—at trimboli.com 

[Theme song, Fade out]