Ten Thousand Losses - Dip and Snus

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

A brief history of snuff, dip and snus. This isn't really a 10kL podcast, but a one-off that Liam did on this same feed early on. Don't want to change our RSS feed name so here you go.

Hey, this is Liam Anderson recording the first, what I hope to be a long series of sort of just stuff I find interesting. You may know me from my podcast, of which I'm one third. Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. I don't know how long this will last. This is just an oral history sort of of things I find interesting. Next week, I'm going to talk about failed products. I'm going to talk about McDonald's failed sandwich, the Arch Deluxe. I'm going to talk about Pepsi Blue. It really is just things I find interesting. So without any further ado, let's get into the history of dip and snooze.

So talk about those. We should probably talk about tobacco what is tobacco so tobacco uh is a plant uh solacane and it's related to potatoes and tomatoes and there are two kinds of tobacco plants cultivated for uh consumer use we'll say So there's nicotinia tobacco and nicotinia rustica. Tobacco is sort of the more popular of the two. Rustica is sort of a wild, known as

wild tobacco. While it creates a fuller, more flavorful experience, it's also harder to cultivate. It's more of a pain in the ass to refine so the vast majority of products you know you'll see we'll use nicotine yet tobacco uh in terms of tobacco cultivation how it works is that uh the nicotine content is found pretty much in the leaves so you'll cultivate those you'll cut apart the plant uh and then you'll

dry the leaves out uh you can see this in these massive warehouses uh sometimes connecticut sometimes virginia north carolina uh and then further down we'll talk about uh what are dip and snooze so those are the products i'm going to talk about today there are other kinds of oral tobacco uh found in africa found in india uh i didn't find a ton of scholarly research on those and i haven't used them i have used both dip and snooze personally um just in case anyone's asking where the word snooze comes from it's a translation of the word snuff uh into swedish um so to talk about dip and snooze we have to talk about snuff and that's introduced uh to european nobility by john nico which is where we get the word nicotine to katherine

medici um for her headaches and it had been brought back on colombian expeditions uh columbus talks about natives who would drink smoke uh indigenous populations have used it have used it for thousands and thousands of years prior to european contact and colonization uh so this was uh used originally by indigenous populations brought back to europe uh and then sort of so on and so forth um let's talk about how you produce uh well first let's talk about uh the difference between dip and snooze the two products i want to talk about today so dip is oral chewing tobacco you put it in your mouth uh between your gum and cheek it It makes you spit. And if you ever hear me talk about on the podcast, spitters and that sort of thing, you spit because it gives you heartburn if you don't snooze because it's pasteurized as opposed to fermentation, which is what happens to dip.

Snooze doesn't give you that irritation. You can keep it under your, you put it in your upper lip and you can keep it there all damn day if you'd like to so let's talk about the processes used to create both now both are uh you you start with milling uh which is snooze that's just fine medium fine medium and then like rough like that's it's only cut into a few grades or milled dip however is cut from the leaves of the tobacco into you'll see long cut you'll see wide cuts fat cuts stuff like that most popular is for sure long cut uh then you mix you know various tobaccos together uh water and salt are added uh and then snooze uh it's sweated that's when uh the snooze is pasteurized however dip is like i said it's fermented so that step is only really for

snooze and then number five packaging so let's talk about dip so dip is originates in the United States, sort of. Native populations have been observed sort of using a stick to put tobacco in their mouths and then chewing it or just chewing the leaves. But it's really how it starts is you take nasal snuff, which is a precursor to both dip and snooze, and it goes in your nose. You take that. You put it on a stick. You put it in your mouth. Okay? So very odd way to do it.

But nevertheless, a ton of snuff mills spring up around the Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia itself is the center of this. There are 27 snuff mills uh in 1794 they employ 4 000 people throughout the city um you know so it's a pretty big industry uh where you start to see uh dip is in about 1822 copenhagen's introduced schools introduced in 1934 uh like i said this evolves out of the tradition of taking the snuff and putting it on a stick and then putting it in your mouth uh but so that's that um a fact i learned uh ben franklin actually tobacco was so popular ben franklin was able to help build the united states as post-war credit uh by trading 5 000 casts of tobacco uh for 2 million livres uh to uh monarchist france

uh dip actually becomes especially popular amongst southern women that's really how the trend starts uh and then uh it becomes like i said popular after the industrial revolution i did want to talk about sort of obviously uh dip in the american south is produced by slave labor uh i read an article that had been published in the 80s about how you know you have these massive warehouses uh obviously in tobacco country duke university duke himself was uh the guy himself was a a tobacco uh king so yeah obviously the stuff is produced via slave labor uh until slavery is abolished but i did want to make note of that and not sort of fuck around and pretend that that wasn't happening um and then i wanted to talk about snooze for a

bit so snooze comes to sweden you know after uh it's introduced to europe uh and the swedes sort of before we do start packaging it with salt preservatives and uh putting in their mouths and then that's packaged eventually they introduce what are called portions. If you ever see a tin of dipping tobacco, you'll sometimes see pouches. So same thing. Snooze can be found in pouches. Can be found sort of loose. You take a pouch and you put it under your tongue.

But it's introduced to Sweden. The Swedes start to uh to popularize it there's a few uh huge guys that really do popularize it and now it's sort of entering uh its comeback so if anyone's interested a lot of the research i did uh comes from this book snooze the complete guide to brands manufacturing and art of enjoying smokeless tobacco by matt johnson it's a fucking great book uh i thought it was funny that uh at one point the the snooze i used to prefer siberia is labeled as a nicotine catapult and nothing else and i just had these visions of some guy just you know mad scientists like dropping oodles and oodles of nicotine into like

a vat and just sort of hoping for the best but uh so that was the first run of uh my as yet untitled project i don't know how it's gonna go uh if you guys hated it um please be gentle i'm very sensitive but if you guys liked it and you have any suggestions or things you want to see, let me know. My DMS are open. Um, yeah, so that's it. See you next time.