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Let us begin by giving credit where credit must be given: In 1983, Drs. Astri Riddervold and Andreas Ropeid contributed two papers on the influence of the natural sciences on the 19th century Norwegian diet to the Fifth Ethnological Food Conference in Hungary. Dr. Riddervold turned the information in the papers into a longer essay for Ethnologia Scandinavica in 1984. Among the material covered in these papers, and the subsequent Ethnologia Scandinavica article, was the tale of the Norwegian Porridge Feud, which caught the eye of the editor of Petits Propos Culinaires, the late (and much-missed) Alan Davidson, who convinced Drs. Riddervold and Ropeid to allow PPC's editors to adapt and abridge their work into an article suitable for PPC. "The Norwegian Porridge Feud" ran in PPC 32 and was subsequently anthologized in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires, which was snapped up and devoured by yours truly, which brings us to our thrilling conclusion...

At first glance, it sounds like much ado about nothing, with a silly name to boot -- the Norwegian Porridge Feud, indeed! -- but once upon a time in Norway, the preparation of a simple bowl of porridge became a nexus for deeply-held, passionately-argued views about the natural sciences, nutrition, economy, the role of women in Norwegian society, education, tradition, nationalism, progressivism and enlightenment. These issues had been discussed through much of the 19th century, but it was the publication of a cookbook, Fornuftig Madstel (Sensible Cookery) in 1864, that triggered the most heated debates on proper cookery and the nature of women's education and domestic roles, and gave rise to the Norwegian Porridge Feud.

The seed that grew into a nearly-two-year feud was a simple cookery question: to flour or not to flour? It was the custom of Norwegian farmers' wives to prepare porridge by throwing a quantity of flour into the porridge as soon as it was ready to eat. One might see such a practice -- adding uncooked grain to cooked -- as a redundancy, but the author of Fornuftig Madstel, Peter Christen Asbjornsen (writing under the pseudonym Clemens Bonifacius) attacked this practice as worse than redundant: he argued that it was in fact a loss to the eater, as the flour would pass unabsorbed through the body, and it was a loss to the Norwegian economy, as all of this unused flour could be put to better use. He argued further that the only way to reverse this chronic waste, and the resultant weakening of the Norwegian population, was to revise the known methods of cookery and optimal consumption of foods to adhere to the principles of natural sciences; since women were the primary cooks for their families, they were responsible for the deleterious effects of bad cookery, and they should be retaught everything they knew from scratch, in accordance with natural science. Asbjornsen was a famous and well-loved author, and his views drew considerable attention.

They also drew strong criticism from Eilert Sundt, the founder of sociology and ethnology in Norway, and the publisher of the journal Folkevennen. Sundt used his journal to attack Asbjornsen's views, claiming that the addition of flour to porridge was a thousand-year-old tradition, that women had learned over the course of 1,000 years what was best to feed their families, and that Asbjornsen's belief in cookery according to natural science was nonsense. Following this attack, Sundt found himself attacked once again, by Asbjornsen, who accused Sundt of not being qualified to discuss porridge-making, and of denying the people of Norway a chance at a better life through science. Stung, Sundt fought back, calling Fornuftig Madstel, in Riddervold and Ropeid's words, "a great insult to the people of Norway."

Thus was born the Norwegian Porridge Feud, in which both Asbjornsen and Sundt, under the banner of "Enlightenment of the People," lined up panels of experts to argue over just what was the best way to bring that enlightenment. Asbjornsen called on the preeminent natural scientists of the day to bolster his case; most of his experts were German, which brought up issues of Western European progressivism vs. Norwegian nationalism and insularity. The mid-19th century saw the discovery of bacteria as a source of disease, and of hygienic practices as a weapon against disease; it also saw a new understanding of chemical properties of foods, and chemical reactions in the human body, which gave rise to a theory of "like replacing like"; as certain nutrients and compounds were shed or excreted by the body, so must they be replaced in the foods containing them. This led to some fascinating but often spurious advice, some of which sounds outright shocking to 21st century ears: Whole grains, the darlings of 20th and 21st-century nutritionists, were seen by Asbjornsen as imperfect foods, difficult to digest; it was the digestible, finely ground, finely sifted white flour that put wheat's nutrients to best use. Coffee was seen as a blood tonic due to its nitrogen content. The heavy consumption of sugar and sugary syrups was encouraged as a means of eking out the diets of the poor; alcohol consumption was encouraged for the same reason.

Although Asbjornsen was considered a progressive, at least in comparison to Norwegian traditionalists like Sundt, the treatment of women in Fornuftig Madstel is similarly jarring to 21st-century ears. To Asbjornsen and his allies (particularly the German Dr. Klencke, who wrote a "chemical cookery book" translated into Norwegian in 1859), it was women who were primarily responsible for the Norwegian diet; it was women who persisted in "unhealthy" ways of cookery; it was women who needed a complete re-education in the kitchen; it was women who should be taught natural science principles in an organized domestic science curriculum; and it was women who were born for domestic living. For these reasons, they argued, the education of women should be confined to a purely domestic sphere. Any study of philosophy, natural science outside of cookery, languages or music was nothing but lost time and energy, a waste, like uncooked flour on porridge. Furthermore, the learning that women had already acquired at their mothers' and grandmothers' sides, and at their own hands in the kitchen, was outdated, outmoded and a further drain on the Norwegian population. It was thus important for women to devote their energies to scientific cookery, since their own experience was manifestly untrustworthy. This is what passed for progressive thought in mid-19th century Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Asbjornsen's book proved to be long-influential, and was used as a reference guide by contemporary female authors of cookbooks. It also did introduce positive changes into the Norwegian diet, such as increased consumption of fruit and vegetables. Yet the less-than-positive effects of Fornuftig Madstel's advice (heavy consumption of sugars and finely-sifted flour, overconsumption of coffee and the eschewing of both fermented and unfermented dairy for margarine) lasted nearly 100 years, until the supply of sugar and coffee was interrupted by World War II. The tenacity of Asbjornsen's ideas is all the more remarkable when we learn that the argument that started the Norwegian Porridge Feud -- uncooked flour, added to cooked porridge, passes unused through the body -- was disproved two years after the publication of Fornuftig Madstel, when a Norwegian doctor put it to the test; acting as test subjects, he and his assistant ate an exclusive diet of floured porridge. A study of stool samples (I probably should have started this with a disclaimer: "Warning! Contains references to stool samples! Sorry, folks!" showed no trace of undigested starch, proving that the flour *was* actually being used by the body. Over the next 20 years, more of Asbjornsen's theories were overturned, and in 1884, the Norwegian Professor Lochmann attacked Asbjornsen once more as touting pernicious nonsense under the guise of scientific certainty. Yet, such was Asbjornsen's popularity in Norway that long after his theories were debunked, Fornuftig Madstel enjoyed continued popularity, and coffee, sugar, white bread and margarine continued to be consumed with abandon.

It's a lot of baggage for a little bowl of porridge. Myself, I prefer to keep my porridge free of controversy, which is why mine never sees a speck of flour. Actually, mine never sees a speck of flour because I find the idea of adding flour to cereal to be more than a little nasty. I find it best to keep it simple. Dried fruit, yes. Brown sugar or maple syrup, sometimes. Cream, occasionally. A glug or two of Macallan 12, absolutely. But no flour, not ever. I don't need that kind of trouble.

One of my coworkers, a Funky Little Company lifer who used to sell me folding cartons back when I was a lowly purchasing assistant at Big Cosmetics Co., has identified a genre of literature that he has dubbed "Only You, McAllister." It is what he said when he saw me sitting in the cafeteria one lunch hour, my nose in the pages of Curry in the Crown, Shrabani Basu's study of curry houses and ready-chilled Indian meals as a cultural signifier in Britain. (It is a fun book to read, even though I was a bit taken aback by Basu's repeated assurances that most of the workers at the food companies profiled therein were happy to be working in non-union factories. But I have a soft spot for any book that states its thesis by quoting from "Vindaloo" by Fat Les.) It is what he said when I told him about the egg book. Granted, he didn't say it when I was reading Geek Love or Mrs. Caliban, but that was only because we had not yet met each other. And he missed his big chance to really let me have it with double-barrelled sarcasm when he and my boss-at-the-time found me on another lunch hour, nose-deep in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires. "What'cha reading, Fin?" asked Boss Fella. I showed him the book. "Is it any good?" he asked. "It's brilliant," I answered. "There's an essay in here about the Norwegian Porridge Feud of 1864-66." I didn't even think about what these words would sound like until they had already left my mouth, turned into sound waves bound for infinite deep space. I waited for the inevitable "only you, McAllister", but Boss Fella beat him to the punch. "The problem, Fin," said Boss Fella, "is that I can never tell when you're kidding."

As if I would kid about the Norwegian Porridge Feud.

The past three months have been a summer of mewling and puking, in which very little bread was baked, very few pies emerged bubbling and shining from the oven, very few words of any consequence were written chez PTMYB. Every Friday, I would slouch, rough-beast-like, out of the LuthorCorp office and onto the N train, vowing that this was going to be the weekend that books would be cracked, notecards filled, fabulous new insights gleaned. Every Sunday night, I would slide into bed, full of aromatherapeutic devices meant to calm my nerves, but somehow they didn't do a thing to stop the cartoon-like noise of my eyes blinking. (Yes, I make xylophone-like tones when I blink, just like Bugs Bunny, or the Powerpuff Girls.) Now, though, summer is over, in a cultural if not temporal sense, and I am suddenly finding myself itching to take notes, make citations and read through 50 years' worth of grocery trade magazines and farm commodity reports. I want to call complete strangers and ask them if chicken-bone fossils have ever been found that would help end the controversy over exactly what sort of chickens were the first to arrive in the Americas, and when. I want to read about Chinese seapower in the 15th century. I want to read about the creation of brioche and kugelhupf. I want to tell everyone I know that Mesopotamian Egyptians hatched chicks on a massive scale, a scale that was not matched until the mid-20th century. Whether anyone wants to hear any of these things is beside the point to me, for I am a woman in love. If my newfound focus and desire for study has not yet translated into a peaceful night's sleep, if my dreams are still cluttered and confusing and vaguely anxiety-producing, I can, as always, turn to the movies for comfort. I had forgotten about an exchange between Robert Burke and Martin Donovan (a/k/a Yet Another One of My Boyfriends) in Simple Men, in which they are discussing the tough, nervy Kate (played by Karen Sillas); Robert Burke says "I like her, but she seems kind of jumpy," and Martin Donovan replies, "Jumpy women are great." I have decided to add that to the list of t-shirts that bunni and I want to have made for ourselves. I want this one on a baseball jersey, bright blue with bright red sleeves and print, so that everything looks like it's vibrating.

But I digress. I am in the mood for nerdy, poindextery pleasures, and right now nothing satisfies that mood, nothing gives me such pleasure, like considering the Norwegian Porridge Feud. You would think that I would be a sport and answer your questions such as "Gee, Jen, just what was the Norwegian Porridge Feud, anyway?", "Gee, Jen, how many times can you say "Norwegian Porridge Feud in a single post?" and "Gee, Jen, you're not going to tease us by rabbitting on about this Norwegian Porridge Feud without telling us what it is, are you?" I'm afraid so, dear friends. It is late here in beautiful uptown Astoria, so late that I can actually hear the crickets chirping in the backyard. (Yes, we do have crickets in New York City. Squirrels, too, although both the crickets and the squirrels tend to disappear when the feral cats are in heat.) It is only in the interest of beauty sleep, and in maintaining functionality at the box factory tomorrow, that keeps me from telling the whole story now. It's certainly not because I want to leave you on a cliffhanger note, coming back to see what happens next, the way those bastards Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins used to do. Heavens, no.

Until such time as I can tell the story, and tell it properly, I recommend that you take three more stops on your pass through the World Wide Internets:

• Snowball has 2 1/2 hours (Mountain Daylight time, her local time zone) of birthday left. Go say happy birthday to one of the best women on the 'net, if not the planet. (This will explain why I love her so.
• Every time I think I cannot be any more amazed by the white-hot brilliant beauty that is Grace Davis, she gives me another reason to be amazed. Grace is doing some truly outstanding work on behalf of Hurricane Katrina survivors. Go visit her, look upon her works, ye mighty, and please help in any way you can.
• Last Thursday, my kind and excellent pal Bunni finally had her Howard Beale moment: she got mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore. She will always be Professor Bunni, but not for the unnamed private New York Higher Education Monolith that took her considerable teaching skills for granted for far too long. Adventure is afoot. Go see.

A final nonsequitur before bed:  When I was adding the links to this post, I happened to click on the "memorable quotes" link on the imdb page for Simple Men.  There is another fine moment in which Robert Burke's character, Bill, gives his new friend Ned a medallion of the Blessed Virgin.  Ned observes that the Blessed Virgin is pretty, and Bill answers, "Not only is she pretty, but she's got a nice personality, and she's the mother of God."  I do like a man with a finely-tuned sense of scale.

Spared by a car- or airplane-crash or

In my silly little world, there are three standards of goodness in men:  There are good men, there are great men, and there is Lloyd.

A good man will notice that the sink is getting a bit dish-heavy, and will do a bit of washing-up.

A great man will notice the sink is getting a bit dish-heavy, also notice that you are doing a bit of puttering around in the kitchen and baking cakes and whatnot, ask "will I be in your way if I do some dishes?", and do some washing-up.

Lloyd will notice that the sink is get dish-heavy, also notice that I am doing a bit of puttering around in the kitchen and baking cakes and whatnot, ask "will I be in your way if I do some dishes?", do some washing-up, return to the living room and announce in a matter-of-fact, not-at-all-self-congratulatory tone of voice: "Well, I have maintained my dominion over the sink.  I have not achieved complete dominance over the sink, but I have maintained my dominion", and then put on the new New Pornographers album for our listening pleasure.

I'm still asking myself what I did in a past life to get him in this one, because I surely never did anything in this life to warrant such a prize.

(Lloyd, if you're reading this, I can already tell what you're thinking.  Just take the compliment, already, and please get that look off your face before it freezes that way.)

"It always gets worse just before it gets better"; thus sang a grand old bar band, Chris Moffa and the Competition, in a grand old pop song, "You Know How Hot It's Been Getting 'Round Here," and once again the wisdom of the universe is made manifest in a three-minute tune.  I'm not about to play with fate by saying that things are better, or worse.  I will say that things chez PTMYB have been pretty damn crunchy this summer (although that crunchiness does not extend to Lloyd, who is, in Bunni's words, "professionally wonderful", and it's about time for them to get better.  It's time to remember that there is a point to getting out of bed in the morning, slinging hash at the box factory all day long, coming home and cracking the books.  It's time for fresh thought...which, of course, is why I'm reprinting this essay, which originally ran on December 3, 2004.

Those of you who are relative newcomers to PTMYB may wonder why I am so fascinated with eggs. Until roughly this time last year, I never thought that eggs would become such a compelling object of study for me. I was a breadhead -- well, I still am and always will be a breadhead, but for the past four years or so I was pretty much an exclusive breadhead. I had visions of baking bread in my own bakehouse. I had a business plan, and a city in which to shop it around. Then one day I didn't. I didn't have enough money, I couldn't qualify for enough funding, I blinked and lost my nerve. Looking around for something to do, I applied for a long-shot deal, a month-long fellowship at a writers colony in northwest Arkansas, to be used for a creative work on eggs, underwritten by the American Egg Board. It was such a long shot that I didn't put too much thought into what kind of book I would write if the opportunity came up. Imagine my shock when Mr. Opportunity came knock knock knocking at my door, and I found myself in Arkansas, surrounded by notecards and 19th century cookbooks and no fewer than three separate treatises on chickens and eggs.

So here I am, writing a book, or at least researching it, trying to find an agent willing to take me and this madhouse project on, and still shaking my head at the absurdity and silliness and sheer, unadulterated, unexpected fun of trying to study the history of eggs in baking.

Maybe it helps if you're a baking nerd, and I'm one of the nerdiest baking nerds ever to hoist a sheet pan. A well-prepared egg is soulful food, whether turned into an omelet, perfectly buttery, plump and self-contained; poached and served on braised spinach with a slight hint of garlic; beaten, enriched and turned into a towering, trembling souffle; made into a frittata, studded with vegetables and suitable for eating hot, warm or at room temperature; or simply boiled and fitted nicely into an egg cup, waiting to be pierced with a soldier of buttered toast. But the real fun of an egg comes when you pull your butter and sugar out of the fridge and turn the oven on. Madeleine Kamman refers to eggs as "miracles in a shell," and nowhere are those miracles more evident than in baking. Depending on whether you use the white, the yolk or both; depending on how, or whether, you beat it and how you apply heat to it, an egg can add smoothness and moisture to your final product, or make it drier and crisper. It will leaven a cake, and if you treat it with care, it will leaven without the assistance of chemical leaveners like baking powder. Heated gently with sugar and milk or fruit juice, it will turn into custard, as firm or as wobbly as you like it. Beating an egg white is a nifty and dramatic trick, traces of pale viscous liquid turning into billowing foam, but it wasn't until I got my first stand mixer that I discovered how neat it was to beat whole eggs to what is called the ribbon stage, the point at which the eggs are lemony and foamy and five times their original volume, when you pull the beater off the mixer and trail a line of batter across the batter surface, that batter ribbon will stay visible for ten seconds before vanishing below the surface. One thing I love to do is make a batch of brown sugar meringues, billowy and ivory-colored. I then boil the leftover yolks and turn them into sablees, delicate sandy French butter cookies that will fall apart if so you much as squint at them, and will melt the instant they hit your tongue. A little plate of meringues and sablees is a beautiful thing, especially if it is sitting next to a bowl of raspberry fool. If the taste doesn't seduce you, the colors definitely will. And I still shake my head at the day I learned that a traditional chocolate mousse contains only chocolate and eggs, no whipped cream. At school we learned how to make "light chocolate mousse" and "rich chocolate mousse"; the light was the traditional, the rich was the one with cream added, and I was surprised at how much more I liked the traditional mousse, its softer texture, its deeper chocolate flavor. Imagine how happy I was to discover that Gina Mallet agrees with me.

If you are not familiar with Gina Mallet, allow me to introduce you. Gina Mallet is a food writer for the National Post in Canada, the former theatre critic for the Toronto Star and the author of Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. She was born in England, to an American mother and an English father. She grew up eating well, fed by relatives and friends with fine (but not snobbish) palates and vigorous opinions, and she was lucky enough to be born at the right time to eat some of the finest cheeses, meats, vegetables and fish that a person could eat, and thus she knows just what we are losing as our food becomes safer and safer, and ever more tasteless. (If you think that this is another jeremiad by a Luddite who insists we must source all of our food from no more than 10 miles from where we live, I assure you that Ms. Mallet is brave and unflinching at examining her most deeply-held beliefs, notably her shock and disappointment to discover that the heirloom tomato she grew in her garden was tasteless and badly textured, while her friend in Pennsylvania raises bright and flavorful tomatoes from a seed hybrid she buys from Agway.) She is a tough, smart, grand writer.

Unfortunately, the story that that tough, smart grand writer tells is a sad one, and every time I think that I've heard this sad story before -- the disappearance of raw farmhouse cheeses, the deplorable conditions of egg factories (to call them "farms" or "ranches" now feels like a cruel joke), the bizarre produce distribution system that, along with the Alar scare, eviscerated the once-glorious apple producing regions of Washington State -- she has something new to tell, something to which I'm glad to have been alerted while simultaneously wishing I'd never heard about it. Today's food production and agricultural policies are driven by the global marketplace, not just in terms of an increased number of foods being available from an increasing number of markets, but also in terms of food being produced to a single homogenized standard, meant to be consumed by billions of people around the world, compromised in an increasingly futile attempt to render it pathogen-free:

As a child, I happily drank raw milk. For several years, it was considered the greatest of treats. In Shillingford, on Thursday afternoons, my sister and I used to stop at the farm on our way home from school. We would tap on the kitchen window, which was flung up by Cally, the farmer's cousin, a ringer for Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in the movie The Wizard of Oz, and she would beckon us into the sparkling tiled dairy, which smelled of washing. On a big wooden table lay large, shallow, stainless-steel pans of milk with cream rising slowly to the surface. Thecream was the color of daffodils. The cows were the superrich Jerseys and Guernseys. Cally poured us a glass of fresh milk still warm from the cow, and it was so good. The milk smelled earthy and complex -- today, I'd call it sexy -- and so rich compared to the gray stuff we usually drank. Then Cally would hand us each a piece of fresh bread, spread with farm butter and homemade strawberry jam, and lay on it a layer of the heavy cream that spread like cheese. This was quite simply the best food we had all week.

Raw milk, as I told a food scientist I know, is a cocktail with as many hints of vegetables and herbs as V-8 Juice, a meal in itself. He would have none of it. "You think it's safe, but it isn't. It's packed with bacteria. We're finding more bacteria all the time. You were lucky. For some reason, you're resistant to bacteria, but others won't be. You must remember we live in a global market now and there are thousands, millions of people who will never have had raw milk, won't be able to digest it, and may die as a result."

I thought he was overreacting until I found out that his reaction was public health dogma throughout North America. Tom Szalkucki, the assistant director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, gave me the reasons. He skipped over the cosmic bacterial menace for more practical matters. From a public health point of view, uniformity is essential for safety, and no regulatory agency such as the Food and Drug Administration can allow the sale of any food that is not safe for everyone. A pathogen in raw milk cheese could hurt those with AIDS, those on chemotherapy, the old. The old, Szalkucki reminded me, and now the fastest-growing segment of the North American population and the fastest-growing population in all the industrial countries, a triumph of health science. I had a sudden vision of aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese.

Now, of course I don't want to see aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese, and I don't want wholesale keeling over due to lethal pathogens, but I am more than a little worn out by our food policy being dictated by bacterophobes, particularly when some of the most lethal pathogens out there entered our food supply by our push to industrialize our food...which brings me back to our friend the egg. There are two reasons to eat eggs -- and I'm talking gastronomic reasons, not health reasons: 1. You like the taste of eggs; 2. You like what eggs contribute to your baked goods in terms of leavening and thickening power. What, then, are we to make of this?

You don't have to be a hen-hugger to suspect that nature was biting back with Salmonella E(nterides). Industrialized humans crammed together in slums with bad snitation were prey to many diseases of close proximity, notably typhoid fever. Why shouldn't it be the same for hens?...But the egg industry was less interested in finding the root cause of Salmonella E than in stopping it. In Europe, the hens were vaccinated. In North America, everything that could be cleansed was cleansed again, and warning bulletins about egg handling were broadcast widely. Salmonella E hasn't disappeared, but it has declined. According to the American Egg Board, the chance of anyone getting infected by an egg in America is about 1 in 20,000, and then if you're healthy, you probably won't get sick at all.

Even so, an industrial solution has to be found. In some parts of the United States, shell eggs are already being pasteurized. A computerized conveyor belt passes the eggs through successive baths of water, heated from 144F to 162F in order to destroy any pathogens. Pasteurization, of course, also wipes out any egg taste. The American Egg Board encourages the use of these eggs, even if they don't quite look right. The board advises: "The heating process may create cloudiness in the whites and increase the beating time for foam formation. When you separate pasteurized shell eggs for beating, allow up to about four times as much time for the full foam formation to occur, as you would in the whites of regular eggs."

The final solution is the irradiated egg. Irradiating eggs, or any food for that matter, is similar to radiation therapy. It is not likely to be good for an egg any more than a gamma ray is good for a human. But gamma rays, electrons, or X-rays that are beamed through the eggs will knock out all pathogens. The Food and Drug Administration admits that eggs lose 24 percent of their vitamin A when exposed to just one third of the approved level of radiation. The yolks of an irradiated egg are watery and dim, and the egg itself is no longer the cook's little helper. The irradiated egg is more difficult to cook, requires more time to whip, and yields angelfood cakes with half the volume.

If the eggs of our future don't taste like eggs, don't contain the nutrients of eggs, and don't leaven or thicken like eggs, why in the world would we continue eating them, outside of sheer dull, repetitive habit? Can we even continue to call them eggs?

Addendum (9/9/05):  The picture below has been run in this space even more than the infamous egg yolks posted above, but I just can't resist running it one more time.  As soon as I get some quality time to look at a calendar, I am planning my return to Arkansas; come 2006, I will be back, and the first thing I will do when I get there is sweet-talk the airport shuttle driver into making one stop for me before we get to the Colony, a stop at Bill's Pharmacy, home of the best eggs I have ever had, and probably ever will.