Here’s another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet.

And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”

Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work.

This thinking is typical of this genre of articles. They view the decision to drop the bomb in isolation and only lament the destruction it caused. What these articles all ignore is the larger environment in which the decision was made. A counterfactual easily points out the flaw in their logic. Imagine that the US decided against dropping the bomb. What would have happened? Most of these articles, when they consider this possibility at all, seem to imagine that the Japanese would have surrendered anyway, and that everyone would have lived happily ever after.

But that is not what would have happened. The war would have continued. The Japanese knew they could not win by early 1944. Their plan was to make the cost of a US victory so high that an armistice would be signed allowing the existing Japanese state (and military) to continue much as it had. This is consistent with Japanese tactics on Iwo Jima and on Okinawa in 1945. They fought essentially to the last man. In both places, Japanese military deaths were nearly 100% of their total force. About 20,000 Japanese soldiers died on Iwo Jima and 100,000 Japanese soldiers died on Okinawa. Total US casualties roughly matched the Japanese numbers, though with a much lower percentage killed due to better battlefield rescue and medical treatment. Iwo Jima had no civilian population, but on Okinawa, there were about 150,000 civilians killed during the fighting. There was no indication that Japanese resolve was wavering, either on the part of the government or the population.

A US invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been horrific. The US military had detailed plans drawn up for the invasion (Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet). The plans called for the war to continue through 1946 and into 1947. Projected casualties were about 1,000,000 for the US military, 3,000,000 for the Japanese military (with a very high percentage of the Japanese casualties being deaths), and roughly 10,000,000 Japanese civilian deaths. The plans called for a conventional amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atomic bomb project was so secret that regular military planners knew nothing of it and couldn’t include it in their plans. One person who did know about the bomb was George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army, and he planned to use the atomic bomb as a tactical weapon during the invasion, expecting to drop 10 to 15 bombs on Japanese defensive positions if that many bombs could be produced in time.

There was another option that was brought up among US planners: simply blockading Japan until they gave up. This is the strategy Germany tried (unsuccessfully) to use against Britain. A blockade would have avoided an invasion, but would have taken years and probably would have killed as many as 50,000,000 Japanese civilians. It was not seriously considered, and no detailed plans were made for it.

My personal thinking on the question of the bomb is made clear due to its direct effect on my family. I had an uncle, Oswald Fabrizio, who was born at the end of 1925. He entered the Marines in early 1944 and was killed in action in May of 1945 during the fighting on Okinawa. Had the bomb been ready sooner, there would have been no battle for Okinawa and my uncle would have survived the war.

My father was born at the end of 1926, and completed Army basic training in Spring of 1945 at a base that had sent many troops to the European theater. Instead of shipping off to the war in Europe (since German surrender was imminent), his unit was sent to “enhanced basic training” at another camp, which sent many troops to the Pacific theater. The bomb was dropped before his unit could ship out to the fighting. When they did ship out, they were told that their troop ship was the very first one to sail across the pacific with its running lights turned on, there being no threat of Japanese submarines since Japan had surrendered.

The stark differences between the experiences of my uncle and my father were due only to a year’s difference in birthdays, and the atomic bomb.

Noah Hawley (the writer of the Atlantic article) seems to believe the options available to the US planners in 1945 were:

1. Drop the bombs, kill roughly 200,000 civilians, including children, and Japan surrenders in a week, or

2. Don’t drop the bombs, no civilians are killed, and Japan surrenders anyway.

But the options actually available were:

1. Drop the bombs, kill roughly 200,000 civilians, including children, and Japan surrenders in a week, or

2. Don’t drop the bomb, continue the war, invade Japan, kill roughly 14,000,000 people, mixed among military and civilians, Japanese and Americans, including children, or

3. Don’t drop the bomb, don’t invade, starve Japan into surrender, killing upwards of 50,000,000 people, including children.

Given these choices, I bet even our Noah Hawley would choose to drop the bomb, without hesitation. If not, what kind of a monster is Noah Hawley?

• 4 eggs at room temperature

• 1 1/2 cup milk, warmed

• less than 1 1/2 cup sifted all purpose flour, maybe 1 3/8 cup

• 1/4 tsp salt

You’ll need a couple of popover pans, or failing that, a couple of cupcake or muffin pans. I use seasoned iron muffin pans. Do not use teflon coated pans. The teflon starts to wear off with use and the popovers start sticking to the pans. The pans should be preheated in a 450 degree oven. Beat the eggs, then pour the milk and salt into the beaten eggs and beat them all together. Pour the mixture into the sifted flour and mix them together gently. Don’t beat the liquid ingredients into the flour. Mix them together just until they are barely combined.

Take the preheated pans out of the oven and lightly spray them with PAM olive oil cooking spray. This will prevent the popovers from sticking to the pans. Pour the popover mix in, filling each cup about 3/4 of the way. Popovers sticking to the pan so that they are difficult to extract is an existential danger, and the PAM spray fixes this problem entirely. The pans should be hot enough so that the batter should sizzle a little as it pours in.

Put the pans in the oven and bake for 15 minutes at 450 degrees, then turn the heat down to 350 degrees and bake for about 20 minutes more. When they’re done, put lots of butter in them and wolf them down without pausing for breath.

The danger with popovers is that they don’t pop. With the recipe above, they always pop. The key item is using a little less flour than milk. Every recipe in the world says to use equal amounts of milk and flour. They vary in the relative level of milk/flour to eggs, but they all say to use equal amounts of milk to flour. This is the conspiracy that is causing so many failed popovers, and it has to stop.

Many recipes call for some melted butter to be added to the batter, but I find it doesn’t do anything and is a pain to prepare. And while we’re on it, the salt doesn’t seem to do anything either. I keep it in because I’ve always done it and it’s not hard to do.

Vegan Popovers

Between the eggs and the milk, not to mention the prodigious amounts of butter, popovers are not very healthy for either your body or the planet. Vegan popovers are the holy grail. I get excited just thinking about them. But try as I have, just substituting in almond milk for cow milk and JustEgg for chicken eggs has been miserably unsuccessful. I can get popovers to pop with almond milk substituted in for cow milk, but they don’t pop as well and don’t taste as good. Substituting for eggs hasn’t worked at all. Work will continue, but for now vegan popovers will remain an unfulfilled dream.

The person I was arguing with would not see that I was not favoring the war or US policy. She was rightly against US involvement, but that prevented her from seeing my point about the original thought process behind that involvement.

My point was that during the Cold War everyone in the West was afraid of backing down from the Soviets. Beyond the tactical considerations, Western policy makers were all afraid of looking like Neville Chamberlain in 1938 (“peace for our time”). Instead, they all wanted to be Winston Churchill in 1940 (“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”). The memory of World War II was fresh in everyone’s mind, even into the 1960’s. And each of them had a vivid memory of Neville Chamberlain waving that idiotic piece of paper in the air after arriving home from Munich.

Each of the American actors, from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson, and everyone down the chain, viewed the Soviets as the new evil force in the world, much as the Nazis were the evil force in the 1930’s. Appeasement was imprinted in their minds as failed strategy. They believed that fighting back was always and everywhere the correct response. Kennedy put the sentiment into words, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Kennedy was more eloquent than most, but they were all thinking, and doing, the same thing. Almost from the end of World War II the Soviets were recognized as a new threat, potentially as bad as the Nazis. Resisting the Soviet threat was what the creation of NATO was about, was what the Marshall Plan was about, was what the Berlin airlift was about, was what the Korean war was about. Everyone was desperate to prevent another world war and just as desperate to avoid looking like Neville Chamberlain while doing it.

So when communist trouble looked like it was popping up in Vietnam in the 1950s, the Eisenhower people send US personnel there to keep things from bubbling over. The Kennedy people continued and expanded the effort. The Johnson administration escalated it to a full blown war. But all of them thought what they were doing in Vietnam was just another facet of the regular containment policy they had all been following since 1946. Each of them thought Vietnam was just another Korea, or another Berlin airlift. And it was, until it wasn’t.

So my point in the argument was not that the American war in Vietnam was right or moral or correctly executed, but that it arose from a framework that policy makers believed to be based on a sound plan of overall containment. The idea is that US leadership didn’t purposely create a catastrophe in Vietnam because of bad intent. The intent was at least rational, and based on a policy that they thought was both working and workable. Instead, the problem was that they completely misread the situation in Vietnam and that is what lead to the disaster.

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And the radiation problem on Mars is not fixable. One of the reasons that we don’t get fried by radiation here on earth is that the earth has a wonderful magnetic field. That magnetic field is what causes the Aurora Borealis that everyone likes so much. We can literally see the damaging radiation being dissipated by the earth’s magnetic field. That magnetic field is created by the earth’s molten iron-nickel core flowing around the solid iron center of the planet. The amount of energy created by this effect is approximately a gazillion times larger than the total amount of energy ever produced by humanity in all of history. Mars is magnetically dead, and there is no way to melt the iron that does exist in Mars’ core to ever get it to flow so that it could generate a magnetic field.

Besides the lack of a magnetic field, the lack of an atmosphere also contributes to the radiation problem. Pop culture represents Mars as having a thin but manageable atmosphere, but that isn’t accurate. Mars has only 1% of the surface atmospheric pressure of the earth. This makes it much more like the surface of the moon, which has no atmosphere, than what we see in movies about Mars. There is essentially no atmosphere to help shield out harmful solar radiation.

The second big problem is the low gravity on Mars. The planet has about half the diameter of earth and only about 10% of earth’s mass. This generates gravity on the Martian surface that is a little more than a third of the gravity that exits on earth. Like the radiation problem, the low gravity problem is not fixable. There is no way to increase the mass of Mars so that it would generate gravity that is close to earth’s. Human colonists living on Mars would eventually suffer from muscle atrophy, bone density issues, and problems with organ function and heart health due to the low gravity. When astronauts go on long missions to space these problems always occur. Special exercises in zero gravity help to stave off the effects, but they can’t completely prevent them. A colonist living on Mars permanently would die from effects of low gravity, no matter what was done to mitigate the effects.

Humans are adapted to living on earth, and despite science fiction movies, there’s no way for us to travel to the stars, or even to planets in our own relative backyard. It might be disappointing, but we are stuck on earth permanently. It’s actually not that bad: If we’re going to be stranded, earth is a really nice planet to be on.

Though it’s impossible to have a human colony on Mars, we can, and should, send more mechanical research probes to Mars. Early in its history, maybe 3 billion years ago, Mars may have had both a global magnetic field and an atmosphere. These could have made conditions right for the existence of liquid water on the surface of the planet. Research probes could help us uncover the ancient history of Mars and find out if there was life on the planet at one time. This knowledge would be important to our understanding of life on earth. If we had any sense, we’d ditch the idea of sending people to Mars and instead send enough mechanized probes to explore every inch of the planet.

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I did several somethings. I committed to getting back into running. I set up to track what I ate. And I eventually started to track my weight too. My goal was to get back down into the 150’s. It worked, but mostly by a series of lucky accidents. I had read that too much sugar is bad, and I had tried to cut out some of it where I could. But eliminating sugar was not the focus of the plan when I started.

Out with friends last year, one of them told me about a new diet she was on where she only allowed herself to eat for an eight hour time window each day. During that window however, she could eat anything she wanted. I tried that and it failed miserably. I ate ice cream, candy, and cookies (but only during an eight hour time window each day). For this year, I kept the eight hour diet in mind, but realized I needed to eat healthier if I was going to lose weight.

I have been a runner for decades, and I knew running would be a part of getting back in shape. As soon as the worst of winter was over, I started on the running program. By April I was running a 5k route almost every day. I kept that up until late summer when a pulled hamstring caused me to pause the running for the rest of the year. Even though the running didn’t continue, I suspect it raised my metabolism, making it somewhat easier to burn off pounds.

According to the food journal, at the start of the year, I was having ice cream for desert almost every night. I was eating Oreos and chocolate fairly regularly, and snacking quite a bit throughout the day. Potato chips were as likely as fresh fruit to appear as snacks.

By the end of April I had dropped about 5 pounds. See the graph of my weight below. It was progress, but not as much as I had been hoping, considering that by this point I was running 20 miles a week. So I started looking at the food I was eating. I had already been trying to limit the amount of food, but that apparently wasn’t fixing the problem. The food journal says I was reducing the amount of food (for example, 3 raviolis at dinner instead of 10), but it also says I was still regularly having chocolate bars and bowls of Frosted Flakes.

Around this same time I saw a news article on how bad soda is for you. I stopped buying and drinking Coca-Cola and 7Up. I didn‘t realize it as an error at the time, but I made the mistake of replacing these with apple juice and pineapple juice because I thought these were healthier. In May, I saw another news article that said sugary drinks of every kind, including apple juice, orange juice, and other seemingly healthy juices are actually loaded with sugar. Natural or not, they are basically liquid sugar and are processed by your body immediately after you drink them. Since they quickly create a large excess of sugar in your system, your body converts a good part of that sugar to fat. I cut out all drinks and replaced them with tap water. This was one of the key things that helped me lose weight. Almost as soon as I replaced sugary drinks with water, I dropped another several pounds and got into the 150’s.

The combination of the running and the elimination of sugary drinks allowed my weight to drift down into the mid 150’s by August. This is when the pulled hamstring sidelined my running routine. But I was on a roll. I started looking to eliminate sugar from everything in my diet. The chocolate bars and candy had to go, replaced with fresh fruit. This was pretty easy since it was summer and good, cheap fruit was everywhere in the grocery stores. Yogurt, which I was eating because I thought it was healthy, is apparently loaded with sugar. You have to search carefully to find yogurt that has no sugar in it. Most white bread has a lot of sugar in it. I jettisoned that and replaced it with rye bread or sourdough, which have almost no sugar. And I was still sticking to the 8 hour per day time window for eating. In practical terms, this meant that I was skipping breakfast (and all the sugary cereal I had previously been eating).

Despite the fact that I had stopped running, my weight was continuing to drop like a rock. In October I was consistently in the low 150’s and at month end I hit 149 for the first time since college. I was down in the 140’s throughout November. I was never a big drinker of alcohol, but after reading that alcohol is largely processed like sugar in your body, I eliminated beer and wine and replaced them with non alcoholic beer.

So there it is. It’s been less than a year and I’ve lost 25 pounds. After a new physical exam, the doctor said I no longer need a statin, my old pants fit again, and my weight is in the mid 140’s. Pretty good considering I was making it up as I went along.

After thinking about it, I realize that I was addicted to sugar and didn’t know it. Even foods and drinks that I thought were healthy had loads of sugar in them. Somewhere during the past year I broke my sugar addiction. It may have been easier for me since I didn’t know what I was doing. Had I said to myself that I was going to eliminate sugar from my diet, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. But because I did it little by little, over a period of months, I think it make the process easier.

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Most of the arguments I’ve seen on this are either circular, off point, or just plain dumb. I have seen people write that the Romans could not industrialize because they did not have advanced mathematics, didn’t use coal as a power source, didn’t have the steam engine, didn’t have the printing press to disseminate technical knowledge, and a host of other roadblocks. Depending on when you count the start of the Industrial Revolution, some of the arguments I have read seem to prove that England couldn’t industrialize in the 1700’s. But it did, despite the roadblocks that it faced. Rome must have faced a roadblock to industrialization that England did not.

To figure that out, it’s a good idea to review the reasons that are generally agreed on for why industrialization did happen in England in the 1700’s. These sets of preconditions come from various Wikipedia entries and are probably reasonable lists:

• High levels of agricultural productivity (the British Agricultural Revolution) to provide excess manpower and food

• A pool of managerial and entrepreneurial skills

• Available ports, rivers, canals, and roads to cheaply move raw materials and outputs

• Natural resources such as coal, iron ore, and waterfalls

• Political stability and a legal system that supported business

• Financial capital available to invest

And this set, a variation on the 6 above:

• The period of peace and stability which followed the unification of England and Scotland

• There were no internal trade barriers, including between England and Scotland, or feudal tolls and tariffs, making Britain the "largest coherent market in Europe" 

• The rule of law (enforcing property rights and respecting the sanctity of contracts)

• A straightforward legal system that allowed the formation of joint-stock companies (corporations)

• Free market (capitalism)

• Geographical and natural resource advantages of Great Britain were the fact that it had extensive coastlines and many navigable rivers in an age where water was the easiest means of transportation and Britain had the highest quality coal in Europe. Britain also had a large number of sites for water power.

Yet another set:

• It had a dense population for its small geographical size.

• Enclosure of common land and the related agricultural revolution made a supply of this labour readily available.

• There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power resulted in excellent conditions for the development and expansion of industry.

• The damp, mild weather conditions of the North West of England provided ideal conditions for the spinning of cotton, providing a natural starting point for the birth of the textiles industry.

• The stable political situation in Britain from around 1689 following the Glorious Revolution, and British society's greater receptiveness to change (compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the Industrial Revolution.

• Peasant resistance to industrialisation was largely eliminated by the Enclosure movement, and the landed upper classes developed commercial interests that made them pioneers in removing obstacles to the growth of capitalism.

Most historians seem to agree that there were 6 preconditions for industrialization in Britain (though they apparently don’t agree on which 6). Looking over the lists, it is difficult to find any item that existed in eighteenth century Britain that did not exist in second century Rome. Some seem to argue that there was something unique about the land of Britain itself that was a critical factor for industrialization to begin. They are ignoring the fact that Britannia was a Roman province in the second century. The rivers, the coal, the ore, the ports, the climate, and the roads were all there in the second century just as they were in the eighteenth.

Political stability, like there was in England after the 1689 Glorious Revolution, is usually listed as one of the preconditions for industrialization. Rome had a similar period of political stability spanning from Vespasian through Marcus Aurelius. Rome had rule of law, though the limited liability joint stock company was not a construct they had available. But Rome did have a transportation system comparable , or even superior to, the one available in eighteenth century England. England had a unified market across the British Isles, but Rome had a unified market across the Mediterranean world: Western and Southern Europe, North Africa, and the near East. Products manufactured in Gaul could be sold just as easily in Egypt as in Italy.

Even more, Rome was already producing some products on a large scale by the second century CE. Using proto factory systems, pottery was being manufactured in large quantities and shipped throughout the empire. Grain was harvested in Egypt and shipped to Rome to feed a population of nearly a million people. Olive oil and wine was being produced and shipped in vast quantities (100,000 liters of olive oil from Libya per year). Gold mines active in Spain were producing 9000 kg of gold per year.

In general, technology was not a limitation for the Romans either. The water wheel was known to them and there were multi stage water wheel mills used for grinding grain in Gaul and in Italy. Water wheels were even used to pump out excess ground water from mines. Architecture and construction, not just of monuments, but of port structures and transportation facilities were a Roman specialty. Anyone who has stood under the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome would not question their technological capabilities (I have never stood in the Pantheon, but I read that it’s awesome).

Second century Rome had most of the elements that are generally considered to be preconditions for Industrialization. In some of the elements, they were more advanced than the English of the eighteenth century. But the Romans didn’t put things together to achieve industrial liftoff like the British did. There had to be something blocking the Romans that the English did not face. That something was slavery, and it blocked Rome on both sides of the equation.

It’s not known exactly how extensive slavery was in second century Rome, but estimates are that a third of the population consisted of slaves. There was likely a wide variation of the percentage by location, with some areas having fewer slaves and some having a larger share. But slave labor was used extensively in all endeavors. It was common enough that for any problem that required more labor input, or increased productive output, the answer was usually more slaves. A need to produce more agricultural output would not have created a need for new agricultural technologies. Instead, it would have created a need for more slaves, using the existing methods. This was true for manufactures as well. A need for more pottery or mine output would not have generated a need for new manufacturing or mining technologies, it would have generated a need for more slaves.

This is one critical difference between second century Rome and eighteenth century Britain. In Rome, there was a robust slave trade, and foreign wars were generating a steady supply of new slaves, In England, there were no slaves and no possibility of getting any. There was a natural supply of laborers coming from the rural farms, but there was nothing that English industrialists could do to increase this supply when it didn’t meet their needs. They had to economize on the labor pool that they had. This meant that increasing production required developing technological solutions to generate more output with the same labor input (i.e., the spinning jenny, the flying shuttle, and all the rest).

Slavery caused a problem on the demand side of the economy as well. Roman slaves could not legally own property. Though they were large in number, they were not a market in an economic sense. This meant that a third of the population of the empire was off the table to any theoretical industrial output. Industry in England didn’t face this issue. They had all of Britain and some of Europe to sell to.

Though the forgoing arguments make sense, it’s difficult to test them since we only have one example of industrialization in history. It happened in eighteenth century Britain and spread across the world from there. So it would seem that any attempt to generalize about why industrialization did not occur in other times and places would be impossible because of a lack of sufficient examples to use as test cases. Except there is another example: The United States in the nineteenth century.

In the 1700’s, the US was an agrarian country very much like Rome of the second century. Industrial methods came as an import from Britain and by 1800 textile mills began popping up. But they became concentrated in the Northeast. Though the industrial technologies were available to anyone with the inclination to take advantage of them, the Southern US never industrialized and remained completely agrarian long after the North completed industrialization.

The US South and North make an easier direct comparison than 2nd century Rome and 17th century Britain. The two regions of the US shared the same national government, the same access to ocean shipping, the same access to technology, and the same legal environment. Though there were differences like climate and population density, the biggest difference between North and South was slavery. It worked against industrialization in the American South in exactly the same ways it worked against industrialization in Rome.

Slaves were a third of the population in the antebellum South, very similar to estimates of the percentage in Ancient Rome. Slaves were primarily used for the cotton harvest, an activity that required a massive amount of manual labor, a requirement which was filled with a massive number of slaves. Apart from the harvest, the slave force had little to do. Southern slave owners attempted to hire out their slave labor during nonharvest times to anyone who would pay. This acted as an innovation killer throughout the South, since labor could be had at a cost lower than the marginal effort to deploy technological solutions.

Slavery in the South also worked against industrialization on the output side as well, just as in ancient Rome. Slaves could neither own nor buy property, so despite representing a third of the Southern population, they were nonexistent as a market. The South remained firmly agrarian right up until the Civil War, despite the North, which was right next door, industrializing at a furious pace during the same time period.

So there you have it. The reason there was no industrial revolution in the Roman Empire is slavery. And we know this because it’s the same reason that industrialization did not take hold in the American South 16 centuries later. I may revise this rant at some later time to clean it up and add citations.

TL;DR: Slavery - bad. Freedom - good.

• About 1/2 cup of olive oil

• 1 large red onion

• Several (5?) cloves of garlic

• About 24 oz of mushrooms

• 2 28 oz cans of Tomato Purée (any brand)

• 2 12 oz cans of Tomato Paste (plain Contadina brand is best)

• 3 tbsp Oregano

• 1 tsp paprika

• 2 tbsp parsley

• 1 tbsp basil

Put the olive oil into a 6 qt pot. Dice the onion and put that in the pot. Use a garlic press to crush the garlic into the pot. Cook those together on the stove over medium high heat, stirring frequently, about 5 minutes. Cut up the mushrooms in a food processor until they are medium fine and add those to the pot, stirring continuously. Cook everything together for another 5 to 10 minutes or so.

Turn down the heat to the lowest setting. Add the purée and paste. Stir in the spices. Let it simmer on the lowest heat setting for a good couple of hours, stirring frequently to prevent the sauce from burning onto the bottom of the pot.

This is a vegan spaghetti sauce. I used to make it with ground beef instead of mushroom, but substituted in the mushroom when my daughter went vegetarian. My mom claimed that this was how her mother made sauce, though all of her four sisters made the same claim, and their sauces were each very different from my mom’s and from each other’s.

The onion should be cooked to the point where it pretty much dissolves into the sauce. The paprika should be felt rather than tasted. The oregano is the dominant spice. You can serve with Beyond Beef meatballs and still keep the whole thing vegan.