"... Mutlu Sirakova’s uncle gave the research team a crash course in ant yogurt making. The team took four red wood ants and dropped them in a small container of warm milk. They then sealed the container, buried it in the ant hill, and left it there overnight. The next day, the researchers removed the insects from the partially coagulated concoction and gave it a taste. It 'had a slightly tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,' according to the research paper...."
"They determined that the ants contributed several types of acids and enzymes that worked together to coagulate the milk. These include formic acid, which the ants produce as a defense mechanism, as well as strains of lactic and acetic acids produced by bacteria living in the ants’ guts. And once the ants start the yogurt culture, more yogurt can be created by adding additional milk — no need for more insects."
I like the part where they buried the container in the ant hill. I don't think that figured into the scientific explanation. It made me think of folk remedies that have burying something as a step. For example, speaking of grandmothers, my grandmother said you could cure a wart by cutting open a potato, rubbing it on the wart, then burying the potato. Maybe there was some curative chemical in the potato — akin to the formic acid in the ants — but the burying must be imagined magic.
"... between chomps of steak with such gusto that my blood ran cold. That hairy, masculine hand. The glass of frothy milk. The pure delight. The cow two ways.... I couldn’t ignore it.... I interrupted his conversation. 'I don’t mean to be rude,' I said, 'but what’s with the milk?' 'Oh, I know it’s weird, right?” he responded, self-aware but not ashamed. Then he leaned over and drawled, 'I can’t explain it. I just love a big glass of cold milk with a rare steak. Mmmmm-mm!' Milk Man’s date didn’t seem to feel weird about it; she gave a 'Yes, my man is a freak' smile as he finished his Big Ol’ Glass of Cold Milk.... Milk symbolizes innocence and purity, and the adult who continues to indulge in it — nay, cling to it — long after their loss of innocence provokes light repulsion, confusion, and fascination in the observer...."
I've been drinking whole milk — cow's milk — in my coffee for many years, but I wanted to go milk-free for 3 weeks just to test myself — on the off-chance that it has something to do with my loss of smell. Yesterday — Day 1 — I just had black coffee, which is fine.
But then I bought some almond milk. Today — Day 2 — I put almond milk in my coffee. Well! That's no substitute for whole milk! It looks as though I put skim milk in my coffee. Don't ask me how it tastes. I don't have a proper sense of taste. It's a look and a feeling I want. For that, almond milk is useless.
Annoying words on the label: "unrivaled creaminess."
I guess that means unrivaled by other brands of almond milk.
[Juneau, Superintendent Bridget] Weiss said the milk and the floor sealant, which is also a milky, white substance, both come in large plastic bags that are stored inside cardboard boxes. For the milk, the pouch is removed from the box and placed inside the dispenser to serve with meals instead of in cartons.
Both the milk and sealant were stored at a district commodity storage site off campus.
Weiss said that somehow, boxes with sealant in large pouches were “stored or moved on the same pallet as large pouches of milk that were also in cardboard boxes. We don’t know how that happened, but they were all put on the same pallet... That pallet was delivered, and the assumption was that it was milk because that’s what we thought was being delivered.”
"Yet despite knowing that cow’s milk is responsible for three times the emissions of plant milks, the corporation still slaps an undue fee of up to 80 cents on eco-friendly choices.
If you’re thinking the company is merely passing on its additional cost to the consumer, think again. According to PETA’s research, it costs Starbucks a few pennies extra to use vegan milk in a drink — but it charges you 10 times the cost or more. To me, the reasoning is obvious. About 40 percent of U.S. adults now purchase nondairy milk (mostly almond), oat milk sales shot up 95 percent in the 52-week period ending in early September, and around half of Gen Zers say they’re dropping dairy. Making conscientious people pay more is profitable. But for any company with the reach and resources of Starbucks to profiteer in the face of a global calamity … well, it brings to mind the greedy Gordon Gekko.... ...Starbucks says it wants 'to inspire and nurture the human spirit.'... End the vegan upcharge."
Here's my May 11th post about the protest. As I said there, I think Starbucks should redo the prices so that drinks with cow's milk and vegetarian milk substitutes are the same price. I would not have known about this issue if it had not been for Cromwell's glued-hand protest, but I do still disapprove of that kind of behavior. There are worse protests, but I think Cromwell, et al., can do better. I note that he didn't explain the connection between glue — or hands — and his cause, so there's nothing especially significant about glued hands.
"It has been shut down since February after several babies who had consumed formula that had been produced there fell ill and two died.
The agreement stems from a U.S. Department of Justice complaint and consent decree with the company and three of its executives. Those court records say the F.D.A. found a deadly bacteria, called cronobacter, in the plant in February and the company found more tranches of the bacteria later that month.
According to the complaint, the same Sturgis factory had also produced two batches of formula in the summer of 2019 and 2020 on different production equipment that tested positive for the bacteria. Abbott staff 'have been unwilling or unable to implement sustainable corrective actions to ensure the safety and quality of food manufactured for infants,' leading to the need for legal action, the documents state.
In a release, Abbott said 'there is no conclusive evidence to link Abbott’s formulas to these infant illnesses.'"
Cronobacter was first proposed as a new genus in 2007 as a clarification of the taxonomic relationship of the biogroups found among strains of Enterobacter sakazakii....
Cronobacter (Cro.no.bac'ter) is from the Greek noun Cronos (Κρόνος), one of the Titans of mythology, who swallowed each of his children as soon as they were born, and the New Latin masculine noun bacter, a rod, resulting in the N.L. masc. n. Cronobacter, a rod that can cause illness in neonates.
"This is just another 'abstinence only' model that won't work. If babies are hungry, parents are going to feed them, guidelines be damned. The appropriate response then is for pediatric nutrition experts to publish safe recipes for emergency nutrition supplementation with explicit warnings to not deviate from the recipe with clear descriptions of the consequences that can result from doing so. If this is an emergency, treat it like one, with emergency stop-gap measures."
The most absurd thing in the article is an anecdote about a baby that had a heart attack after consuming only formula made from coconut water, sea moss, and chia seeds! Just tell people the best mixture that's based on canned unsweetened evaporated milk. That's what the Baby Boomers were fed, and nothing went haywire.
They're afraid people will do it wrong, but they're withholding advice on what would be best! They don't want responsibility, but that's just forcing people to use their own judgment about the best recipe. It’s not that hard. It's not mastering the art of French cooking.
I'm seeing this in The Washington Post: "Incensed by the 'senseless upcharge' at Starbucks for nondairy milk, 'Succession' and 'Babe' actor James Cromwell and other members of PETA, where he serves as an honorary director, staged a protest Tuesday at a Midtown Manhattan location of the coffee chain.... As he reads his statement, the masked baristas behind him generally appear to continue working as if there isn’t a 6-foot-7 Oscar-nominated actor attached to the counter — and later they continue to as he leads the other protesters in chanting, 'Save the planet, save the cows. Stop this vegan upcharge now.' Eventually, the police arrive and tell customers the Starbucks is closed — though they can still pick up any outstanding orders. Cromwell and the other glued protester detach their hands from the counter and leave."
I assume the vegan milks are more expensive than cow's milk, but Starbucks could average it out and adjust all the prices and thereby avoid giving people a money reason to choose cow's milk.
But I want to question whether it was "superglue."
"Some are driving several hours, only to find more empty shelves.
Online, private sellers are gouging prices, marketing cans for double or triple their normal price, and many large retailers are sold out altogether.
Since the shutdown of Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis facility, other manufacturers have struggled to quickly increase production because their operations are geared toward a steady level of consumer demand, according to Rudi Leuschner, an associate professor of supply-chain management at Rutgers Business School. 'Some industries are very good at ramping up and ramping down,' Dr. Leuschner said. 'You flip a switch and they can produce 10 times as much. Baby formula is not that type of a product.'
On top of the broader supply-chain issues that have emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, such as labor shortages and difficulty securing raw materials, the problem may be compounded by panic-buying, Dr. Leuschner said.
Abbott Nutrition said it was doing everything it could, including increasing production at its other U.S. plants and shipping products from its facility in Ireland.... Some parents are researching homemade infant formula recipes on the internet, although health experts have warned that such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers."
Is President Biden doing anything to help? I searched the page for "Biden" and all I came up with was:
Republicans have seized on the widening anxiety among parents to blame President Biden, arguing that the administration has not done enough to ramp up production. On Tuesday, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, asserting that federal officials have been too slow to respond.
Is that the President's argument, that Republicans are politicizing something that he's helpless about? I suspect that if Trump were President, the NYT would craft its language to blame Trump.
I'd like to hear more about the homemade formula recipes? I looked and saw things that I know my own mother followed in the 1950s, with the key ingredient of canned evaporated milk. The NYT article conveys a warning that "such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers." Can? What nutrients can be missing? What dangers are there? How about printing the best recipe for homemade formula?
Breastfeeding is discussed in the article, but the NYT puts a social-justice spin on it:
The shortage has been a challenge for families across the country, but it is especially palpable at grocery stores and food banks in San Antonio, a Latino-majority city in South Texas where many mothers lack health insurance and work at low-wage jobs that give them little opportunity to breastfeed.
You'd think that would activate Biden and the Democrats!
"To demonstrate the 'squeeze' of inflation and supply chain issues on everyday Americans, CNN's 'New Day' featured the Stotlers, a Texas couple looking after nine children – two of whom are their biological kids, while they've adopted six more and have one foster child.
Krista Stotler said she started seeing prices rising this summer and it was costing them an extra $100 a week on groceries.... 'A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money,' she said.... '12 gallons of milk a week may sound like a lot, but they've actually had to cut out their milk baths on alternate days,' snarked New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait.
The New York Times account on crossword puzzles also got into the act, tweeting – and deleting –, 'sorry, i can't do today's crossword. i'm too busy carrying my 12 gallons of milk home.'"
The mockery is based on the gut reaction that 12 gallons of milk a week is absurd. But with 11 people in the family, it's an average of two and a half cups — 20 ounces — of milk per person per day.
One of the mockers — a sports editor at the Orlando Sentinel — tweets "Having to buy 12 gallons a week means you have an issue with contraception… not the price of milk." But as you can see above, only 2 of the children are the natural offspring of the parents. The Stotlers have opened their home to 7 more children. And he's sneering at them!
"People look at me like I’m a lunatic. On planes, I’ll order a Virgin Mary — not because I’m a teetotaler, just because I’m in it for the tomato juice — followed by an orange juice, followed by a glass of milk.... Late in the afternoon, I ate 'sous vide egg bites' from Starbucks, which are these sad low-carb food-like egg disks that say 'I’m not eating bread, but in every other way I have given up.'... On this morning, I was scheduled to appear on Good Morning America to discuss my foreign-policy book, so it was up at 4 a.m. local time to make a Nespresso and Zoom with George Stephanopoulos, who looked perkier than I did, as is his wont. So did the phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered through leg day at the gym shortly thereafter. Time for another ham sandwich and green juice."
Before now, no one in the history of the world had ever said "phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered." I didn't even know you were allowed to call random strangers "hotties" anymore. But "phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered" — that's mad. And there it is with "sous vide egg bites," "sincerely a juice person," and George Stephanopoulos!
It's all so alien. I never get anywhere near George Stephanopoulos!
"I could taste the difference. It was slightly sweet and perhaps a little more watery than cow’s milk. Its sweetness reminded me almost of a milkshake....
As someone who wouldn’t drink a glass of milk on its own out of choice, I find it pleasantly tasty.
If you can get over the hurdle of it coming from a horse then it seems a perfectly natural thing to be drinking."
Said Joaquin Phoenix, accepting the Oscar last night for his performance as a clown-faced murderer. As you can see in that short quote, he's expressing effusive empathy for his fellow creatures, but I wouldn't see his movie, because I believe there is something soul-damaging — something erosive of empathy — in watching the graphic depiction of murder. I don't know why Phoenix considered "Joker" a good place to put his talent, then lectures us about our insufficient love for the living things of earth. And I'm writing that as I drink my coffee with milk.
Here's the full transcript, worth seeing in text, because the actorly performance of the text makes it harder to understand the rationality of it. It feels like an emotional cascade. You get caught up wondering how does he feel and does he really feel what he is expressing and what is he really saying and is he coherent and is coherence necessary?
I’m full of so much gratitude now. I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love...
This speech will also end with "love" — "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow" — and we just saw a montage of the nominated actors that ended with Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce) saying "Remember, truth may be vital, but without love, it is also unbearable." But the love in question at this point was:
... the love of film. And this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know where I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it’s given me, and many people in [this industry] is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.
Oh, no! It's going to be a political speech. The Oscars got off to a bad start with Brad Pitt — who won the best supporting actor Oscar — saying he only had 45 seconds to speak, "which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week" and maybe Quentin Tarantino could do a movie about the impeachment where "in the end the adults do the right thing." Tarantino has been doing movies based on historical events where the good guys win in the end, and the movie Pitt won his Oscar for is one of those movies, so his line was well-crafted, but I hated seeing one political side given precedence. The show was just starting, and he was telling half the country their perspective on the world is not valued. Ah, maybe not. His remarks are focused on the desire for witness testimony in the Senate, not the quest to be rid of the President. That puts him in the Susan Collins position, which isn't all that divisive. But it rubbed me the wrong way. Me — and I'm not a Trump voter — I'm just someone offended by the 3 years of disrespect shown to the people whose candidate won an election.
But Phoenix didn't go into partisan politics. In fact, he is trying to pull people together:
I’ve been thinking about some of the distressing issues that we’ve been facing collectively. I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.
That's the opposite of divisive.
I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.
We're called back to nature, away from the disconnection. If we put milk in our coffee, there is — somewhere out there — a cow that was used. Phoenix doesn't go from there into a PETA lecture. He gets back to human life:
We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.
That's almost right wing. It's at least inclusive of the right. The environment matters, but we can go for innovation and technology and find solutions. It's not about giving things up. Then comes another right-wing-friendly idea, personal responsibility:
I have been a scoundrel all my life, I’ve been selfish.
This reminds me of Trump, last Thursday, going on about his impeachment acquittal: "We went through hell, unfairly, did nothing wrong, did nothing wrong, I've done things wrong in my life, I will admit, not purposely, but I've done things wrong." Oh, Trump couldn't confess "I have been a scoundrel all my life," but he did confess "I've done things wrong in my life."
I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with, and I’m grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other. Not when we canceleach other out for our past mistakes...
A clear statement against the cancel culture.
... but when we help each other to grow. When we educate each other; when we guide each other to redemption. When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said: "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow."
The brother, River Phoenix, died in 1993, when he was 23. He wasn't rescued or educated or guided. Joaquin Phoenix was 19 when he lost his brother, and now he resurrects that brother's spirit in a simple call for love.
"Military contracts stipulated, though, that his family’s company, Sanna Dairy Engineers, would be penalized if the orders were underfilled. So, to be safe, the company produced extra packets. But that meant that it was routinely stuck with excess supply, since the Army had also insisted that none of the overstock be used to fill future orders. The surplus powder was savory, potentially valuable and perishable. With necessity being the mother’s milk of invention, Mr. Sanna had another idea. 'I believed that it would make an excellent ingredient for a hot cup of cocoa,' he recalled. He experimented over the stove in the family kitchen in Menomonie, Wis.... 'I consulted the family cookbook and determined the best proportions of creamer, sugar, cocoa and vanilla,' Mr. Sanna said... Which was how, in the late 1950s, the future Swiss Miss brand — and the whole instant hot cocoa mix market — were born."
From the NYT obituary for Charles Sanna, who died here in Madison, Wisconsin last month at the age of 101. The company was founded in Madison. The brand, Swiss Miss, was sold to Beatrice Foods half a century ago.
"... once distributed goats and donkeys for 'direct feeding.' (Kurlansky mentions an 1816 German book called 'The Goat as the Best and Most Agreeable Wet-Nurse.') Of course, the preferred wet nurse was usually human, but even then you had to be careful. Many believed a baby would take on the nature of whomever she was suckling. ('It was thought that a baby who suckled a goat would become very sure-footed.') 'A study in Berlin in 1838 compared the composition of milk from brunettes, blondes and redheads,' Kurlansky writes, 'and claimed to show definitively that redheads had the worst milk and brunettes the best.'"
Animals were used as substitute wet nurses for infants, particularly after the rise of syphilis increased the health risks of wet nursing. Goats and donkeys were widely used to feed abandoned babies in foundling hospitals in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Breastfeeding animals has also been practised, whether for health reasons – such as to toughen the nipples and improve the flow of milk – or for religious and cultural purposes. A wide variety of animals have been used for this purpose, including puppies, kittens, piglets and monkeys.
The suckling of animals by infants was a repeated theme in classical mythology. Most famously, twin brothers Romulus and Remus (the former founded Rome) were portrayed as having been raised by a she-wolf which suckled the infants, as depicted in the iconic image of the Capitoline Wolf. The Greek god Zeus was said to have been brought up by Amalthea, portrayed variously as a goat who suckled the god or as a nymph who brought him up on the milk of her goat. Similarly, Telephus, the son of the demigod Heracles, was suckled by a deer. Several famous ancient historical figures were claimed to have been suckled by animals; Cyrus I of Persia was said to have been suckled by a dog, while mares supposedly suckled Croesus, Xerxes and Lysimachus.
The Senate voted, 14-84, to defeat an amendment, offered by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, that would kill spending on a Food and Drug Administration study on what can be marketed as milk.
“Consumers are not deceived by these labels,” said Lee. “No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow. They buy it because it didn’t come from a cow.”...
Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin called the amendment “an attack on dairy farmers”...
“These labeling requirements play right into the hands of the large, cronyist food industries that want to place new, innovative products at a disadvantage,” said Lee in a statement last week.
That actually is an attack on dairy farmers — cronyist.
I wrote about the what-is-milk issue long ago. In 2005, in a post called "Sitting in a café":
Extremely mild irritation of the morning (heightened by my caffeination): a man orders a coffee drink made with soy milk. Unless you're allergic to milk or moralistically vegan, don't order soy milk! What are you doing? Soy is a bean -- or, really, a legume. Do you drink peanut milk? Lentil milk? There is no milk, not even juice in a soy bean. So what is this soy "milk"? It's some kind of water containing tiny bean particles. That's not aesthetically correct.
I had to update to say:
An emailer writes: "Hel-lo! Coffee! Cocoa! ... Water with bean particles makes my whole life better, dammit." Wait! Cocoa goes in milk. But still, I get the point. And what is milk anyway? Water with -- what? Why do I favor it solely because the water has been transformed inside an animal rather than suitably boiled and then mixed with a pure powder of human manufacture? Why do I want my liquids to be something that appear in their final form in the natural state? Every other liquid that emerges from the body of an animal is something we -- most of us -- hate to drink a glassful of. The wonder, then, is that we find cow's milk aesthetically pleasing.
"It was a way to reorient ourselves — we were not in service to anyone else, and we were worthy subjects of our own care. It wasn’t about achieving; it was about putting ourselves at the top of a list that we hadn’t even previously been on. Wellness was maybe a result of too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed. Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness. Yoga at work is wellness... The organic produce section of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Hemp. Oprah. CBD. 'Body work.' Reiki. So is: SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase 'mind-body,' meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked, clean anything. 'Living your best life.' 'Living your truth.' Crystals...."
From having it all... to having little symbols of nonexistent meaning... essentially having nothing... but nothing in a graspable, tangible form. And it even has a face. The face of Gwyneth Paltrow.
ADDED: The "mindfulness jar" really is a thing kids are making. I did a search to make this image. Click to enlarge and read:
"For perhaps forty minutes, the two groups mingled: the Mashco touching and probing, and the Nomole team acquiescing, mostly in good humor. The Mashco women approached Flores and, as she giggled, touched her breasts and stomach... When I asked Flores about the women, she put a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. 'They felt my breasts and stomach and said to me, 'You’re pregnant, aren’t you?' When I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ they said, ‘Tell us the truth! Don’t you have milk?’ When I said no, Knoygonro squirted her milk in my face, to say, ‘I do.’ ”
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