Hi! SailorL here, pondering Sonner's latest article where he questioned cultural bacteria. I'm the sort of person who reads the back of everything whether it's yogurt or a peanut butter jar. It's common knowledge that milk is a liquid, but how is milk made into cheese?
It's a good question, but one with a rather disgusting answer. With a quick look back in history, you will find that cheese has been used as a food product for more than 4,000 years! It's an important part of the "Western Hemisphere" daily diet and is made mostly of milk. Cheese can amazingly enough be made from the milk of camel, buffalo, reindeer, goat, or, of course, cow. To make cheese, you heat the milk and other ingredients to pasteurization temperatures. This makes the "Kraft Singles" or the cheese you get a "McDonalds" burger.
So what is this bacterial culture? You can find it yogurt, cottage cheese, sour cream, cream cheese and many other products containing milk. In many cases, bacteria is a bad thing, almost deadly. Gangrene, strep throat and black death (also known as the bubonic plague) are all different types of bad bacteria, while good ones are in a lot of our foods.
Whyvillians could spend months designing a better way to make processed cheese with out the disgusting microbes, but it would be a waste of time. It's something you've been eating since you could walk, or even before... pablam or the mushy baby milk is pasteurized, like cheese.
Instead of griping about milk ingredients, read the back of a juice bottle. The first ingredients listed are used the most, while the ones near the end are used the least. In some, the first three ingredients are: water, sugar, and gluctose fructose. Even worse than these sugar-filled juices, don't be shy about questioning what's in the soda you drink with lunch everyday. I personally don't drink soda or anything carbonated because I dislike the bubbles, but at least 1/2 of the ingredients must be chemicals unhealthy to the degree that you couldn't consume a full tablespoon of one without getting very sick.
What about some of the frozen foods, prefrozen pasta and pizza? How can we be 100% sure that everything is cooked all the way through before we throw it in the microwave for a minute? In all truth, you can't, but we've learned to trust these companies such as McCain(tm), Pilsbury(tm), and Kellogg's(tm) because we haven't been hurt directly through any of their food products.
One last point in my never-ending article is about the food dyes that go into almost any food. Is tomato sauce really that red, or grape juice that purple? In a perfect world, we'd all be living off water and homegrown foods with no chemicals put in by greedy humans who want everything bigger and better.
Some things to keep you thinking;
SailorL
