Why I eat old cheese (2020)(cheeseprofessor.com) |
Why I eat old cheese (2020)(cheeseprofessor.com) |
Adding a bit of sodium hexametaphosphate is good if you want to make cheese slices or blocks of cheese. Increases the firmness of the final product a bit and slices easier.
The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.
I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.
Consider how highly engineered and processed many modern foods are, to maximize their "addictiveness". Assume that the not-so-benevolent geniuses behind that trend have also put some real work into encouraging wasteful over-purchasing of their food products.
:-D
What is remarkable with Roquefort is the penicilium roquforti and the fact that it is not that dry. Many dry cheese can be aged and should be to develop their aromas (Comté, parmiggiano...etc).
One more parameter that I find often overlooked is temperature : aromas and texture are much better at room more than fridge temperature. If you can get your cheese out of the fridge 30min-1h before consuming, you will enjoy it much more. Edit: typo
It did not even depend on the cheese, all of them does not taste good to me when warm.
Hard cheeses are fine if you just scrap one or two millimetres in the worst cases. Soft cheeses are supposed to have a thriving mould population from the beginning, which prevents a lot of nasty things to develop. The riskiest are cheeses you are supposed to eat very young like cottage cheese. These can be aged with the right culture, but it’s unlikely to happen by chance and they get foul very quickly otherwise.
You should be more upset that a simple ER visit could cost you any money at all, to be honest.
It isn't like I'm going to start playing Food Poisoning Roulette any time soon. But if I happen upon some bad food, there is a limit to the expenses occurred.
I am so glad I don't live in US.
Just in case was either war or supply chain issue or crops issue. Just about only people who did not had that could not afford it.
Buying just right amount of food for next two days is modern behavior.
In the quite-recent past, it was common routine to buy (or harvest) huge (by current well-to-do standards) quantities food "in season", and stockpile it for consumption months later. Historically, cheese exists because it's a way to store the nutritional value of milk - when you don't have access to pasteurization, refrigeration, and modern "steady-ish milk production 365-days-per-year" dairy operations.
And similarly (quite-recent past, before the green revolution and massive farm subsidies), far more of most people's income went toward buying food. So they managed their inventories of stored food pretty carefully - vs. modern "meh, whatever, I'll just buy more" attitudes.
We waste our time on addictive social networks which are not exactly nourishing. We may be doing the same with our money on highly processed food which does not nourish us well either.
When it comes to food, you want margin for error. You want your home, your store, your agriculture system, etc to have more food than is necessary. Because if something goes wrong, you have a bit of slack before everyone starves.
If your system produces the “perfect” amount of food with no waste, it means the very first crop failure, trucking disruption, etc. puts you into a dire situation.
I’d rather throw out a thing of moldy cheese once in a while.
And overall, I'm OK with this. I'd rather help folks when they need it even if they didn't make perfect choices than leave folks suffering - and make sure their kids aren't growing up watching their parent physically suffer because the parent messed up when they was younger.
If they determine the benefit of eating something outweighs the risks, they might do it. Reducing the financial part of the equation reduces potential risk. It’s as simple as that.
There are now more than 8 billion people on this planet. And many (though not as many as you might think) billions before that.
Not a single one of them has ever decided, "Fuck it, this might give me 2 days of violent vomiting and involuntarily shitting liquid, but our HEALTH CARE system will cover so WHOO HOO YOLO BABY!!!"
That said, many cheeses that keep well just end up tasting like amonia if you allow them to ripen too long. As a cat owner, that's just a no-go for me.
This was a meme in the past causing a lot of rice you be disposed of; is that disposal justified?
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...
Every few years you get a story like "man dies after eating rice stored on the counter for two weeks." But most people aren't doing that. But some people, I guess, don't understand that cooked rice is a food that requires refrigeration.
I accepted some degree of health hazard for a pleasant meal. Let’s say someone managed to convinced me I was also at risk of losing a great deal of money in the process. I might have declined the vendor’s offer then…
Now imagine someone being particularly sloppy about cleaning up and refrigerating leftovers and reheating the rice multiple times (or at least removing it from the fridge multiple times) over the course of a week. Fatalities are extremely rare but food poisoning doesn't have to be lethal.
My point was just that dodgy cheese is less risky because you have to go out of your way to ignore various signs that would normally flag food as unsafe to eat and the cheese might still be fine whereas cooked rice (and pasta) may not seem particularly unsafe after having been left unrefrigerated long enough to cause health issues.
Basically a lot of people seem to be under the impression that most cooked food is relatively safe to leave unrefrigerated for extended periods of time as long as it doesn't grow mold or start to smell rotten. Usually meat and dairy are the only obvious exceptions but rice and dry pasta are considered "non-perishable" so it's not clear that they're also risky once cooked because they seemingly just go back to drying out. Also there are occasional influencers on social media (often the same kind advocating for quackery like "black salve" - don't google that, it's basically a caustic "skin salve" sold as a cancer cure - and other unsound medical/health advice) telling people not to refrigerate most of their food, often (incorrectly) appealing to history.
We had a toilet paper shortage during Covid, you really can’t imagine a food shortage?
If the main concern is food waste - as it probably was in the article that we are discussing - disaster planning is not the problem. Impulsive buying of attractive stuff that you cannot finish later is.
We had a run on food as well. What happened is that we prioritised food delivery, with in some instances the support of the army IIRC. Something we understandable were not willing to do for toilet paper.
There is a simple reason for that: you cannot have a functioning country if there is a famine and governments will do everything they can to keep a grip on their country.
If it comes to this, having a well stocked pantry becomes the least of your worries as you now have to defend it against your starving neighbours. They won’t be deterred by tough guy smugness.
It’s a good idea to have stocks because it helps mitigating short-term price spikes or unforeseen circumstances such as an accident. Not having stocks won’t cause anyone to starve.
Fatter people have bigger reserves to lean on, but leaner people can hunt the fatties down and, uh, consume their fat in a certain non-consensual way.
FWIW, kids are great but I have no interest in having any - I'll leave this world to you fine folks to kill each other over.
At the same time there were plenty of other supplies uninterrupted and au no point was someone alarming about food shortages.