It is known

[Taomeow]

The concept of "Expiration date" was invented by Al Capone.  Here's how it came to be:

 

one sunny day the famous gangster decided to monopolize the dairy market in Chicago, which up to that time was not regulated in any way.   He started out by legally purchasing a large dairy plant, and then using his people in the City Council to pass the law that would require a stamp of "Expiration date" on all dairy products.   It would have to be a special factory stamp which only his facility possessed.  This way farmers were forced to sell their milk only to his plant, at prices that were essentially robbing them.  

 

The same scheme was later appreciated and implemented by many other business owners, and the requirement of an "Expiration date" stamp eventually became universal law.  (That's why you find it on, e.g., a bag of salt,  whose expiration date is in reality coming up in a few hundred million years, if ever.  Also on pharmaceutical pills, 95% of which, containing no organic matter, in proper storage can last about as long.)   

Edited September 20, 2020 by Taomeow

[silent thunder]

So it was Copone who led directly to the monopoly of corporations that currently dominate the dair industry.  Wow.  His model sure took off among those who saw its potential...

 

My first job out of college was raising money to lobby in DC against the Corporate Dairy machine that was systematically squeezing out the independent and non-bovine hormone using farmers. 

 

If you follow the graphed line of the cost of milk to the 70's, one can readily see when Corporations gained 'functional control' of the market which was then reflected in the subsequent market pricing.

 

I remember when Southern Californians were barking mad over $4 a gallon for gas.

 

But none of them flinched at paying 6$ a gallon for milk.  milk.

 

Gas you need to survey, find oil, build a rig, pump, ship, refine, ship again... 4$ a gallon.

Milk... squeeze cow, pasteurize (a different horror story altogether), package, ship again... 6 bucks please. 

 

And that's nothing compared to the ~ 35$ a gallon for Venti Mocha-fukkaccino's @ (insert name of corporate coffee chain here)...

 

Well... At least i'm not bitter about it.

[Taomeow]

23 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

So it was Copone who led directly to the monopoly of corporations that currently dominate the dair industry.  Wow.  His model sure took off among those who saw its potential...

 

My first job out of college was raising money to lobby in DC against the Corporate Dairy machine that was systematically squeezing out the independent and non-bovine hormone using farmers. 

 

If you follow the graphed line of the cost of milk to the 70's, one can readily see when Corporations gained 'functional control' of the market which was then reflected in the subsequent market pricing.

 

I remember when Southern Californians were barking mad over $4 a gallon for gas.

 

But none of them flinched at paying 6$ a gallon for milk.  milk.

 

Gas you need to survey, find oil, build a rig, pump, ship, refine, ship again... 4$ a gallon.

Milk... squeeze cow, pasteurize (a different horror story altogether), package, ship again... 6 bucks please. 

 

And that's nothing compared to the ~ 35$ a gallon for Venti Mocha-fukkaccino's @ (insert name of corporate coffee chain here)...

 

Well... At least i'm not bitter about it.

 

Yeah, I can tell. 

 

Well I am.  I can't deal with the resulting product.  It doesn't sour, it rots.  It doesn't get metabolized, it bloats.  And it tastes like nothing and is insultingly watery.  In my previous incarnation, just like in this one, I didn't have much of a sweet tooth but I'm a natural born saturated fat fiend (hence a lifetime of no weight issues), so I used to buy a half liter bottle (glass of course) of 35% cream almost every day (52 copecks), and it was hours old when sold and you could tell by the smell, without looking at the production date, that it was not 24 hours yet, less than that.  The sales person would tell me if it was two days old ("yesterday's cream...  still want it?"), so I would know to consume it the same day.  If it was three days old, I would make cottage cheese with it.  If it was four days old...  well, that didn't exist.  Supply was slightly lagging behind demand.  Obviously this model couldn't compete with Al Capone's.  And the one that went before it couldn't compete with this one.  And the one that went before that one...  well, we call it progress.  

[silent thunder]

Real Cream!  I remember scraping it off the top of the urn and putting it directly in a bowl with blue, black and strawberries.

 

My Father's youngest Sister owned a Dairy Farm in Iowa.  She was forced out after putting up a long resistance effort.

 

On the market there is no real milk any longer ^{(unless you have friends)} .  The market stuff is revolting... white pus water.

 

[Taomeow]

1 minute ago, silent thunder said:

 

On the market there is no real milk any longer ^{(unless you have friends)} . 

 

No dairy friends, alas.   (Where's the weeping emoticon when you need it?)  I buy powdered goat milk from the Netherlands...  the only kind I use when the recipe calls for milk.    

[silent thunder]

It's revealed just how deep the scam goes in the power structure when you actually try to organize something like a dairy co-op (like we did back in the 90's) where unneutered raw milk could be sold.  So. Many. Systemic Agressions and Intimidation. Back then at least.

 

Seems raw may be gaining traction in some circles. https://www.realmilk.com/real-milk-finder/california/#ca

 

edit to add:  I'm intrigued by the powdered goat milk idea.  That never occured to me, thank you.

Edited September 20, 2020 by silent thunder

[Nungali]

I remember when we had three cows .  Also we have a small tofu plant that was in full operation back then.  One of the pieces of equipment was a large steel cauldron with a gas burner under it .  Every so often I would get some fresh creamy cows milk, straight from the milking and put it in the cauldron to make a massive batch of  burfi .    Burfi made from fresh cows mmmmmmmmmilk

 

Saffron Burfi

 

[old3bob]

4 hours ago, silent thunder said:

Real Cream!  I remember scraping it off the top of the urn and putting it directly in a bowl with blue, black and strawberries.

 

My Father's youngest Sister owned a Dairy Farm in Iowa.  She was forced out after putting up a long resistance effort.

 

On the market there is no real milk any longer ^{(unless you have friends)} .  The market stuff is revolting... white pus water.

 

 

dam,, my root beer floats made with Breyers ice cream will never be the same 

[Taomeow]

Bugging out since the 17th century.  

 

The Old Believers' settlement Erzhey on the Kaa-Khem River, Tuva Republic, southern Siberia

 

 

 

[dwai]

I remember even as recent as the 1980s, when the local "dairy" would visit our homes in a mid-tier city in southern India -- then the operator would proceed to milk the "dairy" right in front of our own eyes and fill our jar of A2 milk. This was the way, every morning at 7 AM. Until one day they just stopped coming...people started buying packaged milk from the local dairy store which mass-produced the milk in factories.

There are still some people who retain the old ways, even in the heart of the indian cities...but they are becoming an ever-diminishing rarity.

 

 

[Taomeow]

1 hour ago, dwai said:

I remember even as recent as the 1980s, when the local "dairy" would visit our homes in a mid-tier city in southern India -- then the operator would proceed to milk the "dairy" right in front of our own eyes and fill our jar of A2 milk. This was the way, every morning at 7 AM. Until one day they just stopped coming...people started buying packaged milk from the local dairy store which mass-produced the milk in factories.

There are still some people who retain the old ways, even in the heart of the indian cities...but they are becoming an ever-diminishing rarity.

 

 

 

Our home delivery worked alongside stores up to the end of the 1980s, though the delivery person didn't milk the cow right in front of the customers but it was the next best thing -- fresh raw milk.  It was delivered once or twice a week, in large (40 liter) metal jugs from which it was scooped into individual small ones -- mine looked like this: 

The arrival was announced by a piercing, unbelievably loud without any aid from technology, but melodious, sing-song yelling -- "milk!  milk!"  I think the delivery woman was specifically selected for this opeartic voice as the main qualification, LOL.  I can still hear that call so clearly.  It's a three-syllable word in Russian, moloko (which non-speakers might know from The Clockwork Orange) and she always made this abrupt, ear-splitting high-pitched emphasis on the second one, you could never miss it even if you had music on at full blast, or the TV, or sledgehammers working nearby.  

 

 

Edited September 21, 2020 by Taomeow

[old3bob]

4 hours ago, Taomeow said:

Bugging out since the 17th century.  

 

The Old Believers' settlement Erzhey on the Kaa-Khem River, Tuva Republic, southern Siberia

 

 

 

 

doesn't look like it has been used very much or in awhile...winters must be tough to say the least.

[Taomeow]

18 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

doesn't look like it has been used very much or in awhile...winters must be tough to say the least.

 

Judging by the smoke over the roof, it's being used as we speak -- there's got to be a chimney on the opposite slope of that roof.

 

Winters are tough, and summers have their challenges (assorted biting insects), but rewards are many too, for those who are tough enough to match the environment.  People I know in Siberia are in the foraging, preserving and canning season right now.  There's delicious endemic berries of many varieties which, short of raising the dead, can do almost anything else for one's health, hundreds of most powerful medicinal plants, fish so scrumptious and so tender that it doesn't get shipped anywhere else, and a kind of survival competence in the atmosphere (from skills to attitudes) that is hard to find in milder environments.  

 

And then there's Siberian cats. 

 

 

 

 

[SirPalomides]

Of course everyone remembers the greatest Russian political scandal of the 00's, when Gorbachev's Siberian cat went into Medvedev's yard and beat up his Siberian cat Dorofei.

[SirPalomides]

Werner Herzog did a documentary about Siberian fur trappers, called Happy People. I'd say that the winters looked tough but what scared me more were the clouds of mosquitoes attacking these people and their dogs in the summer.

Edited September 21, 2020 by SirPalomides

[old3bob]

42 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

Judging by the smoke over the roof, it's being used as we speak -- there's got to be a chimney on the opposite slope of that roof.

 

Winters are tough, and summers have their challenges (assorted biting insects), but rewards are many too, for those who are tough enough to match the environment.  People I know in Siberia are in the foraging, preserving and canning season right now.  There's delicious endemic berries of many varieties which, short of raising the dead, can do almost anything else for one's health, hundreds of most powerful medicinal plants, fish so scrumptious and so tender that it doesn't get shipped anywhere else, and a kind of survival competence in the atmosphere (from skills to attitudes) that is hard to find in milder environments.  

 

And then there's Siberian cats. 

 

 

 

 

 

I like the grayish white cat in the 3rd picture, 2nd from the left for talking with, the others might take a bit longer although one would have to be there to know...

 

I also saw the  smoke but not much in the way of a trodden foot path around the house or into shed, and it doesn't look like there is much freshly split wood which I would assume is main fuel for cooking and heat if needed for that time of year?

[Nungali]

1 hour ago, old3bob said:

 

doesn't look like it has been used very much or in awhile...winters must be tough to say the least.

 

The people tougher though .  I saw a doco on Sibera , in some small mostly abandoned village . Mostly old people left. An old lady was being interviewed outside her home, they where talking about the season when some freezing dreaded wind  was approaching called ' The ...... '    (something , cant remember  )   and she goes   "  The ..... comes , I am not afraid , nearly everyone else has run away,  I have done it over 50 times ! It cant beat me ,"  Then as they are walking along they pass her large veggie garden, it has a frame over it and is encased in plastic and built up on a platform of stones, she stops, opens a door in the bottom of the stones and throws some firewood in to the fire under there   !   And this is summer  time !   Needing a fire to be able to grow veggies !  And she lived alone . 

 

[Nungali]

39 minutes ago, SirPalomides said:

Werner Herzog did a documentary about Siberian fur trappers, called Happy People. I'd say that the winters looked tough but what scared me more were the clouds of mosquitoes attacking these people and their dogs in the summer.

 

They are  increasing in number ;

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/09/150915-Arctic-mosquito-warming-caribou-Greenland-climate-CO2/

[Taomeow]

26 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

I like the grayish white cat in the 3rd picture, 2nd from the left for talking with, the others might take a bit longer although one would have to be there to know...

 

Siberian cats are friendly.  They look serious but they are playful and usually get along with everybody.  Very adventurous and quite muscular and agile under all that fluff.  Extremely efficient mousers too.

 

41 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

 

I also saw the  smoke but not much in the way of a trodden foot path around the house or into shed, and it doesn't look like there is much freshly split wood which I would assume is main fuel for cooking and heat if needed for that time of year?

 

It's the back of the house, the path must be in the front.  The open doorless premises on the left might be the firewood storage shed -- saraj.  "Old believers" were the 17th century religious dissidents who resisted church reformation, were persecuted and were forced to flee.  Many chose to die rather than submit.  The subject matter of the reform was whether one ought to cross oneself with two fingers or three.  There were other disagreements about the "new" vs. "old" ritual, but that's the gist of it.  They believed that three fingers harbor the devil.

[SirPalomides]

In the 17th century some of the Russian church authorities decided that the Russian church practices, and the service books, were too different from the contemporary Greek practice, so they launched a campaign to revise everything to match what the Greeks were doing at the time. That includes the three finger cross. This led to a huge revolt among Russian Christians who believed Russia was the “Third Rome”, the last bastion against heresy, and that even slight changes in ritual signified a spiritual change. Of course it turns out that it was the Greeks who had changed over time and the Russian church had preserved some ancient Byzantine usages. Anyway the schism is a fascinating topic with some very colorful figures.  

[Nungali]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

 

Siberian cats are friendly.  They look serious but they are playful and usually get along with everybody.  Very adventurous and quite muscular and agile under all that fluff.  Extremely efficient mousers too.

 

 

It's the back of the house, the path must be in the front.  The open doorless premises on the left might be the firewood storage shed -- saraj.  "Old believers" were the 17th century religious dissidents who resisted church reformation, were persecuted and were forced to flee.  Many chose to die rather than submit.  The subject matter of the reform was whether one ought to cross oneself with two fingers or three.  There were other disagreements about the "new" vs. "old" ritual, but that's the gist of it.  They believed that three fingers harbor the devil.

 

What a stupid disagreement to kill and persecute over  !  

 

Ya know what I got to say to that !

 

I would 'bless ' them all  with one finger ! 

[Taomeow]

48 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

What a stupid disagreement to kill and persecute over  !  

 

Ya know what I got to say to that !

 

I would 'bless ' them all  with one finger ! 

 

SirP added a bit more of the historical details (which I know well enough...  the leader of the reformation, Protopope Avvacum, even visited me in a dream in my rebellious youth and instructed me, then a passionate and reckless dissident, in the art of curbing my enthusiasm for truth toward avoiding pointless martyrdom.)  But if we don't focus on the details and take a google earth-like view of the whole, I believe the whole of our history, past, present, and in all likelihood future, is a lot like that --

 

the model of social strife is to fight each other to the bitter end over a finger's worth of differences while the organizers of the strife quietly steal a planet's worth of what really matters to all sides.  Jonathan Swift had a similar model in mind when he described the Big-Endians' rebellion against the Little-Endians over which end of the boiled egg is the correct one to break.

[silent thunder]

3 hours ago, Taomeow said:

Siberian cats are friendly.  They look serious but they are playful and usually get along with everybody.  Very adventurous and quite muscular and agile under all that fluff.  Extremely efficient mousers too.

I hold that Siberians and Norwegian Forest Cats are closely related...  There was a reason the vikings adopted them as travel cats and mousers in the frozen tundra.  They are remarkably balanced and grounded as a breed characteristic.

 

We just trimmed the foot hair on our NFC yesterday... the hair that grows from between her toe beans was over 2 inches long!  We let it go too long and the poor gal looked like she was walking on ice trying to navigate our stone kitchen floors.

 

Weegies as their affectionately called here, while majestic and rather aloof in appearance, are downright unflappable in changing circumstances (like voyages on Viking Longships to uncharted lands) and are incredibly warm and sensitive (when you prove you're not a tool).  They accomodate myriad changing conditions, other animals and children remarkably well.

 

I've had cats my whole life, but our Weegie has a very subtle sense of humor I've not encountered in a cat... it took me a bit to pick up on it... now she cracks me up routinely.  She's also one of the most observant and by far the most non-aggressive feline I've ever known... so long as you're not a mouse, or cricket, or squirrel, etc...

Edited September 22, 2020 by silent thunder

[Taomeow]

1 hour ago, silent thunder said:

I hold that Siberians and Norwegian Forest Cats are closely related...  There was a reason the vikings adopted them as travel cats and mousers in the frozen tundra.  They are remarkably balanced and grounded as a breed characteristic.

 

We just trimmed the foot hair on our NFC yesterday... the hair that grows from between her toe beans was over 2 inches long!  We let it go too long and the poor gal looked like she was walking on ice trying to navigate our stone kitchen floors.

 

Weegies as their affectionately called here, while majestic and rather aloof in appearance, are downright unflappable in changing circumstances (like voyages on Viking Longships to uncharted lands) and are incredibly warm and sensitive (when you prove you're not a tool).  They accomodate myriad changing conditions, other animals and children remarkably well.

 

I've had cats my whole life, but our Weegie has a very subtle sense of humor I've not encountered in a cat... it took me a bit to pick up on it... now she cracks me up routinely.  She's also one of the most observant and by far the most non-aggressive feline I've ever known... so long as you're not a mouse, or cricket, or squirrel, etc...

 

It's priceless to live with a cat who has a funny bone!  I also used to have a cat with a great sense of humor.  Not Siberian or Norwegian, just an extraordinary calico of five colors.  Her humor was not slapstick comedy, it was refined...  E.g., one thing she did was walk in a full circle around the perimeter of the living-room and head for the kitchen, but on the way she had to walk past a visiting friend who liked to mess with her.  So as soon as she was within his range he'd grab her, turn her in the opposite direction of where she was going, and set her back down on the floor.   Instead of just turing around,  Lola then kept walking in that opposite direction, making a full circle around the room once more and approaching that guy exactly like the first time, as though deep in her cat thoughts and paying no attention to him.  He'd grab her and turn her around again.  She would make a full circle again, still insisting on her original route without showing the slightest frustration or impatience.  Neither one would give up for, like, an hour, the guy turning the cat, the cat walking the full circle and still offering no resistance but not changing her Way.  He would be the first one to admit defeat and let her pass. 

 

She did many things that were subtly hilarious, and I believe she understood not just comedy but even tragic comedy, a very complex genre to master even for most humans. 

[Nungali]

Love it !

 

Now take a dog . They walks around the room the same way .   You pick them up, turn them around, put them down and they