221–230 of 234 posts
As a child, I remember noticing that milk would taste different sometimes. My father explained that this was because the cows had been put out to pasture. I can't explain the difference, but it was quite noticeable. This was local milk from a few km away. It came in glass bottles, brought to our house by a milkman. I can still remember listening for his steps on the front porch, when I got old enough to be able to ru…
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It’s fascinating how much this can change if you find a good source for local stuff. Tomatoes go from uniformly-sized red food pellets to a huge variety of sizes and colors with a lot more flavor to them. I miss having a farmer’s market two blocks from my place with a heirloom tomato specialist showing up regularly.
As a European, food at the farmer’s market is usually cheaper in Europe because we cut the middleman and go straight to the producer. Somehow in the US, it’s more expensive instead because “artisanal”, “organic” and so on. As such, in the US, farmer markets always feel like a scam to me.
A lot of farms have stands set up on the road unattended, with a price list: you buy eggs, veggies, etc. on the honor system.
I can't stand "normal" milk from the US... the stuff you buy in the plastic cartons. It taste horrid. Milk from Germany? I love it. Milk from Darigold in the paper cartons? I love it. Milk from Darigold in the plastic? Tastes like garbage. Organic milk in a paper carton? Some is good, some taste like garbage. I didn't realize how different milk tastes until I spent some time in Germany. Prior to that I just thought I…
I was born in the early 50s and my folks were Californians from small-town Minnesota, so I'm used to the idea of very sweet dishes being considered okay at all meals. An example, my mom picked up from her Dutch-immigrant mother, a breakfast dish made from thoroughly dried out bread scraps, simmered in milk with cinnamon and liberal amounts of sugar. They called it (I don't know the Dutch spelling) stoot-uh-bray (phonetic) which I suspect meant something like stewed bread. Loved it and the many other fattening 30s concepts of what constituted a proper meal. A slightly less chocolatey version of homemade pudding over graham crackers was considered a perfectly acceptable lunch, Grandma called it cocoa-dope. And though no one pushed my mom to cook all our meals, it was clear she felt it a failure if any of us in our family of six found it necessary to prepare their own meal. Dad was a railroad conductor on 24-hr call. When he got called, she got up and prepared him a meal and/or lunch, regardless of time of day or night. He simply could not break her of this habit. But yeah, my folks and their folks definitely grew up on a diet resembling at least some of what the article referenced, and held similarly strong attitudes about the kitchen being the center of home culture. Sit down meals for the whole family were mandatory until such time as we left home. No TV or radio during meals, just conversation. Not such a bad deal, really -- three mandatory whole-family conversations a day -- two if school was in session. Occasionally I used to quickly walk the 600-yards home (from elementary school) for lunch. Some days I'd trade my homemade-bread sandwich for one of my schoolmates Wonder Bread sandwiches at the outdoor lunch tables of elementary school, both parties usually felt they got the better of the deal. Different times, different attitudes.
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I don't know about PolyCarobonate, but for LDPE and HDPE (and PET) that sounds incorrect. Certainly, chemists are worried about much smaller amounts of contamination (ppb) than humans and they would definitely know (and measure) how much plasticizer was leaching from their bottles. It appears to be almost none: https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/lab-pla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#BPA_substitutes I know there's wide variety in plastics. Be careful about cherry picking studies that show no harm, you can do it with lead if you really want. The situation isn't as dire, but I think the actual impact on animals is more up in the air than a brief survey of the literature suggests.
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In Germany the milk in plastic tastes fine, although the plastic is more like a ziplock bag with some rigidity to it so it stands up straight and pours well. I wasn't trying to say the plastic is the cause of the taste difference. I emphasized the plastic in the US because thats been my observation. However if you check the expiration dates in the US, milk in plastic tends to expire much more quickly than the milk in…
> However if you check the expiration dates in the US, milk in plastic tends to expire much more quickly than the milk in paper cartons. So there is more going on than it simply being different containers. Without further details, I'm guessing that "milk in paper cartons" has been UHT-treated, which means it could last even longer than the published expiry date. It'll still go bad in a few days or weeks once it has b…
Google cone-shaped milk cartons. Interesting bit of historical trivia.
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>> The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian. Adding to that, the US food culture always changes to wars, new immigrants, boycott, and government subsidies. Most countries aren't like that, and are significantly more conservative with dietary changes. With all these advantages in the US's favor, why is it that Europe i…
Fantastical means something strange, atypical or weird as if it came from fairy tale. It's not necessarily good or bad, so I wouldn't call it an advantage. I didn't realize it could so easily be confused for “fantastic” which has a nice connotation.
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The secret to the Darigold plastic/paper dichotomy may be in the expiration dates. At least for the 1% product, the half-gallon cardboard cartons tend to expire at least one month, sometimes two, later than the plastic jugs sitting next to them. Not hard to imagine how milk that's been sitting around in a plastic jug for an extra month or two will taste worse.
Milk with a multi-month shelf live can't be fresh, I believe. The fresh (mildly processed) milk I know turns bad within about a week, the "extended shelf life" stuff that was introduced a couple of years ago (in Germany) lasts for a few weeks. There is also "H Milch" which tastes very differend and can be stored at room temperature for several months.
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But why? Speaking as someone from a '3rd world country' [1], the traditional food preparation has been unchanged since the 1920s. The last great change in diet occurred when tomatoes and corn arrived from the America's to W. Africa, then later again when rice became a staple. The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian.…
> [1] We do not love that phrasing. The Cold War is over. Just say which continent you mean specifically. I wonder how many people are thinking of a particular place when they say 'third world country.' In my experience they're just using it as a slightly less offensive way to mean 'shithole'. Which of course we also see when Europeans want to talk shit about America, so they call it a third world country.
"3rd world country with a Gucci belt" is a rather popular one.
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ah ok a bit like the french used to do prunes wrapped in bacon. do the spanish grow dates? never seen a spanish date
Not in significant quantities, looks like, but Morocco and Algeria, which are basically next door, are significant producers.
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>> The US has a fantastical food culture because it's a large country that can natively produce almost every crop, and was historically agrarian. Adding to that, the US food culture always changes to wars, new immigrants, boycott, and government subsidies. Most countries aren't like that, and are significantly more conservative with dietary changes. With all these advantages in the US's favor, why is it that Europe i…
>With all these advantages in the US's favor, why is it that Europe is held as a standard of food done right? Because filter bubbles and liking Europe[1] is very fashionable in filter bubbles that are demographically similar to HN and most of HN has a social circle full of similar demographics that they get their food opinions from. There are plenty of people who hold middle America in high culinary regard. The rest…
I don't think that's the case. Demographics for cooking and pop nutritionist shows are not comparable to the demographics of HN. The audience of the former is dominated by married, middle-aged women in metro-suburban areas across the United States while the audience of the latter is dominated by unmarried, late-20s, bicoastal, urban-dwelling men. Outside of family relations or significant others, I see little overlap between the two at the individual or social level.
> There are plenty of people who hold middle America in high culinary regard. The rest of the things those people tend to have to say are generally not welcome around here so those people don't hang out here and don't hang out with the kind of people who hang out here so there's little discussion going on between these groups of people.
My complaint is not about a lack of high regard, but lack of objective assessment. Sure, association or lack thereof might have something to do with a lack of commentary on American diets. But it has nothing to do with unqualified undermining of those diets. Such an opinion must have first come out of someone's mouth before becoming an oft-repeated factoid.
If you know of any, what middle American diets are associated with height, longevity, increased musculature, or better overall health and by what standard is this proven?