I love kefir. my kefir grains, kombucha scoby, and vinegar mother, are all thriving in my kitchen, i haven’t quite gotten around to naming them though. 
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Kombucha Scoby and Vinegar Mother sound like Neil Gaiman characters.
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I thought the Flint water situation resulted from the city trying to save money not some company. Not sure how that applies to what you are saying.
Could have been. They gave them to me at the clinic, just handed me the bottle and told me to take a dropper full every day or something.
They also gave me sulfur as an antibiotic, which was a little weird to me but it works.
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I have been banned from bringing the stuff to my office.
They sell an instant mix for it (just add veggies and 24 hours) but it is not even close to the same. More or less just salt and chili pepper with a very small content of the rotting seafood which gives kimchee its fun.
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Actually, what’s coming out now is that the switch the state forced the city to make was more expensive than the status quo - it was part of a move to weaken the Detroit public water company as a step towards forced privatization.
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Although I can’t stand the stuff without some kind of spicy condiment, natto.
Fermented soybeans!
Yes it is as bad as it looks, but it is a typical breakfast food in Japan.
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I’ve given natto three or four tries, and it still tastes like baby poo unless heavily condimented. One of those times was a pack of frozen natto; the engrish instructions suggested adding a “small couch of salt”, and on tasting it I decided that’s about how much salt it needs.
The last time I tried it was in Kyoto, where I got a cheap natto roll from the 7-11 and was eating it on the street to see if it’d be any better (it wasn’t). A Japanese grandmother gasped when she saw me with it and said “oh! no! don’t eat that! so bad!”
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FWIW, it is really easy to do, and a great way to handle vegetables that are on their last legs. Just brine in salt water overnight, add a 1/4 teaspoon of that crazy red pepper, stir and jar. Et voila!
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There is actually an easy all-purpose solution to this and many other food, medicine, and supplement problems.
Do away with all “claims” completely. No marketing allowed.
Just do purity checks like there are for lab reagents so that customers know exactly what they are buying. Then it is their responsibility to do their homework to buy and use what they need.
It doesn’t.
But since you brought it up, I’m having a hard time telling the difference between .gov & .com these days - and in some cases where one begins and the other ends is a bit beyond blurry.
Both are comprised of people whom never seem to be responsible when things go wrong* (responsible in the “do not pass go” sense of the word) and people oscillate between .gov & .com’s (specifically those regulating .com activities) with ever increasing frequency.
- not exclusively- but if you have enough money & power, you can insulate yourself quite nicely in either.
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The owner of our favorite little Korean place sold it to new owners – our favorite thing was her mother’s KimChee. We haven’t been back to see if the new owners have anything that is as good.
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The trick to that stuff is it has to be eaten with rice in order to mitigate the “oozing, can’t get off your chopsticks” quality of it. My wife always buys the stuff before she tries dieting. It sits in our fridge for weeks. Without heavy doses of wasabi or hot sauce, I won’t go near it.
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I rather suspect they gave you sulfa , not sulfur . Big difference.
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That does sound like an effective way to reduce caloric intake.
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But Jamie Lee Curtis said yes, and that’s good enough for me.
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It’s not that bad. I grew up around a lot of natto-eaters and I find that the smell bothers me a lot more than the taste or texture, or slimy goo- nature of the stuff. Take it to another level and try adding some Sriracha to the natto over hot steamy rice.
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Except for the quoted bit that says that most of them don’t contain the microbes stated on the label?
Ah yes, those more challenging ferments: natto and limburger cheese and “stinky tofu” and “1,000 year old eggs” (these last two are Chinese and part of my childhood list of holiday or special day delicacies). Makes that GT’s kombucha in larger grocery stores look positively staid and perhaps even normal.
I love nattomaki and other weird stuff (no thanks on that limburger) and I have had nothing but benefits from eating fermented foods. My DH thinks that my lacto-fermented pickles are merely cucumbers soaked in eeeevvvvvulllll.
I like how ferments taste.
Whenever possible, let your food be your medicine. It’s never a bad thing to go for fresh, nutrient-dense, live/living foods (if you’re an omnivore, follow your best judgement here). Supplements of all kinds in the USA are not usually standardized potencies. It’s usually the more expensive brands and therapeutic grades of probiotics reliably list third-party certification of contents, assays, etc. Some dishonest manufacturers sell crap. News? Hardly. Herbal supplements sometimes don’t have what their bottle labels claim is in them either. For that matter, anyone lately check the total ingredients list for McDonald’s “All-BeefTM” patties lately?
I don’t mind @doctorow going on about what he thinks is true. The proof’s in the pudding. Plenty of us on this bbs are already prone to self-experimentation. We’ll make our own decisions, based on our own ultra-hyperlocal data. Supplementing? Don’t feel better? Don’t include probiotics in your intake–unless you enjoy their taste.
Were it not for the live, fizzy, pungent probiotics in my life, my central Texas juniper pollen allergies would be far more intense, and my digestion would be not so thorough.
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My family requires me to open my kimchi outdoors! Also some of my pickles. I don’t mind standing under the eaves on the front porch and eating my short grain hot rice and cool kimchi. It’s kind of a nice quiet delicious moment, usually.
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