Financial industry lobbyists have deeper pockets and better connections?
I’m sure that many of the current Repugnant candidates would like to deregulate the food industry (and all other industries) to match the financial sector.
2 Likes
You colud als search the “Grana Padano” if you like a good italian cheese like the Parmigiano Reggiano. It’s normally a bit less “dry” tha the Parmigiano Reggiano http://www.granapadano.it/?l=en
Another very similar Italian cheese is Trentingrana
If you could find them in the USA, probabily are the real Mccoy.
3 Likes
When I was a kid and my grandfather was a dockworker, occasionally a big section of a cheese wheel would show up in our fridge. It was only some years later as an adult that I realized what the connection was.
Personally, I only buy parm if I can see the stamp on the rind.
3 Likes
I’ll think it’s light when Jamie Dimon gets his due.
1 Like
I know the difference. Propylene Glycol is also used as a laxative for babies and small children, because of it’s low toxicity.
Yeah, no. Cellulose isn’t wood pulp. Cellulose is a long chain of sugar molecules. It’s a major component of the cell wall of any plant, including any fruit, vegetable, herb, or root you have ever eaten. Cellulose is one of a number of sugar-chain compounds that make up “dietary fiber”, and that means your RDA includes something like 10 to 15 g of cellulose every day. Sure, you can get cellulose from wood, but wood isn’t just cellulose, or even mostly cellulose, and cellulose from wood is no more or less healthy for you than cellulose from blueberries or broccoli.
Doesn’t mean it belongs in your cheese, of course. But screaming “your cheese has wood pulp in it” is factually incorrect and strikes me as deliberately misleading, by suggesting that something not-food is being deliberately added to food. (As another commenter pointed out, above, that’s Food Babe style thinking.) And it misses the real point, which is that grated so-called parmesan is more likely to be Havarti and mozzarella and Emmental.
8 Likes
I was agreeing with you, just pointing out why propylene glycol in food products does carry a slight risk.
1 Like
This. A tiny percentage to keep that nasty Pizza Hut foil envelope of cheese from turning into one big lump while waiting to end up on a pizza is probably okay. A substantial percentage, not okay. Replacing ‘Parmesan’ with ‘not-Parmesan’ while claiming ‘Parmesan’ and charging Parmesan prices, not okay.
Best source for inexpensive chunks of Parmesan-Reggiano, Costco. About half I grate up, the other half gets put on crackers or consumed straight. Yum.
1 Like
Mmmm…Havarti. Havarti with dill, even better. Damned Danish genes make me crave this stuff with frightening frequency.
4 Likes
I don’t use non-dairy creamer, but I can assure you, I would never put cream in my coffee without taking a lactose pill first. There are varying degrees of intolerance.
I had a summer job, back in my college days, at a factory that turned wood pulp into the additives that replace fat in fat-free foods. It was a pretty fascinating process (to me, anyway), which a search reveals I’ve already prattled on about, elsewhere in this forum, but I’ll paste in here, to spare you a click, if you’re interested.
The wood pulp arrived at the factory in the form of giant rolls (say, meter wide strips rolled up 'til the rolls stood 1.5-2m tall) of what I’d describe as blotter paper: white, spongy paper, ~3mm thick. The paper would be diced into ~1cm squares which would then be broken down into a slurry, via hydrochloric acid, and the slurry chemically neutralized with ammonia. The moisture would be spun out in a drier, resulting in cakes of pale grey fudge. Chunks of this fudge would tumble down a chute, at the bottom of which we’d collect barrels full, load the barrels onto pallets, and forklift them over to another part of the plant, where the fudge would be mixed in with a binder of some sort. It might be xanthan gum, or guar gum, or, most commonly, carboxymethycellulose, a/k/a CMC gum. That, to my knowledge, was the only ingredient that would show up on the package in the grocery aisles: whatever gum was used to stick the wood pulp to the rest of the food, which speaks to how we react to the notion of wood pulp being in our food. I.e., by and large, society seems much more comfortable with a mysterious gum, or multi-syllabic word salad on the ingredients list, than the words “wood pulp”.
This blend of pulp and gum would be further dried and sifted into a fine powder, and shipped off to wherever people have had the fat sucked out of their food. I remember this stuff went into Miracle Whip, and some kind of Sealtest fat-free ice cream-ish substance. Not sure who else our clients were/are, but I gather it’s a pretty common method for replacing fat in fat-free foodstuffs: acid- and ammonia-soaked wood pulp, blended with gum.
Add a little stank, and I bet it tastes like grated parm!
8 Likes
It took a while, in Germany the name “Parmesan” was not protected but used as generic form for any hard cheese similar to the real thing. The commission sued the German government in 2005 and won in 2008.
2 Likes
Ah, Xeni. “Wood.” Really?
I’ve never seen that warning (I’m a resident of Washington State, in the general Seattle area). The typical “warning” I see reads thusly: “This milk has not been sourced from cows that have been treated with rBST. The FDA has determined that milk from cows treated with rBST is not significantly different from any other milk.”
Which basically means: “While rBST doesn’t cause any problems known to science with the milk, rBST isn’t great for the cows and can cause mastitis and stuff, so literally all the milk in the US doesn’t come from cows treated with rBST, cuz it’s not very good for them. Maybe we should breed cows to handle rBST better or something.”
The thing is, rBST and naturally occuring BST are the fucking same molecule. I, and nobody else should give a flying fuck whether there’s BST or rBST present. The problem at most, is ethical, since supplementation of BST (or it’s identical twin rBST) usually causes mastitis and lameness in cows. So there’s the problem. The label should really read nothing. But if the milk comes from cows supplemented with any hormones that should be stated, if only for ethical reasons. Practically no BST gets into the milk anyway, since it’s a hormone ffs. It enters the bloodstream in nearly homeopathic amounts, and by the time it gets to the milk there’s no BST in there. So the labels are just there to hurt biotech companies who follow the rules.
1 Like
It’s not just cow health, it’s that we already have a milk surplus in this country and have to support the dairy industry with subsidies and price controls. Increasing per-cow productivity would lower wholesale prices to unsustainability and help no one except possibly the very largest agribusinesses, which could snap up bankrupt farms at fire-sale prices. (Edit: Oh, and the biotech companies who sell unnecessary engineered hormones.)
Dairy producers use the “no rBST” label voluntarily, as a means of protecting their livelihoods. If the public thinks it’s health-related, great, whatever gets them on the bandwagon.
Very good point, I didn’t think of that angle writing my comment. The economic argument is stronk…
I think that type of rationale is dumb. It only serves to enhance the “natural food” illiteracy prominent in US culture. As far as I’m concerned it’s a misleading label, and causes people to think that rBST is inherently physically unhealthy which simply isn’t true. In my college stats class (I took it on a lark, because I like math and wasn’t really a student. I had just come back to college to do more math) the vast majority of people I surveyed (in the ballpark of 80%) said they thought milk from cows treated with rBST was “Unhealthy” and/or “Poisonous”.
This to me counts as deceptive labeling. I’m not in favor of supplementing cows with BST or rBST for the sake of the animals, but the labeling doesn’t serve a function other than deceiving the public. What happens when we breed cows that are able to handle it without any statistically significant negative health outcomes?
I value the truth far more than I value soothing lies.
If you put “Not Tested On Animals” on a shampoo bottle, nobody thinks that the shampoo is better for their hair.
1 Like
Sure.
But if you said “This shampoo contains no propylene glycol, and propylene glycol isn’t known to cause blindness in rats” to the US public, for some reason I can’t figure out, is like saying “the Yakuza isn’t known to cut off people’s armpit hair, therefore armpit hair is a vital organ and we’re lying to you.”
It’s weird. Maybe it’s just because I’m from a fucked-up culture, but most things the FDA says are trusted by people, and people trust health inspectors for restaurants and that kind of thing, but if they see a label formatted exactly like a warning and read it, they’ll take it completely differently than what the actual text says, and read into it a helluva lot more than: “It’s more expensive to us to use rBST, than just not using it.”
The place I shop shreds cheese there. You can watch them do it, actually, so I think I’m good, even on the parm!
