CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
201
Three weeks later I’ve got a happy and sad story to tell about this.
I ran out of cumin seed a couple of weeks ago. My local grocer is out of it. I checked other nearby groceries - all out. I really prefer to toast and grind myself, but was stuck using pre-ground.
Yesterday I was traveling a bit farther afield and stopped at a grocery over there. Yay! They had cumin seed. Not in any of the cheaper brands like Badia or Spice Island or McCormick, it was some fru-fru “all natural, organic, imported all the way from Planet Neptune” brand that cost me $8.50 for a 50 gram jar. But at least I now had some!
On the way back and close to home I had to detour through a small shopping center due to an accident at the intersection. Sitting there in all its glory, not a 5 minute drive from my house, is a small Indian grocery. I went in and turns out they’d been there over a year - but just tucked away out of sight, behind a day care center and a Walgreens, in a plaza housing a Dominos Pizza, a couple of karate places, and the worst Chinese food restaurant for miles.
I got 200 grams of cumin seed for $2.79. An hour after having just paid what amounted to $34 per 200 gram. So I was sad-happy.
They also had kala jeera (nigella), methi (fenugreek) and small black mustard seeds at similar prices - stuff I’d had in mind to find due to recipe browsing. And the coriander seed was dirt cheap - I needed 40 grams to make biltong anyway, so that was a happy find overall.
I know when I moved to where I do now, I looked for an Indian market for their spices. Alas, 1.5 hours to the nearest one. Then, I discovered planet Amish for more common spices, then the Mennonite store for the harder to find. I was so relieved after thinking I was SOL for spice sources. Then, Thai market opened, as did the heavens. THANK YOU, LORD!
Anybody dumb enough to get up close to a farrowing sow gets what they deserve. I grew up in hog country…every farm kid I knew had an ugly scar left by a protective sow.
I don’t even go out of my way for raw milk. The cream is usually my main motivator. Our Ag classes at school take the raw, let separate, then give each kid a little corked container for their cream and put a marble in it. They shake it up to make whipped cream. Never had a kid die yet.
81 outbreaks over a 5 year period from 2007 to 2012 according to the graphic and the CDC says that over a longer timeframe, " From 1993 through 2012, 127 outbreaks reported to CDC were linked to raw milk. "
So the frequency of the outbreaks seems to have increased in the 2007 to 2012 timeframe but you are still more likely to being struck by lightning. Admittedly, raw milk drinkers are a smaller percentage of the US population vs people who walk outdoors…
Have there been any fatalities from raw milk? Asking for a friend. LOL!
We used to drink raw milk from the gallon jar, cream on top. I can’t say I liked it all that much more than regular milk. It was just milk once you got the cream off it.
Looks safe to me. Of those 81 cases there were only 73 hospitalizations. No deaths.
I’ll take my chances. Raw milk has become more popular. No mystery there. I know of nobody where Iive who has suffered from this menace. Sometimes sourcing means everything.
Not justifying in any way, but raw milk is not the only risk we take. Every year, many people get sick from eating salad (uncooked vegetables) instead of cooked vegetables. Many people also die from eating raw fish.
“Raw or undercooked fish may also harbor the most common food-poisoning bacteria, Salmonella, which causes about 1.2 million illnesses, 23,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths in the US every year, according to the CDC. Food is the source of most of these illnesses.”
" There were dozens of outbreaks of E. coli linked to leafy greens in the United States between 2009 and 2017, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds of people fell sick — E. coli causes severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting."
I think there are plenty food risks we are taking. Raw milk is one of them for sure. Parents can decide if their children should eat salad or sushi or raw milk…etc.
There are other less acute risk and more "chronic risk such as simply eating smoked meat.
Hey, I like to live dangerously! Raw milk, no seat belt, Amish meats, meats raised by pre teen kids, shushing steers back through my neighbors gate, chasing the other neighbor’s heifers back through their fence, hunting wild asparagus. Livin’ on the edge, yo!
When the baby spinach thing was getting people sick, Willie Nelson, who had just been busted with pot said :" ‘It’s a good thing I had a bag of marijuana instead of a bag of spinach. I’d be dead by now’?"
If you fear the worst possible outcomes of raw milk consumption don’t drink it. I’m still not going to sweat it. Safer than driving to work and just missing 20 flippin’ deer. I hope people are really up for hunting come October.
Does the cream rise because the milk is raw or because it is not homogenized?
Boiling or pasteurizing the milk should not affect the cream the way homogenization does?
In don’t know for sure, but I would guess lack of homogenization. Boiling probably wouldn’t kill that beautiful aspect. “Raw”, to me, means right out of the cow. The milk I buy is bulk tank, meaning it’s been filtered prior, and cooled in the bulk tank. Open the spigot, and there ya go.
You are using a false equivalency. Way more people eat chicken than drink raw milk.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
220
Hi Ellen. I didn’t equate the two or did not intend for it to be read as if I were equating them. I’m pointing out that there are a lot of ways to get sick from food, and context matters in any risk-reward equation.
That said, I’ve now done a bit of digging. Although I couldn’t find a percentage of persons in the US who eat chicken (I’d guess the vast majority less vegetarians), I did find that about 2% report consuming raw milk and 15% report consuming raw oysters. Presumably the milk drinkers are consuming the milk considerably more often then the raw oyster eaters are consuming those.
But even if, arguendo, you put them at par (as if the oyster eaters are consuming them as often as the milk drinkers consume the milk), and then norm up the numbers of those sickened, those attributed to raw oysters are on the rough order of 50 times more than from raw milk.
