jsolomon

You know, what would really be sweet is to have a ruggedized industrial-type pc--you know, one you can splash stuff on--with some built-in temperature probes that you can stick in your oven, etc. Built-in software to do multiple timers for you, and small and inobtrusive. That would be the pc I would want for my kitchen. Has anyone seen anything like that?

What about a Tekpanel pc?

The icebox looks very cool, but does it function as a pc? It didn't specify on the literature I saw.

By extension, here is how I'm signing off of this. rBGH is technology. Technology is bad and kills people. Even good people. Anecdotal proof of why technology is bad and kills people.

I think the Folgereque quality may have come from the level of your roast. How did the beans look after you were done? What was their size? You may want to try roasting them a little longer. When I tried roasting on my own, I used a cast iron skillet and a heat gun and got very satisfying results. I think you're on the right track. Also keep in mind that the flavor will be best after the beans sit for about a day. Grind and drink within a week.

That's really opening up a diminishing returns case. With the stage we are currently at with genetic engineering and genome understanding, it'll provide a lot of egghead work, but not return much, yet. To be a successful portion of agriculture, it'll take at least another decade of engineering on the technology behind how actual application of this goes. It ain't easy, yet. No. Wasn't that easy? The reason is, there are numerous studies from antibiotics to herbicides that within 15 years of any new product coming on the market, there is a published case of resistance. When you couple that with the general case of giving prophylactic doses to livestock is giving them sub-therapeutic doses, you find that you set up a perfect area for a resistant population to set up shop. Depending on how the resistance is gained, this population could be exceptionally difficult to get rid of. The epidemiology is already done. Why do we have animals that we need to give sub-therapeutic doses to? Well, confinement is one reason. Also, livestock is usually raised around some form of standing water, which is not necessarily the best for wholesome-ness, so you always have some form of crap going through the population. It's just like the soldiers say at basic training. You shove a bunch of animals in an open bay, and they get sick. So, what do we need to do? Look at how we raise animals in confinement and see if there is something we can do to help relieve that stress. Monitor the animals in confinement better to remove sick ones earlier. And, agressively treat illnesses in them. What does that mean with rBGH treated milk cows? Certainly monitoring them is called for. Making sure that their teats are not overused is another safety measure that needs to be heeded (if it's not already). Off-topic, not every paper that gets published in Nature or Science is necessarily backed by quality data. That's why everyone needs to read and consider each paper carefully.

Bacon and butternut squash with bread crumbs or roughly-crushed saltines creamed kale or creamed spinach mushrooms and beef stroganoff

That's a standard trick for raising awareness. In the Army we call it the shit sandwich where you have something you want to raise awareness about with a person or task so you in essence say "it's great. it's shit. it's great". Then, the part you really want to raise awareness about you tuck into the last "it's great" part. He probably had someone he didn't want to annoy when he wrote the article.

bacon

Sheesh, and I thought I was sad by simply wanting a Unix serial terminal in my kitchen (that I could buy by the lot off of Ebay and just toss when I spill junk on them). If I had a pc in my kitchen, I'd never cook because I'd spend too much time looking at eG. akebono, one of my friends has a kitchen magnet that says "Susan is overcome by the little beauties in life" which has a cartoon of a woman crying over an ice cube tray with a thought-bubble stating "Perfect ice cubes every time". Your statement cracked me up by reminding me of that. Stunning!

Son, I hope you said that in your nice voice.

Sheer speculation, but the carcass quality of the cow might also be better at that two-year shorter date. This would also help offset things. There are many wholly-owned chains, e.g. Braums, that own the cows, and the stores and sell the meat from the cows in the stores. "Value-added" I think is the concept.

You're sure it's not the frat boy effect? Y'know, people saying, "Even if I don't enjoy the taste, it'll get me drunk/make her clothes fall off"? There are times when I would prefer a high ABV wine. There are times when I would prefer a very very tasty wine and don't care about the ABV. What I think is the latest high ABV craze is that there are some very early high ABV wines that scored well and represented their varietal well, and it got out the kind of yeast they used--a high alcohol tolerant one. So, there are a lot of me-too wines out there. Not that this is a bad thing. It is merely a phase. Besides, with all of the high proof liquor out there, is it something to be horribly worried about?

So, when people start discussing things that are in our sandbox, and we begin to use our vocabulary and our tools we're wrong? I don't understand how that is. On the other side of the coin, science is quite confrontational (and egoistic, and old-boys-clubby, and traditionalistic, and hide-bound) just like any other "honorable employment" that has a lot of education required. Imagine what would happen if someone posted 3+3 = 5? We would get corrected, and how. Science, especially things dealing with hormones and safety are an area of study that we really don't have a lot of data on. Sure, we can answer the question of "is it safe in acute exposures?" But, the question of what will happen with chronic exposure, we just don't have the data or the tools to study. So people project based on their experience, their assumptions, and their beliefs. When you're speaking about conjecture and faith, you'll get hard jabs from everyone. It's the same response you get when you post 3+3 = 5. Those that believe you are really passionate. Those that don't and post, are really passionate. Those that don't care, generally don't post.

But, we don't pump them full. The doses given are sub-therapeutic that have a half-life of measurable effect on the bacterial population. It doesn't KILL the bacteria like a therapeutic dose would. It selects for bacteria that are somewhat resistant in the population and lets them live. I'd just be happy to see the milk get treated well from cow to store. Given the disparity in shelf stability I see between milk in different stores, I know that there are people not minding the store, as it were, when it comes to how long their milk, and by extension other products, are at any given temperature. I don't necessarily see the fault as entirely on the hands of the farmer when it comes to rBGH milk. There are a lot of hands that the milk generally passes through from cow to table, and those hands need inspected, too, but you rarely hear about it--which is bad on us for not requiring more transparency at other ends of the food production industry.

I do agree with you to some extent. However, the stress on the herd is difficult to measure because by any stretch of the imagination, these milk cows are treated certainly much better than they would be in the wild. And their diet is much higher quality from a nutritional standpoint.

The stance of the FDA (and mine) is that you can't filter in quality (i.e. if you are working on a sterile product, you are always better to keep it sterile the whole way through, not filter in sterility at the end) Simply saying "pasteurize it" isn't quite solving the problem, because there are very real dangers with simply allowing a polyglot of bacteria to live in milk and then pasteurizing it. Not sucking on the teats til they bleed is a good option, IMO.

Yes, but they've still got sex and wine intimately intertwined, which still rubs me raw. I'm not saying that there isn't a connection between romance and wine--but it's the same connection as with bread. You know, "a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou". For wine to be commoditized, some of the sexual pressures over it need to be relaxed, and I don't see them really working toward that end. They just want to either turn it on its ear, where they admit that women have the power with sex, or they just promote the sex and forget about the rest. Either way, it's still marketing groupthink which cheapens what the caring wineries do to make their wine. If everyone looked at wine the way they look at bread, I'd change my tune, but we're not there yet. And, I don't see this as taking us successfully to that direction.

Err, ahh, because of the 'r' in rGBH, it IS the natural thing. 'r' stands for recombinant, which means the exact gene from the cow has been spliced into something (usually a bacterium or a yeast, but not always) which then expresses this new (to it) gene. There is a thing in genetics called the Central Dogma which states quite clearly that all life we have discovered on Earth treats the same genetic sequence the same way. The same sequence that codes for a particular amino acid in cows codes for the same amino acid in Escherichia coli, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The argument of "it's not natural" reminds me very strongly of people saying that artificial benzaldehyde (a flavorant) is different from naturally occuring benzaldehyde (the flavor of almonds). There is no chemical assay that we can do to show they are different, so they must be the same. Now, I'm not saying that elevated levels of rGBH are good or bad, but I am asserting that most people argue against this as a FUD-styled aesthetic argument, which I usually discount out-of-hand.

As I sit, reading weepy-eyed evangelizations about schmaltz, all I can think of is "when is the fat-rendering eGCI course?"

apple butter?

What would the "Tastes Great!" "Less Filling!" campaign look like in wines? Yeesh. Contemplation is nearly enough to make me a hermit.

I can't even fathom a serious reply to that. Granted, the word "pimp" and its various conjugations rarely enter into my speech, and I'm certain that those conjugations and wine have a very intimately intertwined history. <snip> Sorry, got carried away here </snip> Don't get me wrong, I'm all for dirty jokes, double entendres, and plain old grossing out, but peurile third-grade humor I don't think belongs in food descriptions. And, "Be individual, buy our crap" is one of the largest oxymorons I've ever seen. B.I.H., I say to Virgin Vines.

And that's the same reason I won't go to a butcher who merely labels stuff "meat", or worse yet, "generic animal product". I also don't shop at an auto sales establishment that removes the brand emblems from their vehicles. It clues me in to deeper problems. If the purveyor looks at my wine as a way for them to make millions, then they can f*** off. I'm a discriminating consumer who has a natural tendency toward intellectualism and curiosity. If they don't pander to that, I'll take my business elsewhere, after making my opinion known. Caveat emptor has a Newton's Third Law side, also (every action has an equal and opposite reaction). Thus, if the buyer was being aware, the seller has less profit, meaning they missed a demographic. That being said, I'm still not a fan of retardate labels that allow wine to simply be sold under a "plonk" label. I have similar problem with Coors, Anheuser Busch, etc. not putting more on their labels (and that born on crap really pisses me off). Bottom line is, it's only hip to be dumb because marketers have convinced us of that. What a crock. Makes me want to see if I can market sugar free, fat free, sodium free, calorie free lead-carbonate as an artificial sweetener.

I see where you're coming from Daniel, but I don't yield. At least, I don't yield completely. I DO still want good labeling for wine. I don't ask that it be complicated or anything like that, but I want it at least reasonably consistent, and I'm not sure Virgin Vines plans on having a consistent plan for someone to be able to take experience with their wine to a second level and use it as a springboard--based on labeling and tasting experience alone. It might, simply as an entry to wine, get people comfortable with trying more wine--which Is A Good Thing, but if it still leaves them at the same precipice, but this time with a powerful thirst. It's still leaving us perilously close to where we are right now, before they start. It's not much progress, and I don't see it as terrifically helpful progress. All I'm asking for is labeling that will help people by being consistent with what labeling they'll see on other wines. Edit: stoopid pre-caffeinated grammar and punctuation