Nuclear device for the kitchen, yes really

Personally, I prefer food with less bacteria in the first place. Pasteurised and Homogenised milk are a good example - the actual problem is cowshit in the milk. Rather than making farmers clean up their act, the P&H processes simply kill all the lurgies within the cowshit. So instead of getting milk contaminated with live cowshit bugs, we get milk "contaminated" with dead cowshit bugs.

best not to think about why we would want to consume milk anyway, given that we are not cows. People would certainly look at you sideways if you drank human breast milk as an adult.....

But I am leery of techniques like irradiation, which will probably be used to increase production throughput on factory farms,abattoirs etc which normally results in greatly increased fecal contamination. WTF, we can kill the bugs.....

As far as GM etc goes - I have a fair understanding of the science involved, and it sure *isnt* engineering. When it is (IOW when outcomes can be predicted with extremely high accuracy, and yields are in the high nines), watch me beat a place to the front of the queue to get "improved."

Until then, its a little bit scary, especially given chemical sciences past "successes".

did you ever watch the move "super size me?" Morgan spurlock did a very simple, very interesting experiment with some glass jars - he placed various items of Chuckdonalds in jars, and left them. 3 months later, and the fries *still* looked only a few hours old.

I try hard not to eat any mass-manufactured stuff. My almost-step-brother's (not yet, mid next year is the eta) wife recently did an MSc in food technology. For her thesis she researched the nutritional approaches taken by food manufacturers in the design of products (Melbourne, Oz). Conclusion - none of the 100+ manufacturers she interviewed considered nutrition during the development of a food product. scary.

Cheers Terry

This must be true. years back I did a postgrad information systems management paper (because I had to). Our lecturer proudly informed us that all IT theorems had 3 parts, so 3 is clearly a mystical IT number. Hence it must be the cosmically ordained limit for signature length

Cheers Terry He who must be obeyed And cannot count to three successfully.

Cheers Terry

Probably before HPV was nailed as the cause.

Cheers Terry

Africas problems are almost entirely political, you are dead right. But the west certainly *could* do something to help - stop supporting the warlords too. DRC is a great example.

Cheers Terry

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Isn't the selective breeding of cereals and vegetables for yield and resistance a kind of GM, even if a slow one? This has been going on ever since mankind took up farming a few thousand years ago. Still, on an evolutionary scale, the timespan is much too short for mankind to have "adapted" to these new genes. So unless you have some evidence of this (adapting) occuring, I'm afraid your hypothesis isn't more than wishful thinking.

Anyway, cooking and eating something will certainly scramble whatever DNA was in it into total uselessness.

- YD.

Acording to some report I saw a long time ago even if there's no deterioration in the usual sense, there are long term chemical changes altering the taste and appearance.

- YD.

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to

well, whatever, I dont' care, you're coming off as a bit of a snot, if you disagree with me, or have some information that you think I don't have, then present it otherwise you're wasting my time.

ie.. lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Thank you for your gratuitous insult - Not only pig bladder but pig headed too.

Oh dear. I feel somewhat responsible for all this, as I began this topic crossposted to both uk.d-i-y and sci.electronics.design, as I expected both to have a fair bit of expertise in different ways, and both to be quite relevant to this one.

It seems you two wont be getting married after all...

NT

That is a monthly, and - at least in the classic years - the articles were written by scientists, then intensively edited. We knew the late Vicki Fromkin, who wrote such an article (on Speech Errors) some thirty years ago. New Scientist comes out every week, and concentrates on topical issues, which makes such a leisurely approach impractical.

Havig said that, the only one of our acquaintances who regularly wrote for the New Scientist - Susan Blackmore - was originally an academic and is still associated with the University of Weatern England at Bristol.

If you've got one to offer, I'll be spectacularly obsequious.

-------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Personally, I prefer food with less bacteria in the first place. Pasteurised and Homogenised milk are a good example - the actual problem is cowshit in the milk. Rather than making farmers clean up their act, the P&H processes simply kill all the lurgies within the cowshit. So instead of getting milk contaminated with live cowshit bugs, we get milk "contaminated" with dead cowshit bugs.

You don't have ANY idea what the hell you are talking about. Have you been to an active grade A dairy farm? Most of them border on surgical cleanliness. There are very regular inspections. This covers everything from water supply to waste containment. I would be more willing to eat food off the floor from a dairy barn than your floor.

Hear! Hear!

...Jim Thompson

Great, but our Western warlords (same mindset as those that invented "necklacing", just more subtle) find them easier to deal with than democratically-elected governments. Point being we ought to stop supporting _our_ warlords.

Mark L. Fergerson.

Yes ;-)

No. But, I'm a supporter of preservation methods that could bring farm-fresh quality back to the supermarket. Shipping picked-green fruits and vegetables and allowing "ripening" en route gives me products that rot in one day when I take them home, plus they have no flavor.

...Jim Thompson

Turns out that it does immensely. The ripening->rotting progression stops when tomatoes are irradiated.

I used to grow my own tomatoes in the front entry court at the old house... into the shade by 10 in the morning, but now I have no such lucky exposure... I now have to grow flower bushes around my citrus trees to keep them from sun-burning :-(

...Jim Thompson

Lived on one for several years. I know the whole dairy process very well. I still contend that fecal contamination is not(or should not be) an issue in a adequate(not even a good) grade A operation. Grade B has a more leniency, but there aren't very many operations running grade B (mostly older, small farms). In a reasonably modern milking operation, there should be little opportunity to contaminate anything with fecal material. I will agree that practices do vary, but I also contend that dairy is a business(and a high dollar one at that), and any good businessman will do what he can to limit expense and increase income. Reducing/limiting contamination accomplishes both of these quite nicely.

The parlor(milking station) is contructed of stainless 304 top to bottom. It is constantly washed down with iodide based cleaners(very effective antigen). The cow is prerinsed with a cleaner and iodide wash, the milking unit is attached, from there on it's pretty much a sealed system. A milk is transferred in a vacuum system from the cow to the central system, where it is crash cooled and stored. From there it is pumped on to a transport truck of some sort and off to processing.

The entire system is cleaned daily with an acid wash and rinse.

As for cows.... they are very clean animals, and prefer to stay that way. If they are given half an opportunity they will not defecate on themselves, or lay in their waste. This again, comes down to good practice. Keeping animals clean, keeps them healthy. Clean animals make money, dirty ones do not.

As for monitoring for bacteria loads, this is only good practice with any raw food product. Dairy products are known to be harbors for some nasty bacteria. Just nature of the product. Reasonable practice helps to reduce this. There are many opportunities for contamination throughout the system. I remember an incident a few years back where someone had used a truck to transport raw eggs and then milk in the production of ice cream. As expected, bad infection resulted. This is certainly not the farmer's fault(or the cows).

There is something called somatic cell count, which is a count of dead white blood cells in the milk. This is an indication of the health of the cow. I dont' remember exact numbers any more, but if this number gets over a certain threshold that cow will be red flagged and get placed in isolation for treatment. Many larger operations, just ship her out but that is another issue.

JW

Pickled and smoked foods cause stomach cancer.

John

And I bet the Utilogic drivers sounded great, too.

John