Friday, 23 August 2013

Fascination in Small Facts.

Something has long intrigued me:

When I was a kid, you didn’t want to be drinking milk that was over about two days old. Nowadays, I often drink milk that I bought in the supermarket two weeks earlier. It still tastes fine and doesn’t curdle in hot drinks. I wondered whether they’d started adding preservatives, so tonight I asked a dairy farmer of casual acquaintance whether that’s the case.

He told me it isn’t. The reason it lasts longer, he said, is because it’s homogenised these days instead of being merely pasteurised. Unfortunately, his description of the homogenisation process was at variance with what I later read on a couple of websites, so I’ll leave it at that and accept the potential risk of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

(And did you know that cow milk has three times more protein in it than human milk? Water buffalo milk has even more! Fascinating.)

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