Expiry Dates

Sometimes a little too much time on my hands gets me to pondering over scads of things that we do, eat and mix up; milk products for example. I really love them but have often wondered who first said, “Hey, let’s let the milk sit around until it spoils, separates and then eat the curds.”? Lately, with the rat poison thing, I have been thinking more about this.

In Peru, they make cheese the old way but putting the cow’s stomach’s liquid in the milk to coagulate the milk fat. In some areas they use llama stomach juices too. However, in the north of Peru there is a lizard that they drop into the milk and it produces the same affect. Now having said that, don’t you just wonder about the thought process that got someone to drown a lizard in milk in the first place? Just how many other critters do you suppose they dunked in the milk first or did they just get lucky with that first lizard they tried? Yet on the other hand, maybe a lizard just serendipitously fell in the bucket in the milk shed and started the milk a-clotting. For me this conjured up the image of a soggy little reptile treading milk, I don’t imagine he was built for swimming but probably kept his head above milk, heroically chugging until it started separating it into whey and curds. I imagine that density issues interfered what with curds bobbing in the whey until he finally succumbed to the variable compactness confusion, a poor, drowned, sodden little lizard. I suppose I wax pensive and I am dwelling a bit overly on clotting and curding these days…

Anyway, speaking of thickening milk with bacteria, yogurt fascinates me too. I love Peruvian yogurt better than the Swiss variety. Like most of these things, it comes with an expiration date or sell-by date just like its North American distant cousin. I say distant because the texture and flavor resemblance pales by comparison, a paltry puny relative and nothing more. Still South Americans have a certain obsessive relationship with expiration dates I have noted over the years. They will throw out a case of perfectly good milk because of the arrival of its expiration date. Though just an example, really anything with an expiry date as the Canucks and Britts say goes out of date the day after. Heck, my mother kept every prescription medication that we did not use in a big box in the hall closet for rainy sick days… She knew what they all did and for her; expiration dates served for a mere suggestion. Not in Peru or Chile though. The day after… aspirin has just turned to cyanide. Cough syrup turns to death potion at five minutes beyond the stroke of midnight.

I have had Peruvians tell me that I am risking my health by eating yogurt that has passed its date… Julie likewise asks me if the yogurt in the refrigerator has gone bad??? What does this mean? Just what happens to spoiled milk with more time? Does it get more spoiled? What are the health risks in eating more yogurty yogurt? Some say it goes all moldy… Hello-o-o! What is that green stuff on the Treasure Island, Gorgonzola or Roquefort? How many deaths or terminal illness get attributed each year to Kraft Roka Blue Cheese Dressing for example? “Mrs. Hasler, I regret to inform you that your husband succumbed to a hyper sensitivity to cheese mold…”

Today I went to Costco. They had great huge cheeses from Parma, Italy, aged parmesan cheese… they have dates on aged cheese, use-by or sell-by…all the same to a Peruvian. What does that even mean though? Isn’t the whole idea of aging the cheese that it gets better the longer it sits, or not? I need help here, what happens if you don’t eat the matured cheese by the date that FDA or Costco expiration police say you need to eat it? Does the increasing elderliness of the cheese somehow cause it to go south because the sagacious warehouse store daters say so and so as not to get into dutch with the feds? Phew, now there is a silver lining to health care and even bigger government! Somebody tell Nancy Pelosi! I can see it with roast chickens or putrefying pork chops you refrigerated what with salmonella and all. For me the jury is still out on the brown lettuce that we have thrown out in truckloads. Sometimes stuff just gets science projecty, i.e. really slimy, icky and even smelly like tortillas, celery and raw gizzards with green and often slimy mold, putrescine and cadaverine but aspirin, cheese and yogurt, come on now!