oh shit… I never thought of the canning. I suppose the canning process kill it. Which I suppose also means buying kimchi in jars loses the probiotics for the same reason.

The fresher kraut in the grocery store seems to be in plastic bags in the refrigerated section, but I’m not sure I can trust that either… those bags have to be sealed just as well. OTOH, I’ve bought food in the fridge section with plastic film over it which really balloons out when close to expiry, apparently due to gas emitted by the bacteria. So maybe they aren’t killing the bacteria in those cases.

Someone in my family seems to be suffering from digestion problems due to lack of gut bacteria, which was likely killed off through docs over-prescribing antibiotics like crazy… like candy. So I searched for info on restoring gut bugs. A common dietary recommendation for gut bug restoration is to stop eating red meat, or to cut back on it, I forgot which. IIRC it’s because some gut bugs thrive on red meat much more so than other gut bugs and it creates an imbalance.

I have no idea how solid that info is but someone should be checking that. Only like 1% of the population qualifies to donate their feces for fecal transplants. Not joking. Their shit is literally valuable. Those people are found to have a strong healthy variety of gut bugs. When their feces gets packed into gelcaps and someone swallows them, the consumer can repopulate their gut with good bacteria. Someone should follow those stool donors around and see how much red meat they are eating.

Note as well recent research shows that race horses which have the healthiest gut bugs win more prize money. Not sure about mortality, but @fossilesque@mander.xyz’s article focuses on mortality when maybe that’s a little too blunt of an instrument.

Yeah we do eat some disgusting things. What works on me is if you start feeding it to me before I know what it is. Then after I’m accustomed to something it takes a higher level of disgust to turn me.

Hot dogs in fact crossed that threshold. I ate them as a kid then one day questioned what they were, heard John Candy call them lips and assholes, saw a video of that pink slime in big vats, and that turned me. No more hot dogs for me. OTOH, I had a quite tasty vegan hotdog that was good at simulating the real thing using nuts.

I’ve mostly ditched dairy milk out of a combination of mild disgust coupled with better alternatives (coconut milk). I’ll do Bailley’s but pass on the milk stout beers.

Anyway, you can feed bugs and cockroach milk to your kids and maybe they grow up accustomed to it.

I’ve lived in roach infested regions and encountered many. But never smelled them. Are you holding them up to your nose? I’m not sure I ever got closer than ~50cm from one. I wonder if you have an extra sensitive olfactory sense.

In any case, the odor could be a defense mechanism perhaps sucreted and maybe not in the milk. The smell of fish is off putting to me but I can eat a fresh prepared white fish because the odor of the meat is fine.

Goat cheese tastes like goats smell.

I occassionally visited someone with a goat farm. The odor around the farm was quite distinct and far from pleasant. Then when I tried goat cheese, the taste was spot-on the same as the external odor of goats. Really put me off. I cannot do goat cheese because of that. Yet goat cheese is somewhat popular so I don’t get it. I wonder if aroma is unimportant to some people.

Not sure why that is necessarily the case. Recall how wine was made at one point: people barefeet got in a tub of grapes and smashed them by running around. Roach milk could be a matter of rounding up some 8 year old boys and giving them gummy bears or a candybar if they stomp around in a vat of roaches.

ah yes, that’s it.

I cannot help but think about that future-set movie with a non-stop train conditions non-survivable outside the train, with a class system on the train. The lowest class people were at the back of the train were fed something called nutrition bars or blocks (or something like that), which looked like mysterious black jello-like bricks. They were made on the train from cockroaches. Anyone know what movie I’m talking about? This research fits nicely into that movie narrative.

Agreed.

As a kid I recall stepping on one and thick white milk squirted out. Another kid said “just like a Jr. mint!” Ever since then, I have been unable to mentally separate Jr. mints from cockroaches. And to be clear, that association was not an upgrade for the roaches… it was a mental downgrade to Jr. mints.

For centuries, saffron has been a prized dye

Bizarre that such a costly substance would be used as a dye for clothing. Why pay what’s likely the equivalent of HP ink when you can just get a box of Rit yellow dye at the supermarket?

Surely the price will drop when someone figures out that drones can fly around and harvest the saffron.

That would make sense. In Europe I got an IV just for blood samples. They could have been anticipating the possibility that I would need pain killers later, but seemed like it would have made more sense to use a normal needle and only do the IV if it came to the point of needing meds.

⚠ Folks-- use lynx to view that article. It’s fully #enshitified in GUI browsers (autoplay, ½-screen blocking bullshit) but decent in text browsers.

Indeed… now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.

The article covers that: “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can’t afford a basket of groceries.”

Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.

… or farmers trying to sell obscure things like celery root!

seriously though, the article seems reasonable and balanced to me. E.g:

• “Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can’t afford a basket of groceries”
• “It’s important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem”.

Right but what if the cheapest food is idk, something like celery root? I think the idea w/the thesis of the article is that a skilled cook can adapt to whatever ingredients are cheapest at any moment.

I think I’m a decent cook but I also think I need to improve because when I’m in the produce area and have no idea how to use like 15—20% of the options there. E.g. celery root, cactus, and ½ dozen things I don’t even recognize.

What’s Kenji? Is it the cookbook mentioned here:

https://www.kenjilopezalt.com/

?