Say Cheese

"Limburger"
You can spend a lot of money on cheese or more modest amounts. Experts can tell the difference. Whichever, whatever, I love the stuff, since I was first exposed to different cheeses aged 8. I've had a good bit to say about cheese on The Blob

• Why Limburger smells of feet - it's the Brevibacterium linens silly.
• Grandfather's pumpernickle, red onion and Limburger sandwich.
• Modern commercial variety
• Kids give it a go: "Did someone fart in your mouth?"
• Cheese rind is well safe. But not the wax on Gouda, y'dork!
• Cabrales is wrapped in leaves.
• How to make Jarlsberg.
• Silke Cropp makes Corleggy cheese in Co Cavan. When we lived in Dublin 20+ years ago, Silke would bring her amazing cheeses to the Dublin Food Co-op and I'd buy a slab, or even a whole kilo at £8.50, every time I was there.
• Mini-documentary on Alpine cheesemaking and dairying.

While it may be safe to eat the rind but it's not always safe to eat cheese. The main problem is Listeria monocytogenes. This Gram-positive bacteria grows well in the presence or absence of air. It is common enough in the soil, and so is spread by plants that have contact with the soil. We're still pointing at canteloupes because a 2011 outbreak of listerosis was associated with that fruit [map R]. That deadly incident dealt a serious blow to canteloupe farmers in Colorado and elsewhere in the USA, but it was a once-off as far as Listeria and canteloupes are concerned. It's easy to wash the fruit - ammonia or ethanol will do it - because it is big and nobody eats the rind so you'd be ++ unlucky to get sick from that source.

Another once-off food contamination scare happened in the run up to Christmas 2014 with toffee apples [L for cases map]. The problem with apples is that the Listeria can lodge in the holes at each end. But that's okay because most people [self is excepted because I eat apples pips and allll] leave the 'core'. The toffee-apple case was unfortunate because driving the stick up the apple's oompah transferred the Listeria to the anaerobic interior of the fruit, where it grew anaerobically.  But most of the outbreaks of listeriosis recorded by the CDC in the last ten years have been caused by cheeses of various sorts.  A useful graphic for the process of determining  which puka-puka people are part of the same event.
Listeriosis could be a case study from Risk Assessment. This is the idea where you have balance the likelihood of an event and its severity to decide what sorts of events are worth preparing for or acting to avoid. Risk is usually defined as the product of the likelihood and the severity. Salmonella and Campylobacter contamination of food is common but 'case fatality rate' is only 1% while Listeria is much rarer but 25% of contractees seem to die. This is why health professionals talk large about Listeria. But the talk is always in the context of small babies (and late stage pregnant mothers; the elderly and those who are immuno-suppressed including those with AIDS and those who've had a hearth, liver or kidney transplant. That's because the rest of us has an immune system which can duff up Listeria before it gets started and that's why Listeriosis is rare.

Listeria is also a problem because of the wide range of temperature at which is grows. It is happy to go forth and multiply at 37^oC but will also grow and divide at 4^oC. That's what your fridge is set to! Cooling food and left-overs is a really effective strategy for slowing the growth of E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter. But cold-loving  'psychrophiles' like Listeria and Pseudomonas won't be bothered by the chill. It would be stupid to throw up your hands and say "Why bother with a fridge?" because that controls the growth of the vast majority of food spoilage microbes.

From pasture to plate

Grow your own; make your own

Last year local libraries handed out packets of seed. I pre-planted the beans and peas in 4cm micropots to be germinated under the sofa. But I couldn't be dealing thus with spinach; so I cleared 1 sq.m. inside the polytunnel; lurried in a few buckets of compost; broadcast the spinach seed; and raked them in. In a couple of weeks, the weeds were back in numbers but the spinach came up as well; and I had to water c a r e f u l l y lest the wispy seedlings were carried away in the flood. Since then, for the whole of July and half of June that spinach has kept on giving [R below for one day's harvest]. [R above] is the too-small-to-pick abundance left for  another day. It's true, however, that I often hand-pick a sandwichful for lunch.

I never wash own-self-grown salad leaves because I know there is no coliform in that part of the garden; and who wants wet leaves in a sandwich?? In contrast there's been another national recall of contaminated produce: this time spinach (and rocket, mixed leaves). The only advantage of _buying_ fresh picked greens is that there's a chance they are packed in nitrogen which will (until opened) protect the product from spoilage much better than a bag in the salad drawer of my fridge.

I say another national recall of contaminated produce because we had one also involving Listeria just two weeks ago! That was at the value added end of the food chain in Ballymaguire Foods up in Lusk, Co Dublin/Fingal. If you've ever eaten a chilled 'ready meal' in Ireland [Aldi, Centra, Supervalu, Tesco] chances are it was made by Ballymaguire, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hoey Family at Country Crest Ltd. The Hoeys used to grow and sell spuds but, like Keogh's Crisps, worked out they could do better by processing produce and now have 400 on the payroll. This recall list  gives some idea of the cross-contamination possibilities:

• Bolognese with Pancetta
• Chicken & Chorizo with Baby Potatoes
• Goose Fat Irish Potatoes
• Ham & Mushroom Tagliatelle
• Irish Angus Beef Meatballs with Pappardelle
• Mashed Turnip or potato [€6.50/kg "gluten free"]
• Potato Gratin
• Rainbow Root Vegetables
• Salmon Penne Pasta
• Three Cheese Cauliflower Bake
• Veggie Lasagne
• Wholemeal Pasta Bolognese

You can buy organic potatoes for less than €2/kg, so getting them mashed by strangers for your family is [€4.50!] costly . . . even without dicing with Listeria.

make your own? An earlier Me might have expressed amazement that adults in 21stC Ireland couldn't mash their own potatoes, let alone construct a basic chicken pie. Last year we went through a jag of buying and eating Aldi Deluxe Special fancy pot pies. They were tasty [food engineers know their onions] even if they had 30 different ingredients. Well obvs home-baked pies would likely max out at ~10 different ingredients, so convenience isn't about limiting the inventory in your pantry. My judgey gripe is imaging the cliché office worker unable to cook because they're exhausted from pounding the keyboard all day. Really? Not all office workers! but I reckon some of them would live longer and happier lives if they cared about food prep and did it well rather than shirking it as an invidious chore. 

I confessed this a tuthree days ago when I was having lunch with Cookie Dau.II. She invited me to check my privilege. There are far too many people living in B&B hotel rooms with no chopping board & only a microwave for cooking. And cohorts of elders living alone but not eligible for Meals-on-Wheels. And folk with the palsy or registered blind. I accept that, but I suspect there aren't enough such edge cases to justify a whole industry processing food for profit. The business model depends on healthy, fit, people who can afford the price of convenience and choose not to donate that discretionary income to people who cannot.

One result of eating a few dozen Aldi pot pies in 2024, is that I have a stack of those dinky aluminium foil dishes. For me it is the work of minutes to make a batch of short-crust pastry, enough for a week's worth of pies, say, Mo We Th. There is a good bit of Lebanese genes culture swilling about in the family: many of my rellies are unable to stop over-catering for The Unexpected Guest. There is always something to fill a pie in a left-overs tupperware tub in the fridge. The example [R] contained an interesting mix of brown lentils, green beans, red onion, beige garbanzos, with a smidge of diced chorizo.  It's probably more efficient to take a leaf out of Hoey Inc's playbook and assemble a batch of pies all at once - say a half dozen, not a half tonne. They'll keep a few days as >!Shazzam!< convenience in the fridge and much longer in our freezer rather than Aldi's. Pricewise, I'd guess the mark-up between my pie and Ballymaguire pie is about the same as for mashed potato. And any contamination from sloppy kitchen practice will just be asymptomatic family-own-self coliform. I wouldn't serve Uncle Dan from Canada one of my pies - his microbione is a different, susceptible, kettle of fish altogether.

I don't know any specific cases but it's Lombard Street to a china orange that some of 'my' Food and Ferm microbiology students from my working days in The Institute finished up doing QC for major food producers in Ireland. I reckon they're better at doing Gram--stains from production line samples now than when they were on my watch. 

Listerham

Could be a mid-sized market town in Norfolk? But no, it is rather a rant from me about the mysterious transformation whereby thinly slicing food quadruples the price paid by consumers. A couple of weeks ago, Dau.II foodie sans pareil had day release from Dublin to help her agéd parents with some domestic task. She has hank when she poured off the train at Plunkett Station and we had to repair instanter to a supermarket for the makings of a hang sangwich. Nope, LIDL ham would not answer, we must go across the way to Supervalu for a packet of Brady's Family Ham . . . a  Stafford's turn-over Ingredients Wheat Flour, Yeast, Water & Salt. I buttoned my lip, because Dau.II, as a child, could get hangry and I had no wish to witness the adult version.

But my inner dialogue was to the effect that LIDL ham was quite likely made in the same factory with pigs from the same farm injected with NaNO₂ from the same vat.

Then on the last day of June, the food-safety authority FSAI issued a Listeria recall directive on

• Brady Family Wood Smoked Real Irish Ham 6 Slices €37.40/kg
• Brady Family Hand Crumbed Real Irish Ham 6 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Triple Oak Smoked Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Honey Roast Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Tesco Finest Crumbed Shaved Ham 16 Slices €20.75/kg

all with a bbd of 16 July 2026. I rest my Lidly=Brady equivalency case! You do you, listen to the radio adverts, and buy Brady Family Ham at €37 per kilo. In a hangry emergency I might buy the same stuff in a yellow pack from Lidl or Tesco. But really, I'druther can a [half] kilo of uncooked ham for €7/kg, b'ile it up and cut generous tranches for a week's worth of lunches. Can't be piffling about with waffer-thin slices of honey-shaved wood-roast hand-carved over-priced product.

It could be worse for Brady's rep. It's "only" Listeria!? [whc bloboprev] Unless you're pregnant, very young, very old or undergoing chemo, you'll get through the infection with some fluid loss [both ends] and some discomfort. And (this is important) the contaminated batch was detected by routine in-house QC at Brady. Accidents and boo-boos will happen in any institution; if the errors are detected, then nobody dies. I hope the recalled ham gets chopped up for soup; it would be a shame and a waste otherwise.

By coincidence, the day before the recall, Wikipedia featured On this day the 1971 case where Bon Vivant tinned Vichssoise avec Clostridium botulinum killed one, disabled one people. "On July 3, Bon Vivant voluntarily recalled all remaining cans of their vichyssoise, including soup manufactured under 22 different private label brand names". The FDA came down all heavy and Bon Vivant went bankrupt. I hope Brady's weather the storm because they employ a bunch of people in Co Kildare and are tuned in to Food Cloud, the no-food-waste charity. 

Tweaking the microbiome

Only connect!

We could weather a lot of the crap that dumps on us through life if only we weren't already compromised in some quite distinct way. Being caught outside in a deluge is okay if you've packed an umbrella; you don't get Guillain-Barré syndrome unless you've been struck by Campylobacter or HPV vaccine AND you have a genetic pre-disposition. Did someone say vaccination? Seems that for some people, 'flu vaccine can trigger narcolepsy. I've had a lot to say about the microbes of our guts and how they affect our health and happiness. Why just the other day I reported that some people will gee up their immune system to an annoying intolerance of gluten IF their immune-system is programmed to react in that way to the natural (and almost always benign) zoo of bacteria in their guts. At the end of that essay, I suggested that it was diffcult to precisely promote the death of baceria known to be harmful, but that you might be able to preferentially feed 'good' bacteria.

Two days later, because the internet loves me very much, up popped a story about that very matter. It was doubly interesting ecaue I've got a final year project student who is looking at the genetic make-up of viruses which infect Listeria monocytogenes she is also looking at the mechanisms that Listeria uses to control the depredations of, and limit the damage caused by, these infectious particles.

A group of microbiomologists from San Diego [press release / exec summ] led by Lance Boling [L above] in the lab of Forest Rohwer [R above] have coursed over the literature to identify 100+ foods and food products that are claimed to be specific for affecting the microbial community in the gut. Among these foods are Stevia, a key ingredient in Gwyneth Paltrow's woo-wah fashion-accessory 'foods' or Goops as she prefers to market it. Other tested foods include citric acid, caffein, capsaicin, cabbage, cinnamon, clove - and that's just the Cs.
They have then tested these compounds to see
a) whether they killed such bacterial star players down there as Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron [prev] Enterococcus faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
b) whether the bacteria grew better "yumm: send more cottage cheese"
c) whether and how they affected the viruses that they deduced from sequence analysis infected the bacteria.

One of the key metrics used by Team San Diego  to count the cases of the change from lysogeny to the lytic phase of the viral life-cycle. Lysogeny is when the virus genetic material is physically incorporated into the bacterial genome where it lies dormant; getting replicated passively every time the bacterial host divides. This can go on forever . . . until something induces the virus to excise from genome, actively assemble dozens of whole viral particles and burst out of the bacterial host to infect dozens of other bacteria. That 'something' trigger might be a sense that the bacterial host is in trouble and like to die. The virus would be better off if it sent a great many descendants out to try their luck in the cruel world than passively wait for the end with and in the current home. This make copies and scatter is called the lytic phase, because it involves the lysis of the bacteria.

The original paper, replete with data and informative graphs is freely available, so you may go and mine the horse's mouth for things that you may like to include in your new rich and varied and pre-biotic diet. You may bet that there will be some problems with replication - another strain of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron might have a subtly different genetic make-up but this is grist to my mill of reflection on the relationship among diet, microbiome and health. It's in the detail: Arctostaphylos uva-ursi [bear-berry] will cause massive virus induction in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron but tends to prevent this bacteriocidal phenomenon in Enterococcus faecalis and Staphylococcus aureus. If one food product doesn't do much then there is always the possibility of synergy on the plate: a salad of chicory, clove and cashew may turn out to be just the thing for duffing up Clostridium difficile.

Smoked: American Slices

I've written a bit, and with reluctant admiration, about food engineers. The products they create may not be simple, or even wholesome, but b'god they taste good.  If they weren't tasty, they wouldn't sell and the engineer would have to go back to making roads or circuit boards. The engineers can do better if they work closely with food marketers. These are the guys who make it all sound appetising and design the packaging to give pathetic small double wrapped thing itself look generous, well proportioned and sizzling A couple of years ago, I alluded to the significant difference between Irish smoked salmon and smoked Irish salmon: the former being born in Norway.

I was interested to read about the virtues of American cheese, especially in its quintessentially correct place as part of a cheese-burger. J Kenji Lopez-Alt, the author, is managing culinary director at SeriousEats, the multi-writer food blog.  He's just launched a hard-cover book The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science which probably isn't as good as On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee which is on my Must Read Again list. But Lopez-Alt digs a bit below the surface of the hamburger-topping to tell us how the thing is made. He cuts the ground from under the feet of food nazis purists who claim that cheese is cheese and process American cheese is not. Like communion wine, all cheese is the work of human hands and so it is processed. If you leave a bowl of milk on the kitchen table, and allow nature to take its course, then cheese never results.

The US Food and Drug Administration FDA have rather precise standards and make these determine what may be claimed on the packet of food and food-like comestibles. This is a Good Thing lest the more enterprising food capitalists start to sell regurgitated condensed bee vomit as 'honey'. Whoa! They do that already? I knew I was safer with Lyle's Golden Syrup - less Listeria and makes way better flapjacks, Thanks to the officious ministrations of the FDA, these things are different:

• Pasteurized Process Cheese
• Pasteurized Process Cheese Food
• Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread

Ironically, adding the word 'food' to the definitions above allows the inclusion of a higher proportion of things not normally recognised as food. The FDA is as American as apple pie and no patriotic American is going to consume foreign stuff produced by, for example, cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Therefore the word American is sort of hanging invisibly before the word cheese as in Pasteurized Process American Cheese Spread. Accordingly concoctions like American Sandwich Slices [see package R] are FDA-labelled as

• Pasteurized Process American Slices

Where the cloak of invisible implication has shifted to Pasteurized Process American Cheese Slices. These things contain no cheese, process or otherwise, but are a cunning mix of oil, water and emulsifiers. No, its worse than that: like Benecol, the first ingredient is water:  Water, food starch, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, modified food starch, milk protein concentrate, salt, natural flavor, sodium phosphate, stabilizer (xanthan, locust bean, guar gums), sorbic acid (as a preservative), lactic acid, artificial color. As Lopez -Alt charitably puts it, Sandwich Slices attempt to "mimic the meltability and flavor of actual American cheese. They do a pretty poor job at both".

via, as often, Metafilter, where, as often, 

the commentary is worth skimming

everlasting paste

We prefer to be exclusive when it comes to food? We'd rather not share our salad greens with caterpillars and snails. And I don't mean accidentally chomping through a maggot when eating an apple; even the tooth-marks of invertebrate sharers brings up <huuack> a feeling of disgust in many consumers. That's what I take from the fact that all the leaves in those nitrogen-packed bags of mixed salad greens are intact and unblemished. An amazing feat of quality control mediated by optical recognition software and the sharp eyes of low-paid assembly line workers. As well as prime delicious looks, we'd also like to have some shelf-life to the product and that's largely due to the nitrogen [no oxygen aNNyway] pillowing up the salad leaf bags.

Dairy is another matter. Because of its packing, we're less worried about things we can see lapping up the cream; it's more abut the microbes - Listeria and Coliforms; Campylobacter spp., Salmonella spp., Brucella melitensis, and Mycobacterium bovis [that would be TB!]. In my dotage, I've started to add cream to the weekly shop: I add a gob of it to drinking chocolate made on hot water when I can't be arsed to make a pot of tea. There's almost always some in the fridge and I use it several days beyond the printed sell-by BB date. My sainted MiL learned to cook in tropical Africa and had to trust her nose and eyes and I am channelling her.

A good few weeks ago an honoured guest brought a shop-bought pie [a rare treat in our make it from scratch home]and a carton of Elmlea double cream.  I've clearly lived a very sheltered life because I'd never 'eard of it. The package looked just like reg'lar cream and Dau.II had to point out that it wasn't. One clue was that the sell-by was months out from the day of purchase.  The pot sat in the fridge for weeks until, at the end of May, Dau.II stopped piffing about, opened the lid whisked up the contents, made some meringues and a rhubarb fool and served it forth in our short drinking glasses. It was fine. But why would you bother to keep the dairy but get the fat from somewhere else?

It's just that, instead of one ingredient, there are ten (10) to construct an emulsion of water, fat, carbs, protein and ADEK vitamins: Elmlea Double: 

• Buttermilk 69%, Vegetable Oils (Coconut, Rapeseed), Lactose, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin, Sucrose Esters of Fatty Acids), Stabilizers (Xanthan Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Carrageenan), Colour (Carotenes).
  

Hey look, there's our generic industrial paste ingredient carrageenan [prev]. And that's where all the oilseed rape Brassica napus napus goes! There's A Lot of bright yellow fields this spring growing these Brassica for crushable seed. It's Canola to y'all Nordamericanos.

But the market division at Elmlea realised that they were missing a trick by selling a product that was too close to, like actual, cream. There are loads of consumers who have gone all vegan on us and want nothing to do with exploited farm-stock. Marketing talked to the food engineering division et voilá! Elmlea 100% Plant Double Alternative To Cream. Which has upped the ToC to fourteen (14) ingredients and left not even the whiff of cow behind [poop joke - I'm still 11 at heart]:

• Lentil Protein Preparation (Water, 1.1% Lentil Protein), 31% Vegetable Oils (Coconut, Rapeseed), Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Emulsifiers (Sunflower Lecithin, Sugar Esters of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Stabilizers (Guar Gum, Locust Bean Gum), Natural Flavours, Salt, Colourant (Beta-Carotene) 

The finance department were presumably delirah with this solution because Buttermilk <whoa pricey> has been replaced with 1% lentils in water <commendably cheap>.

And while we're on immortal food products, let's recall the gingerbread church which was made for Christmas last year. We're not generally super-quick to dismantle the paraphernalia of the holidays and that gingerbread chapel is still with us 5 months after it was constructed from food grade products. The coloured windows were made to measure by including crushed hard candy in the window-opening when the walls were baked. They looked really well but sugar is hygroscopic and a little widdle of coloured syrup started drooling down over the window-sill before the end of January.  A few weeks later the gloop was creeping across the snow and finally consensus was reached about a respectful end to the edifying edifice. It's rather too late for going up the chimney as winter fuuuuuel. On the 27th May it was put out "for the birds" but they were not interested. I suggested that the whole thing would be disappeared by "mammals" if left overnight on the coffee table outside in the yard. I was imagining this, The Beloved thought that and the gingerbread came inside again sharpish.

Cheesy

I'm on the last chapter /section of Michael Pollan's Cooked. He has some interesting things to say about cheese  a nun called Sister Noëlla who lives in Connecticut and makes a cheese called Bethlehem which is more or less the same as the Auvergne's Saint-Nectaire.  If you don't want to read the book - and it's taken me a month of elapsed time - you can hear Pollan reading some of the juicier excerpts at a foodie conference. Over the weekend, I as hanging out with Dau.II and her bloke and her grandfather Pat the Salt. We all got fed up with the TV rather quickly and Dau.II suggested we watch an episode of the TV series based upon Cooked that is available on Netflix: here's the trailer. The smiley face of Sister Noëlla makes a brief appearance. The films - we saw 1.25 of them and fell asleep over another (right after dins) - are gorgeous and complementary to the book rather than a précis of the text. The series has clearly been made in the tradition of David Attenborough - high  production values and tight editting so that you feel you're getting a mouthful of executive summary.

Pollan addresses a modern foodie dilemma: we are moving on from a century of Pasteurisation into a post-Pasteurian world where 'this milk is RAW' is taken to be highly complementary . . . and still rare. We gave up on raw milk 100 years ago because it was shown to transmit typhoid Salmonella typhi and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These germs were susceptible to the brief heating and rapid cooling process invented by Louis Pasteur. The trouble with using Pasteurised milk to make cheese is that you have to employ a food-engineer add the Lactobacillus that are an essential part of the process. Traditional cheese-makers never bother[ed] with that - the bacteria and fungi just fell from the roof of the cave or came out from under the fingernails of the cheese-maker. Indeed, before Pasteur, they didn't even know that microbes were involved in the miraculous transformation. Needless to say, Sister Noëlla makes her cheese [Like St.Nectaire above R] in the traditional way a bit like I make sourdough bread. The wooden vat she uses is never washed - just rinsed - and has a slick white interior. There will be billions of bacteria on this surface ready to go forth and multiply as soon as warm milk is added.

Every year people die from eating unPasteurised cheese - it's the Listeria stupid - but I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban the stuff. Far more people die each year in automobiles and nobody is seriously suggesting these pleasure vehicles should be forbidden. Apparently Sister Noëlla saw off the local Food Feds by adding E.coli to a) her wooden barrel and b) a 'clean' culture of Pasteurised milk in a stainless steel vat. The latter was far, far more coliform than her stuff, because her stuff was a thriving mutually supportive community that could together resist attack from the interloping Black Hats. Vive le fromage, vive la microbiome, vive la France.

The devil in the detail

What a difference a vowel makes. At The Institute, I teach inter pluribus alia Human Physiology to pharmacy technicians. Very few of them had such an expensive education as me, so I try to cut them some slack on the long words. But in science and in their profession, for some of the long words, they just need to suck it up.  I find the anti-inflammatory antibody Adalimumab notably tongue-twisting, so I tend to talk more about Infliximab which has similar effects but is easier to pronounce. Here are some terrible twins in the spelling-bee of pharmacy:

Promazine v Promethazine; Tamoxifen v Tenoxicam; Vinblastine v Vincristine

In at least 2 out of the 3 cases above, an error in the writing, reading, dispensing or cross-checking of the prescription will have really adverse effects. The marketing department of MegaPharm Inc seems to live a dream-world of creative word-coinage.  The possibility of error multiplies as the number of medications increases - as it does as people age in the First World.  If you're over 80, you're likely to have a handful, or several handfuls, of meds to take every day. With failing sight and slipping memory, not to mention changes in the packaging, mistakes will be made.

Blister-packs [L] were invented to make it easier to get the correct drugs down the patient-hatch on the correct schedule. The packs are assembled and filled in the pharmacy [instructional video]; they have large print labels and supply an audit trail for the owner and carers. The blister-pack option is offered by pharmacies if that seems appropriate. Last year, there was a court case and more forms to be filled after it transpired that some pharmacies were charging for 'phased dispensing' when it was really not appropriate. It's more convenient, and less error prone, for everyone if the weekly blister-packs are made up in batches of four for a month's use.

My aged father-in-law Pat the Salt is in his 90s and still fairly fit but clearly slowing down on multiple fronts. He's no longer, for example, able to mow 2/10ths of a hectare of lawn any more like he could at the age of 85. Growing old is all about the failure of all systems of homeostasis: the eye-muscles can no longer keep things in focus; the blood-pressure goes up and down - mostly up - erratically; core body temperature can no longer be maintained against external fluctuations; diabetes - failure to control effective insulin levels - gets more common; the immune system is slower off the mark so you have to give up unpasteurised dairy products (it's the Listeria, silly). And so on.

A couple of weeks ago, Pat complained of being dizzy so he was taken along to the GP. Nurse measured blood-pressure and found it rather low. Doctor confirmed and ordered him off his BP meds. All blood-pressure medicines are designed to lower blood pressure, because for almost all people high BP is the problem - driven by normal people sitting on the sofa; eating saturated animal fat; sprinkled like snow with table salt . . . and then filling in the corners with ice-cream and cake. The Beloved therefore took all the blister-packs back to the pharmacy and said "Pat's blood pressure is now too low could you fillet out the Reminyl from these two packs and reseal them, please?". And it was so.

Two weeks later, Pat was back to the GP to see how the new regime was working and the Nurse gets a 'normal' BP measurement. But 10 minutes later the GP finds it is too low. The discrepancy is a worry, no? In an ideal world, health practitioners would get out the sphygmomanometer three times to check for consistency but that is never going to happen in this busy world. A bit of detective work indicated that The Beloved should have said "Pat's blood pressure is now too low could you fillet out the Ramipril from these two packs and reseal them, please". More to the point, the pharmacy technician and the locum pharmacist should have acted on the whole sentence rather than getting triggered by the key-word. Reminyl is designed to give folks a boost to their memory; Ramipril a boost to the BP. Because of the comms failure he was on the wrong medicine for 2 whole weeks.

Lucky that Pat doesn't live with  Crohn's disease, psoriasis, ankylosing spondylitis or rheumatoid arthritis, all of which are annoying other members of his family. The treatment of choice for those auto-immune diseases is Infliximab marketed under the trade-name Remicade. Lucky for me-the-tax-payer too: costs per year: Ramipril=€160 ; Reminyl=€1,600; Remicade=€16,000.

The Science of Cheese

🧀I'm having a great deal of fun reading A Cheesemonger's History of The British Isles by Ned Palmer as an eBook on my Borrowbox device. Ned Palmer consolidated his love of cheese by working for several years in Neal's Yard Dairy in London. He also developed formidable upper-body strength from turning heavy rounds of cheese to keep the cellar's treasures in peak condition and reducing the population of cheese mites Tyrophagus spp. [literally that is cheese-eater in Greek] to manageable proportions. In the course of his work hefting and selling cheese he got to know many of the artisanal cheese-makers who rediscovered and reinvented the lost arts of this cottage industry in the 1980s and 90s. The book's conceit is to pick one presently available cheese which seems to exemplify the techniques of a particular bygone era . . . and go visit the place where it is made. With luck, the cheese-makers will get some free labour out of their visitor but it's clear that some of the tasks cannot be done efficiently by a tyro tyrokomos τυροκόμος.There is a zen of cheese - good cheese is not to be bludgeoned and cheesemakers know when to step back and let the microbes do the talking. But when the the work of human hand is required, that hand must be practiced, committed and fast.

🧀Todd and Maugan Trethowen [R up to his elbows] started making their traditional Gorwydd Caerphilly in response to the demand for carefully made cheese towards the end of the last century.  It's no longer made in Wales because the logistics got too difficult in the remote valley where they started to revive a real cheese that was rather different from the plastic-wrapped blocks of "Caerphilly" sold by the tonne in Tesco. Like my late lamented friend Mario Fares and the options of PAML, Maugan Trethowen systematically altered all the parameters of their cheese-making process - e.g. heating successive batches of milk from 20°C to 50°C and carefully recording the outcomes. Gorwydd settled on 22°C as the optimum. Unless you do this, you may get good enough but you'll never get the best.

🧀Later on, in a discussion of witches and their effects on the neighbours' cheese, Palmer writes about curd which congealeth so it will rope like birdlime that you maie wind it on a stick . Ropey milk was part of my patter at The Institute when I was introducing the Lactic Acid Bacteria practicals in the Food and Fermentation Microbiology course. What the local witch-finder described above can be rendered in science-speak as the production of exopolysaccharides by Pediococcus spp. Pediococcus is also an LAB but fermenters definitely want to keep it out of the workplace for this reason. Scrupulous washing of hands is required in modern food production facilities but there is also an argument that the shelves, walls and ceiling of the cellar and, indeed, cheese-makers' hands are an important source of good bacteria which can fight off the black-hats more resolutely than bleach. 

🧀As a final anecdote about trade secrets, open disclosure and The Art, I'll quote Joe Schneider, who makes unpasteurized Stichelton in the same region of the English Midlands where Stilton enjoys Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) under EU law. The small print of that PDO specifies that Stilton is made from pasteurized milk. Pasteurization, by definition, alters the microbiology of milk and so makes a different product from what was created and marketed on either side of The Great North Road in the 1700s. Schneider's position is that you can control Listeria in more subtle ways than killing all the microbes in the milk. But "You can come to my dairy, take pictures, take notes, copy everything you like. You won't know how to make my cheese. I don't know how to make my cheese". This is like trying to follow a protocol that is detailed in the Materials and Methods of a scientific paper. My old boss had a standard operating procedure SOP when her students couldn't make it work. She'd phone up the rival lab and ask if they'd host the student for a couple of weeks. More often than not, student came back with a working method. Not everything can be written down, including the invisible indescribable background certainties which make things work . . . of course you don't leave the eppendorfs in the ice after you add the primers. 

🧀Colour supplement: Gorwydd Caerphilly -  Appleby's Cheshire - Coolea

Use your shirt-tail

Being a teacher of, among much else, microbiology and having two a daughters in the catering trade, I've become a bit more careful about washing my hands. But not being a surgeon or a commis chef, I'm not all OCD about it. If I eat a sandwich at work I don't go wash my hands first and I don't wash my hands after I have a pee in the woods. YMMV but you're not going to live longer than me because of it.  You might think I was a bit obsessed about hand-washing from the number of words I've written on the subject: sushi - sangers - lettuce - fungus - more fungus - driers - towels - kittens - OCD -hexachlorophane - money - books - Listeria - catheter - nitroglycerine - Semmelweiss - post-dagging.

Whatever about washing your hands want to be careful about drying them as an Arstechnica post pointed out in April. Their conclusion: them electric hot-air driers? They suck! In particular they suck in a selection of fecal coliforms from the flushing aerosols, concentrate them, warm them to blood temperature and then blow them all over your hands. After which you go and eat your dinner? I don't think so, and I try to have a scrap of towel at work so I can avoid using the drier or the seat of my pants.

The original study Deposition of Bacteria and Bacterial Spores by Bathroom Hot Air Hand Dryers out of UConn, Farmington, is paywalled but you can read the abstract at PubMed. They sampled the outblow from several bathrooms [both M & F] by holding a Petri dish open in the airflow for 30 seconds. They caught between 20 and 60 colony-forming units CFUs = bacteria on each plate. This was several times higher than the catch on Petri dishes left out on the bathroom counter next to a regular fan to circulate the miasma. They also found that the interior surfaces of the hand-driers were clean, so the CFUs were likely a sampling+concentration from the ambient air. High efficiency particulate air HEPA filters reduced but did not entirely eliminate the contamination.  HEPA filters are designed to catch 99.97% of all particles that pass through the multi-layered device. Clearly 0.03% of the bacteria are enough to make a few colonies on a plate.

Here's an earlier Arstechnica slap at Dyson Airblades for helping to spread viruses: especially at heights equivalent to a small child's face. Original study out of U.Westminster, UK [abstract] also paywalled. These new-fangled over-tech Airblades delivered 1000x more viruses than plain old paper towels. That's kind of interesting because economists and statisticians are trained in risk-assessment to reconcile the incommensurate. How do you set off the loss to the planet of sending thousands of tonnes of paper towels to land-fill against a cohort of children having snot-virus blown at them? You can do a QALY analysis on the viral-load aspects but how do you set that against the cost of using  paper towels now to the planet and the as-yet-unborn small children.

The answer really is to get an old cotton shirt, cut two neat squares out of the back, hem it, embroider your loved-one's name or initials in the corner and <presto> your Christmas presents are all sorted. If you cannot follow my instructions here is a fully illustrated protocol.

Sunday Sundae 240618

Woowah Loolah:

• I didn't see the [clawed] end of this story about clogged pipes: I larfed. via MeFi.
• Co-worker told me a story about a worker in the Waterford Iron Foundry who used to raffle his weekly paycheque. Not quite charitable because the cheque was for £182/wk and most of the 400 employees each paid in £1 to have a chance at a windfall. Probably Urban Legend.
• Story in a radio segment about de-escalating confrontation with the angry and dispossessed to bring "the problem" back under control. Man goes into a bank with a gun and demands $2,200. Bank-teller finds the specificity of the amount peculiar and asked robber why he needs that much. Robber says his pal will be evicted unless he can raise $2,200 back-rent of his apartment. Teller suggests he go over to the the desk in customer service and she'll come out and arrange a loan for him.
• The madness of pass-time - Dressage à l'Afrique
• Feelgood: Telling people they're beautiful - in Brussels
• On Food and Cookin'
• Making porcetta in Marino IT
• Making Bresaola (mind the Listeria):
• Smashburgers Bon Appetit
• Cake or death - Eddie Izzard
• Cheese wars in Normandie - to pasteurise or not to pasteurise
• Red Deer have heft
• The Slightly Spooky Recamán Sequence <Numberphile alert>

Gearing up the Gram stain

In my Yr3 Food and Fermentation Microbiology course aka F&F, the kids do a helluva lot of Gram stains. This chemical /microscopic test usefully divides the bacterial world into two enormously variable classes based on properties of the cell wall. That's important because the cell wall is a very common target for our 20thC anti-biotics some of which only operate against one class or the other. Penicillin, for example, used to work against 'Gram-positives' like Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Clostridium and Listeria and not-so-much against enterics like Salmonella. Of course penicillin does not work against anything anymore because of the rise and rise of anti-biotic resistance - MRSA anyone? Because resistance has been promoted by flaithulach use of anti-biotics, no medico wants to prescribe an anti-biotic which will be ineffective against the cause of the infection while promoting resistance among the microbial innocent bystanders. So one of the first tests in the Path Lab is a Gram stain.

Whom do we have to thank for this work-horse of bacterial diagnostics? Why, Dr Gram of course. Hans Christian Gram, a Danish citizen, was working  in the city morgue in Berlin and used much patience and ingenuity to develop a stain that would make bacteria more visible under the microscope when he was trying to establish cause of death (often TB at that place and pre-antibiotic time). The fact that half the bacteria he encountered stained blue-purple and half pink [see R, if you look carefully you can see that the blue ones are spherical and the pink are rod-shaped - if you can't look carefully under pixellating conditions you're not cut out for microscopy] was a by-product for him but super-useful for pathologists - and F&Fists - ever since.  Gram must have been patient and ingenious because we have finished up with a protocol that involves fixing, staining, washing, different staining, decolourising, washing, counter-staining, washing, drying, viewing.

Every year we get a leaven of French students in Yr3 under the Erasmus scheme. These étudiants formidables are really good for us because they are different. And formidable because les lourdauds et monoglots will have stayed at home in Nantes or Paris. In Ireland the protocol is carried out by flooding the glass microscope slides, the this then that, on racks above a sink or staining tray and letting the excess stains run off down the drain. In France otoh they keep the stains in special glass jars and transfer the slides from one to the next in order.  Every week or so, they dump the stain and make up fresh, I don't know which is more wasteful but the french method seems more efficient and less messy. One issue, I suppose, is whether you are doing one preparation or many-at-once.

Last Tuesday I was being adult-in-the-room for the Yr4 research project students. Students are not allowed in any lab unless supervised. Now, my level of expertise at the bench doesn't make me the most competent person in the room to give a tutorial on how to use a Spectrophotometer but after 40 years in science I'm not totally useless with my advice. One of the kids had a pile of Petri dishes and was fixing a sample to a slide prior to doing a Gram stain. This involved holding the slide with a pair of wooden tongs and passing it through the flame of a Bunsen burner to dry off the water and bake the bacteria unto the glass. You have to be a little slippy here, because a beginner's error is to crack the slide in too hot a flame - it's one of the reasons for wearing safety-glasses in the lab. Looking at the mountain of Petri dishes to be processed, I realised >!shazzammm!< a more efficient way of drying/fixing multiple samples. Why not, I suggested, spread the soup on several different slides and leave them on top of the hot-as-hell (well, a tad over 100^oC aNNyway) autoclave to dry off. That way a) no cracking b) you can prep-up the next batch while waiting.  And surely 25x samples is the time to do the Gram stain à la mode français? More time for tea that way.

Cattle cake

I spent 10 days with my mother recently, triggered by the fact that she had a cataract op and needed drops to be popped into her eye. She asserted that she'd be able to do the drops if it was okay to touch the tip of the dropper in the corner of her eye - which it is not! You don't want to contaminate the bottle with whatever is growing in the tears. It was a long time between drops 4x a day, so I did a bit of deep cleaning in the kitchen. Not a lot, I didn't want to get officious and, by implication, judgmental. My father used to visit his cousin pretty much every year: not the lesbian cousin, but the sailor cousin who lived romantically on the shores of Lough Derg. One day during his visit, he went into Nenagh, the nearest town, and bought half-a-dozen crisp new t-towels and 'helpfully' presented them to his cousin because he'd decided that her existing towels were a health hazard. The cousin was more bemused than offended. I am aware that there are aspects of our kitchen that would not pass muster if the food safety authority descended for an inspection but they are effectively invisible to us. Because nobody has gotten ill yet and we have neither mice nor cockroaches in residence, there isn't a huge amount of pressure to change.

The first morning I was with my Mum, I went at her primary food cupboard which hangs off the wall over the work-surface between the hob and the oven. Like many elderly ladies, my 97 y.o. mother has shrunk from a rather tall-for-her-era 1.75m to something at least 10cm shorter - it's the bone density, silly. She can, therefore, barely reach the top shelf of this cupboard let alone see the surface. Nobody, or no kind person, is going to recommend that she gets her wobbly pins up on a step-ladder or stool to reach the back. Accordingly, I found some interesting things up there.  With macular degeneration and a rheumy right eye it is impossible to read the sell-by date and she often can't find whatever she's looking for . . . so she buys more. I found 6 cartons of Cadbury's Bournville Cocoa, 3 opened; 5 slabs of Green&Black organic chocolate; 7 containers, various, of white pepper; 4 containers of black pepper; three small tins of Lyell's Golden Syrup two open; two ancient packets of flour. It's a hassle living on your own because you cannot buy 50g of flour to make a white sauce.

In between eye-drops, we had plenty of time to catch up and Mum told me about the olde days (within my life-time) when the local grocer had biscuits displayed in 30x30cm tins with glass tops. As a naval wife, she had to shift house every year or two which meant establishing a relationship with another grocer. If you sell biscuits by the pound [450g] or half-pound, there are going to be broken biscuits in the bottom of the tin. These were sold cheap as Broken Biscuits and were a source of shame "That Mrs Doohickey, I heard her ask for broken biscuits at the grocer, her husband drinks and that's all she has to feed the children".  Our family [no shame] bought them regularly because they were an essential ingredient of cattle-cake

• Ingredients:
• 8oz + 3/4 broken digestive biscuits 
• 3oz butter
• 2oz sugar
• 2oz cocoa power
• 1tbs golden syrup
• note 1oz/ounce = 28g
• Method: 
• melt butter in saucepan, 
• cast thereto sugar, cocoa and golden syrup
• stir into broken biscuits
• press into swiss-roll tin to set (fridge recommended)

This is clearly from the same family as Bob's Famous Flapjacks which I made the other day for the walkers on the Blackstairs Challenge and also periodically for the starvin' graduate students at The Institute. They are both essentially a carbo-vehicle + butter, sugar and golden syrup.

It also explains the presence of so much cocoa powder and golden syrup in my mother's store cupboard. The neighbours are not above dunning the Oldest Person in the Village for a batch of cattle cake when the village fête, or a cricket match, or the duck-race, needs something to go with an urn full of strong tea. I came away with half the pepper, and the oldest cocoa that was sell-by 28 04 2014 and a tin of syrup sell-by end May 2015. As well as shrinking, elderly people get a bit sketchy on the immune front and readily succumb to Listeria etc. and I don't want my Mum to go from a terminal case of botox.

On the morning of the Blackstairs Challenge, I thought it might be Der Tag to make up a batch of cattle cake which I proceeded to do, using a tin of, now bendy, ginger biscuits (which I found behind atop the fridge) instead of digestives. The cocoa was a bit caked but sieved out fine, and the golden syrup was darker than the more up-to-date stuff but it all worked out . . . except that I forgot the sugar. But that's okay: I discarded half the sugar from the original flapjack recipe when I inherited it and that less-is-more improved it. But I declined to serve the cattle cake out to strangers the walkers in case the antient sirope was awash with Clostridium botulinum.

Notes: two questions will have occurred to the curious:

• Why cattle cake: not because of its resemblance to the compressed protein-rich livestock feed cobbled together from the byproducts of the brewing industry or ground-nut Vigna subterranea oil factories. It was so called by my elder brother when, in short trousers, he was helping make a batch in the mid-1950s. My mother brightly asked the young shaver what they would call the new treat and he looked dreamily out of the window at a field full of Friesian cows.
• and what's with the 3/4 biscuit on top of the 8oz of digestives? That seems a spuriously accurate quantity given the long-as-a-piece-of-string "tablespoon" of syrup. I guess that one batch, long long ago, turned out a bit gloopy and someone threw in an extra biscuit to thicken up the mix. I do that - throw in a handful of extra oats - with my flapjacks. It's a bit like Primo Levi's famous story of a [paint] recipe that demanded 23 [not 22 or 24!!] drops of one component.