Suppose you are a family living 7000 years ago. You may have a few cows or goats or sheep, some clay pots, some woven baskets and a few primitive metal or stone tools. Of course, you would not have thought of your tools as primitive, you would have described them as modern, perhaps even cutting edge. Get It? It may be your lot in life to find it necessary to relocate from time to time for whatever reason and we all know moving is never any fun.
You need food for the journey, so you dispatch a calf, dry or smoke the meat and get on with packing everything else up for the trip. You keep your milk in a large clay pot, probably made by the wife, but the thought of carrying that heavy-ass thing, who knows how far, is at best, depressing. What to do? While you are rubbing your forehead in frustration, you have stroke of genius. I just dealt with my calf and over there in the pile of innards is a stomach or two, I can pour the milk into the stomachs, tie it off and leave that giant pot behind. It will only take her a week or two to make another one.
Problem solved. Except when you get to the new digs and the wife says, “I sure could use some milk.” You say no problem, untie the calf stomach and proudly turn your brilliant solution bottom up. But what comes out is not cool, creamy, sweet milk, but a chunky slurry of pale white liquid and squishy lumps of white weirdness.
The wife gives you one of those looks and you are perplexed beyond measure. In your panic, you pour off the liquid and squeeze the lumps to get as much liquid as you can out of the disaster. Amazingly enough the taste of the liquid is not horrible and when pressed together the lumps are soft, sweet and flavor filled. Congratulations, you just invented the first cultured dairy product, one that we now call cheese.
Calf’s stomachs contain an enzyme called rennet, which coagulates the proteins in the milk causing them to congregate and leaving behind a white liquid. We call this curds and whey. People have been manipulating this process ever since and there are an untold number of cheeses in the modern world.
Cheese is a product of the environment in which it is made. This why true Parmesan-Reggiano can only be produced in the Parma and Reggio Emilia, regions of Italy. This cheese dates back at least 900 years and is one of the most imitated cheeses in the world. Think green cardboard tube, not really Parmesan cheese.
Monks in this region raised dairy cows and requiring a way to extend the shelf life of the excess milk, they began to produce cheese. After adding the rennet and removing the whey, the curds are heated, salt is added and the mixture is placed in molds and left to do its thing.
It is the naturally occurring bacteria in the grass of this region, eaten by the cows, that make this cheese unique in the world. Salt keeps the harmful bacteria at bay and allows the good guys to work without interference. After a couple of years, the bacteria have converted the lactose to lactic acid and the resulting product is slightly sour, with nutty to fruity overtones and a delightful but minute gritty texture. Obviously, production techniques have been modernized since the 10th century, but only in terms of equipment used, the ingredients have never been altered and the producers have gone to great lengths to protect the name of Parmesan-Reggiano cheese. In this country any product labeled simply Parmesan is in fact an imitation. Think green cardboard tube.
There are many examples of region specific cheeses around the world. The best-known blue cheese is perhaps Roquefort. This cheese is made from sheep’s milk and can only be produced in the Combalou Caves in the Roquefort-sur-Soulzon region of France. The naturally occurring mold in these caves is Penicillium Roquefort which grows very well on the curds placed in the caves.
Holes poked in the curds allow the mold to penetrate to the interior and after a few weeks, the resulting cheese is veined with blue streaks of mold. Acid produced by the mold gives Roquefort is unique tangy flavor and leaves the cheese moist and crumbly. Like parmesan, Roquefort is widely imitated.
People have been making cheese for thousands of years and for the vast majority of that time, they did not understand what was really happening. All they knew was if they put some curds in cave and came back in a couple of years they had a delightful edible product. No concept of bacteria, harmful or otherwise, no concept of lactose conversion to lactic acid, no concept of rennet, just good eating.
Rather than attempt to appeal to a wider base of voters by recognizing the changing demographics of the country, the Republican Party is singularly focused on altering the structure of the electoral process in such a way as to reduce the number of people willing to run the gauntlet required to cast a vote.
When Trump says you gotta fight or you won’t have a country, what he means is conservative old white guys have to have the power at all costs. Stop the steal is a dog whistle for we can’t win on merit; don’t trust the system, massive fraud, it’s the only explanation. Let’s change the rules.
Much has been made of Georgia making it illegal to give food or water to people waiting in line to vote, especially since Georgia is world renowned for its spectacular serpentine strings of voters. While this is undoubtedly barbaric, it serves as an easy distraction from the real objective of the Georgia republicans.
Historically, the Georgia secretary of state served as the chair of the State Election Board and we all saw Mr. Raffensperger resist all calls to declare the results dubious. So, he has been demoted to a non-voting member with his replacement to be elected by the legislature, who has the power to take over local election offices. Does anyone wonder if the person elected by the Georgia legislature will work to give them the results they seek? Only desperate people would think it is a good idea to put a politically indebted person in charge of elections.
The dog and pony show unfolding right now in Arizona would be laughable if it was not so frightening. Unable to find evidence of fraud or to get the result they wanted after multiple credible audits and recounts, the all-wise Arizona State Senate, hired a stop the steal, Qanon adherent that has been an active purveyor of the most outlandish theories regarding the recent election that have been proposed.
This hyper-partisan, with zero ballot auditing experience, is currently doing yet another audit on the Arizona Presidential election results; not all the elections, just the one the Republicans lost. Who among us doubts the outcome of this fair and balanced recount?
The entire stop the steal message has given Republican State Legislatures across the country the cover they need to restrict voting in the name of election security. We are told voters are greatly concerned that the election they lost must have been consumed with irregularities and we must address these issues with the utmost urgency.
Many voters are indeed concerned, primarily and only because Republican politicians have told them they should be. No evidence of fraud has ever been found, but we are still hearing that there was fraud, had to be fraud must have been fraud. Now the lie is being repeated often enough and with enough conviction, and we are seeing first-hand that perceptions can be changed and a new reality is thus born.
When the outcome of national elections is doubted, not accepted and challenged without evidence, the very idea of self-rule is in jeopardy. Propagating a narrative put forth by an amoral President is a danger to our children’s future.
Arizona in particular and the Republican Party in general, is pouring milk into a calf’s stomach without understanding what is going to come out. You can’t put milk curds into just any old cave and expect to get a tasty cheese, The French in Roquefort just got lucky. I fear we have begun a process without understanding how it will work or what the consequences may be. It is a dangerous experiment indeed. We are quite likely to end up with a green cardboard tube.
TNLJ 8119