Tuesday, December 02, 2008

I do not know whether drinking sour milk will hurt you.

My comfortable life has few real luxuries -- okay, that's a lie -- but one of the most important is my morning iced latte.

Years ago, my friend Gary gave me a fancy espresso/cappuccino machine as a combination birthday/Christmas/housewarming present, and I use it every morning. My friend Pam just sent me a bag of amazing decaffeinated espresso beans, so it's a whole ritual: turn the machine on, run some water through it, grind the beans, load the dripper-thing (the technical term), and add milk, Sweet'n'Low and ice.

This morning, after a week away from home, I was so glad to get back to my routine, and even more relieved that I still had most of a jug of skim milk in the refrigerator.

I don't know what I thought that milk had been doing for the past week. Since Gardiner, as far as I know, was not sucked into a black hole, that milk was aging at the same rate as the rest of us -- but that did not occur to me until I had taken the first big swig.

AGGH. PLEH. I've rinsed my mouth out twice now, and still feel the taste in the back of my throat. But that's all it is, right? Sour milk can't kill you, can it? I mean, this is homogenized and pasteurized and vitamin-fortified and all the rest of it - this queasy feeling in my stomach is really just in my head. Isn't it?

3 comments:

Ed Lamb said...

Sour milk is fermented milk. It will not kill you, but it will make you gag or hurl.

Leave milk to sit long enough, and it turns into much better things, like cheese. The liquid that separtesout does need to be drained/strained though, because -- again -- drinking what is essentially milk vinegar will make you nauseous.

Anonymous said...

what Ed said
Sour Cream, Youghurt, cheese, all milk in decomposition

RBo

Still wouldn't recommend it, though

Anonymous said...

actually if you have pasteurized milk, that sour is BAD bacteria that do NOT form things like sourcream, yogart, etc... you need UNpasteurized milk that contain the 30 other bacterias that help SAFELY breakdown milk proteins. This sour milk that drank, you most likely got at the grocery store CAN make you sick DON'T DRINK IT!!! There are vendors that sell raw milk without hormones, anti-biotics that IS safe and turns SOUR not PUTRID. Milk is a fascinating thing to study, and I highly recommend it. Milk like our ancestors used is far different from what we've been using the past 100ish years. --thats why we are calcium deficient and have irritable bowel.. I could go on and on.