And yes I finished the second part of TRINITY PINES, utilizing an idea I had, a tragic idea.
But all tragic thoughts do not lead to tragedies, right, Joe?
He died a couple of years ago. A great local historian!!!
I had two big chunks of DELICIOUS APPLES but didn't wanna walk to the compost, so I buried them in the lamppost garden in the front yard.
When taking my morning walk, my foot was hurting but I thought, I CAN DO IT, WALK AROUND THE BLOCK.
When I got to the SANDERS House a big black Chevy Equinox was in the drive.
Remember how we loved our cars when they were new?
When I walked around block this morning I found a DOO DAD.
Then I misplaced it. Turned out my pockets on my coat and there it was.
C H E E S E. from the Smithsonian Magazine
There are cheeses with fuzzy rinds such as Camembert, and ones marbled with blue veins such as Cabrales, which ripens for months in mountain caves in northern Spain.
Yet almost all of the world’s thousand-odd kinds of cheese start the same, as a white, rubbery lump of curd.
How do we get from that uniform blandness to this cornucopia? The answer revolves around microbes. Cheese teems with bacteria, yeasts and molds. “More than 100 different microbial species can easily be found in a single cheese type,” says Baltasar Mayo, a senior researcher at the Dairy Research Institute of Asturias in Spain. In other words: Cheese isn’t just a snack, it’s an ecosystem. Every slice contains billions of microbes — and they are what makes cheeses distinctive and delicious.
People have made cheese since the late Stone Age, but only recently have scientists begun to study its microbial nature and learn about the deadly skirmishes, peaceful alliances and beneficial collaborations that happen between the organisms that call cheese home.
To find out what bacteria and fungi are present in cheese and where they come from, scientists sample cheeses from all over the world and extract the DNA they contain. By matching the DNA to genes in existing databases, they can identify which organisms are present in the cheese. “The way we do that is sort of like microbial CSI, you know, when they go out to a crime scene investigation, but in this case we are looking at what microbes are there,” Ben Wolfe, a microbial ecologist at Tufts University, likes to say.
Early on, that search yielded surprises. For example, cheesemakers often add starter cultures of beneficial bacteria to freshly formed curds to help a cheese on its way. Yet when Wolfe’s group and others examined ripened cheeses, they found that the microbial mixes — microbiomes — of the cheeses showed only a passing resemblance to those cultures. Often, more than half of the bacteria present were microbial “strangers” that had not been in the starter culture. Where did they come from?
Many of these microbes turned out to be old acquaintances, but ones we usually know from places other than cheese. Take Brachybacterium, a microbe present in Gruyère, which is more commonly found in soil, seawater and chicken litter (and perhaps even an Etruscan tomb). Or bacteria of the genus Halomonas, which are usually associated with salt ponds and marine environments.
Then there’s Brevibacterium linens, a bacterium that has been identified as a central contributor to the stinkiness of Limburger. When not on cheese, it can often be found in damp areas of our skin such as between our toes. B. linens also adds characteristic notes to the odor of sweat. So when we say that dirty feet smell “cheesy,” there’s truth to it: The same organisms are involved. In fact, as Wolfe once pointed out, the bacteria and fungi on feet and cheese “look pretty much the same.” (An artist in Ireland demonstrated this some years ago by culturing cheeses with organisms plucked from people’s bodies.)
Initially, researchers were dumbfounded by how some of these microbes ended up on and in cheese. Yet, as they sampled the environment of cheesemaking facilities, a picture began to emerge. The milk of cows (or goats or sheep) contains some microbes from the get-go. But many more are picked up during the milking and cheesemaking process. Soil bacteria lurking in a stable’s straw bedding might attach themselves to the teats of a cow and end up in the milking pail, for example. Skin bacteria fall into the milk from the hand of the milker or get transferred by the knife that cuts the curd. Other microbes enter the milk from the storage tank or simply drift down off the walls of the dairy facility.
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