WOW! got done quoting...too many...deleted it... I'll just ramble on and try to remember what I had to say Lol!.
Salt fish is way different than pickled fish, I've ate pickled fish many times, love it just have never made it myself which is way cheaper. My great-grampa used to eat salt cod in a wood box, always wanted to try it just haven't yet. They do sell it in grocery stores. If I remember right he soaked the fish in water, rinsed, soaked, rinsed, made a gravy out of it and ate it on toast.
Ron, I'll definitely check out that Netflix show you mentioned, I've mentioned this here before but I recommend 'Food Inc', put it off because I figured it was political propaganda, wasn't, good one to watch. Desertchic, there was part of food inc that talked about grass fed beef, virtually no bad bacteria (listeria maybe?) in grass fed beef compared to grain fed. Not on food inc, grass fed beef has higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of bad.
FYI, I live in dairy country, work at a dairy plant, learned a lot about our food. I started on the beginning of the process, now am on the tail end, had almost every job here now, was day off and weekend, vacation relief for awhile, had to know all jobs. Tail end, the whey, I right now run a reverse osmosis system that takes the whey from 4% to 15%, then a humongous evaporation system that takes it to 40% solids, load it on trailers, spend 7hrs a day on my butt occasionally pushing 'buttons' on a HMI screen, good job that no one wants to do cause it's very stressful Lol! When things go wrong, goes wrong quick and bad....got to hear it and feel it, and be quick on your toes, computers suck when things go wrong.
They condensed whey used to go to a pharmaceutical plant, dehydrated it further to powder and used it for coatings on pills, they went out of business. Now some loads go to farms for land spread fertilizer, some go to a place for 'animal feed'. The pharmaceutical plant I was told when I was in milk receiving, driver that went there said when he was unloading a super stinky trailer was there, "what is that", slaughter house remnants, spleens, blood, etc, "what do you do with it?", make it into a powder, it's the beef protein on the label in all soups you buy.....
On the tail end now, many loads of 'animal feed' later I asked the driver what animals do they feed it to? "I took a tour of the place, they get all out of date food from all stores, bread, donuts, ring dings and ho hos, candy, boxed macaroni and cheese, pasta, anything you can imagine in a store, swirling in their mixer, shredding and chopped up, buckets and boxes and bags, supposedly they get the plastic out, then they spread it on a huge floor and add your Gus's whey, dehydrates, they bust it up and load it." load it to feed what? (I was thinking maybe a dog food plant), "Beef feed lots out west"....wow, they feed them candy....
Beginning of process, milk intake, loved the job had it for yrs, I personally checked the milk for antibiotics and bacteria. The driver takes a sample that is put in a little refrigerator and that is what the farmer is paid for, butterfat, protein and the grade is depending on the cleanliest, bacteria. I have seen loads rejected for both antibiotics and bacteria yrs ago, now it's rare, very rare. The majority of the milk we take in day after day, week after week, many months I can look in that microscope checking for DMC, and see nothing, no 'bugs', raw milk is pretty safe. Many drivers have their own jug in their sample cooler, drink it, say they grew up on it. The smell of raw milk in thousands of gallons soo sweet, never tired from smelling it, you don't smell it from a jug or a glass.
My DW grew up on raw milk, they always had a couple milk cows and milked them themselves, bred them with the beef they raised, doesn't matter what you breed them with to get milk. I worked a bluestone quarry yrs ago on a dairy farm that bred their cows with white faced black Herefords, at the time they were getting $5 a calf, not even worth trucking them.
I don't know how they keep going besides it's all they know. Recently milk was at a all time high after yrs of nothing, when it was at a low, very low, a big dairy company posted recorded profits....not ours but nearby. I've personally witnessed price manipulation, the ones that are marketing milk for farmers in bed with the factories, crazy stuff, no rhyme nor reason other than someone is making $$ other than the farmer. Milk is at a downside now, again. We Americans could feed the earth with what we are capable of, politics gets in the way, special interests and lobbyists fund them.....
