Safe as milk

Best before 19-11-66
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Everything in your fridge has a Best-Before date on them.

Milk goes bad... well not really it just changes. Some little microbe decides that it can reproduce by utilizing the lactose which is a sugar in the milk and as a by product lactic acid is produced.

Of course since all the milky goodness is now forced to exist in an acid environment the casein protein of the milk denaturates and unfolds, and as a consequence the texture of the milk changes. It curddles.

Now some people would say the milk has gone bad, and other people from other cultures would call it buttermilk and drink it down.

Proteins in milk have a habit of expressing themselves in different ways and it usually finds an expression when the proteins become denaturated. Heat is another way of denaturating a protein. Boil up some milk and then leave it to cool and a skin will form on the surface of the milk. The skin is denaturated protein.

P.S. What a load of codswollop. The protein stuff was good and that is the way milk gets modified to make fermented milk products, but I tell you here and now if you eat bad stuff then you will get sick.

I should know I was up at 3 in the morning with a blowtorch at my backside singing John Cash's "Ring of fire", while my stomach churned like a cement mixer as a prelude to projectile vomiting. I am in bed for the day and well past my sell-by-date.