Glued to the TV (Feb 28/18)

How to pasteurize milk correctly

                        by Robert LaFrance

            My cousin Clyde, who retired from dairy farming a year and a half ago, and I were sitting and watching a high school hockey game when the first period buzzer sounded. While Mister Zamboni and his rider were clearing the dust from the ice, Clyde and I talked about farming and why he had given up his dairy herd, one of the best in western New Brunswick.

            It turned out to have been an involuntary retirement, exacerbated by his hired hand’s lack of understanding of how governments (don’t) work.

            “It was government regulations,” he said. “I farmed for over thirty-five years and my stables and equipment were always spic-and-span, but not according that that nest of government regulators – provincial and federal. I could have eaten off the floor in my stables.” He didn’t explain why he would have considered such a thing.

            He went on to list some of the things he had been required to do and they included pasteurizing his own cows’ milk. “While I was away, my hired hand read the regulations. Each milk (or milch) cow had to be dipped in boiling water for three minutes,” Clyde explained. “He learned later that they meant the milk itself, not the cow. By the time I got home from Minto I didn’t have much of a herd left. He said he had always thought three minutes was a bit long.”

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            In last week’s column I mentioned the Olympics and how some people find themselves glued to the television (sounds painful) for the two or three weeks that those sporting events are shown. Then of course there’s the suspense of watching to see which Russian athlete(s) will be banned for life (two months) for using “performance enhancing” drugs.

            A week before the competition began in early February I wrote to Sigrud Melanson, the head of the South Korean Olympic games committee to give him a suggestion. “Whenever a Russian athlete wins a gold medal, take it away and charge him or her with doping. Make it automatic. It will save a lot of trouble later on when those people hack an election somewhere because you can also include a travel ban.”

            I didn’t receive a reply. This shocked me. I included several other suggestions in my second letter, such as (1) Mike Duffy to be named Olympics Ethics Commissioner, and (2) Donald Trump be banned from competing in the Truth Games scheduled for late this spring. I needn’t have bothered with that second one, because some minor questioning determined that Donald Trump hasn’t even a vague idea what truth is.

Continuing on the theme of the Olympics, I think the whole thing should be banned anyway. It’s like watching a never-ending beer commercial in which dozens of  young men or women with perfect physiques and brilliant smiles are shown guzzling beer.

Tell me this: would these people, if they were habitual beer drinkers, look like this? In my nearly seventy years, I have met hundreds of beer drinkers, often including one in my own mirror, and have not seen it, especially on Saturday mornings. (I am referring to the Old Days.)

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“If you don’t get down off that roof, I’m going to throttle you!” Mrs. Tuttle, our next door neighbour, said to her son Whiffletree one day. I was just thinking about those old days this morning between my bacon and eggs.

Of course Mrs. Tuttle didn’t throttle her son because it would have been illegal and she was very law-abiding in every way. However, she thought about it every day. Whiffletree was ‘a handful’ as people say about other people’s bratty kids, but to everyone’s surprise, he grew up to have a successful career as a dairy farmer. He sterilized the milk, not the cows.

The reason I brought up the subject really had nothing to do with Mrs. Tuttle, Whiffletree or cows. It is about the word ‘throttle’. A throttle was a pull-out switch that used to be on the old Model T Ford and other cars. Later on Ford moved it to the floor of the car and we called it a footfeed or gas pedal. I mentioned in a recent column that the first car I ever drove was a 1949 Monarch, a large gas-guzzling Ford, but the second car I drove (I was all of 12 years old) was a 1950 Meteor that had a throttle. Fun times in the Maritimes! I hope I added to your vocabulary.
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