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Mother Jones
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A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.
This is the story you’ll often hear about how humans discovered cheese: One hot day 9,000 years ago, a nomad was on his travels and brought along some milk in an animal stomach—a sort of proto-thermos—to have something to drink at the end of the day. But when he arrived, he discovered that the rennet in the stomach lining had curdled the milk, creating the first cheese.
But there’s a major problem with that story, as University of Vermont cheese scientist and historian Paul Kindstedt explained on the latest episode of Gastropod—a podcast that explores food through the lens of science and history. The nomads living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East in 7000 B.C. would have been lactose-intolerant. A nomad on the road wouldn’t have wanted to drink milk; it would have left him in severe gastro-intestinal distress.
Kindstedt, author of the book Cheese and Culture, explained that about a thousand years before traces of cheese-making show up in the archaeological record, humans began growing crops. Those early fields of wheat and other grains attracted local wild sheep and goats, which provide milk for their young. Human babies are also perfectly adapted for milk. Early humans quickly made the connection and began dairying—but for the first thousand years, toddlers and babies were the only ones consuming the milk. Human adults were uniformly lactose-intolerant, says Kindstedt. What’s more, he told us that “we know from some exciting archaeo-genetic and genomic modeling that the capacity to tolerate lactose into adulthood didn’t develop until about 5500 B.C.”—which is at least a thousand years after the development of cheese.
It took another recent advance to figure out the origins of cheese: Kindstedt says that only recently have scientists been able to analyze the chemical traces on pottery from thousands of years ago in order to find milk fat in the higher concentrations that indicate it was used to hold cheese or butter, rather than plain milk.
Using this new research, Kinstead explains, we now know that the real dawn of cheese came about 8,500 years ago, with two simultaneous developments in human history. First, by then, over-intensive agricultural practices had depleted the soil, leading to the first human-created environmental disaster. As a result, Neolithic humans began herding goats and sheep more intensely, as those animals could survive on marginal lands unfit for crops. And secondly, humans invented pottery: the original practical milk-collection containers.
In the warm environment of the Fertile Crescent region, Kinstedt explained, any milk not used immediately and instead left to stand in those newly invented containers “would have very quickly, in a matter of hours, coagulated due to the heat and the natural lactic acid bacteria in the milk. And at some point, probably some adventurous adult tried some of the solid material and found that they could tolerate it a lot more of it than they could milk.” That’s because about 80 percent of the lactose drains off with the whey, leaving a digestible and, likely, rather delicious fresh cheese.
With the discovery of cheese, suddenly those early humans could add dairy to their diets. Cheese made an entirely new source of nutrients and calories available for adults, and, as a result, dairying took off in a major way. What this meant, says Kindstedt, is that “children and newborns would be exposed to milk frequently, which ultimately through random mutations selected for children who could tolerate lactose later into adulthood.”
In a very short time, at least in terms of human evolution—perhaps only a few thousand years—that mutation spread throughout the population of the Fertile Crescent. As those herders migrated to Europe and beyond, they carried this genetic mutation with them. According to Kindstedt, “It’s an absolutely stunning example of a genetic selection occurring in an unbelievably short period of time in human development. It’s really a wonder of the world, and it changed Western civilization forever.”
To learn more about what those first cheeses tasted like—and how we got from there to Velveeta—listen to Gastropod’s “Say Cheese!” episode:
Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chili peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.
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How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese
Mother Jones
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Police
This is an estimate of the money that police departments spend to respond to and investigate gun-related crimes. It includes police salaries, benefits, and equipment, as well as overhead costs to the police department. Miller based this calculation on the amount of time police spent on initial response and follow-up (based on this sample survey) and the amount of money police departments spend on average per officer (including fringe benefits, equipment, supervision, etc.) using data from the 2006 Census of Governments.
The True Cost of Gun Violence in America
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The True Cost of Gun Violence: Our Methodology
Emergency transport
This is the cost of the labor and equipment involved in transporting victims of gun violence to the hospital. Miller calculated the likelihood that each type of victim (fatal or injured) would reach the hospital via emergency transport using data from a national sample of emergency room visits. The cost of transport was based on a GAO survey from 2010, which was then updated to 2012 dollars. The median cost of emergency transport for an individual injury or fatality was $452.
Medical
This is the cost of treating victims of gun violence in the hospital and post-discharge. It includes the hospital service and insurance claims processing fees paid by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the victims themselves. Hospital costs are based on a database of 40 to 50 million healthcare claims from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, insurance costs come from data collected by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and post-discharge costs are based on medical expense data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Council on Compensation Insurance.
Mental health
This refers to the cost of counseling for victims of gun violence and their families. It includes the services paid by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the victims themselves. The number of people seeking mental health services per gun violence incident (death or injury) and the cost for these services are based on Ted Miller and Mark Cohen’s 1998 survey of 168 mental health counselors—including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and pastoral counselors—which found that for every murder victim, 1.5 to 2.4 people sought mental health treatment.
Legal services and adjudication
This is the cost of legal and adjudication services for perpetrators of homicide and aggravated assault, including salary of the judges and public defenders, and other overhead costs of operating a courthouse. These costs are based on a 2010 study by Kathryn McCollister et al, which examined Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI data to calculate local, state, and federal government expenditures on legal services for homicides and aggravated assaults. Miller’s estimate assumes that legal and adjudication costs do not apply to unintentional deaths or injuries, legal interventions, or suicides.
Incarceration
This is the estimated amount of money needed to incarcerate perpetrators (convicted in 2012) of homicides or aggravated assaults over the course of their sentences. These estimates are based on a 2010 study by Kathryn McCollister et al, which examined Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI data to calculate local, state, and federal government expenditures on incarceration of perpetrators of firearm homicides and assaults. Here again Miller assumes that incarceration costs do not apply to unintentional deaths or injuries, legal interventions, or suicides.
Work costs for victims and perpetrators
This refers to the potential wages and household productivity that were lost due to a death or injury. Miller estimated lost wages of victims and imprisoned perpetrators using expected earnings data from the Current Population Survey (US Census), data on the duration of temporary disabilities from the Annual Survey on Workplace Injuries (Bureau of Labor Statistics), and workers compensation data on the probability of permanent disabilities by the type of injury. Lost household productivity is estimated using a 2009 study based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. In both estimates, Miller assumes that victims and perpetrators make the same amount of money and are as productive as the typical American in their gender and age group.
Costs to the employer
This refers to the costs other than benefits that an employer incurs when a worker leaves employment permanently or temporarily because of injury. It captures costs of workplace disruption, rehiring and retraining, overtime to meet production schedules, and investigation and reporting of on-the-job incidents. This number is based on estimates of employer costs by injury severity used by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Losses in quality of life
This is an estimate of the financial value of the pain, suffering, and fear that accompany a death or injury. Miller concludes that a life is worth about $6.2 million, which is a violence-specific average based on the amounts awarded by juries in wrongful injury and death cases. It includes lost wages and household production.
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Mother Jones
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California’s drought isn’t bad news for everyone: turns out West Nile Virus has been thriving in the state’s parched climate. The California Department of Public Health announced last week that in 2014 it recorded the most cases of the potentially deadly mosquito-borne illness since it first showed up in the Golden State more than a decade ago. The CDPH tallied 801 diagnoses, including 31 deaths—the most ever in California.
Credit:
The Drought Is Behind California’s Skyrocketing West Nile Virus Numbers
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Mother Jones
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I continue to be a star patient. Final results from yesterday clocked in at 5.2 million stem cells. Apparently I only need two million for the transplant, but they like to get a double sample in case I need another transplant a few years down the road. So four million is the goal.
So why am I still here? Good question. I don’t really have a good answer, though. Just in case? More is always better? This is actually a SPECTRE front and they use excess stem cells to breed an undefeatable clone army that will take over the world?
Not sure. In any case, stem cell collection has gone swimmingly and I’ll soon be out of here. Now there’s only one step left: the actual second round chemo itself followed by transplanting my stem cells back into my body. That begins on April 20.
BY THE WAY: The folks here, who have much more experience with cancer meds than your standard ER facility, are quite certain that my excruciating back pain on Friday was a side effect of the Neupogen. So that’s that. Today was my last shot of Neupogen, which means I can get off the pain meds in the next day or two.
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Mother Jones
I am blogging direct from the Apheresis Center at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. There’s a large machine to my left that makes ticking noises and—hopefully—is drawing blood from one of the catheters in my Hickman Port. The stem cells are then removed and the remaining blood is returned through the other catheter in the Hickman Port.
There was some question about whether this would happen today. You see, my daily Neupogen injections are supposed to stimulate my white blood cell production and therefore my plasma stem cell production. The goal is for my stem cell production to be above 10, and if it’s lower than that, there’s no point in doing the collection.
So earlier this morning they drew some blood to test my CD34 level. It was….
102.00.
This is superheroic performance, though the nurse declined to tell me if I had set a new world record. In any case, this is great news for two reasons. First, it means no more Neupogen shots. Second, it means that I’m likely to be finished here in two or three days. Yippee!
And this surely demands a treat for everyone. So here’s some bonus catblogging. As you can see, Hilbert has cleverly used staircase access to perch himself on the top of Karen’s bookcase, where he is lord of all he surveys. As usual.
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Libros
