Industrial chalk that was used as adulterants wasn’t nearly as pure as the calcium carbonate you are imagining
Comment on YSK: Regulations don't exist because governments like them...
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Surely you could’ve come up with a better example.
Chalk is just calcium carbonate. Modern medicine uses calcium carbonate to as a calcium supplement.
We are still adding things to milk. Any milk that’s “calcium fortified” or “extra calcium”, and a lot of nut-milks, have calcium carbonate as an ingredient to this day.
I mean, I get your point…honestly, I do…but it’s coming across nearly as the same sort of anti-science drivel you’d expect from the counterargument.
Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
T156@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Plus I can’t imagine that a company who is adulterating their milk with chalk dust is going to stop to find and choose a food-safe chalk dust and supplier. They’d just scoop a bunch from whoever’s cheapest, and if they adulterate their chalk dust with bleach or something, that’ll be going straight into the milk.
Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
we’ve become complacent for so long due to good regulations keeping us safe invisibly, that your average voter seems to think we never needed them to begin with.
The ignorance is staggering and dangerous
Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 week ago
Yeah the good times making weak people has gone full swing and people don’t realize how bad it could be.
Weak people who have never been tested with an actual bad time in their life. Just upset if they had even a little restriction.
witx@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
In your examples you know those things are being added to the milk because it’s in the ingredients, the case OP mentioned you didn’t know. Are you able to see the difference?
And there were many other things added to food besides chalk
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Exactly. There are better examples. Chalk is a bad one because it is, technically, edible, and still being used as an additive to this day.
witx@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Chalk in OP’s example was being added without people’s knowledge, it doesn’t matter how inoffensive it is. How hard is it to grasp?
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Because people are dumb. Chalk is in milk, now, right on the label…even marketed as a feature.
But if you tell that to any random schmuck they either won’t believe you or they’ll be disgusted. And then probably keep drinking it anyway.
And that’s with the information right there on the label.
I’m not trying to downplay the example, but there were far worse atrocities fixed by regulations.
sundray@lemmus.org 1 week ago
It’s not the chalk that’s the problem.
It’s using it to disguise the fact that the milk you’re selling is spoiled.
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 1 week ago
In big cities like New York, some dairies fed cows leftover grain mush from distilleries, called swill. The cows were sick, the milk was watery and bluish, and to make it look normal, some sellers added stuff like chalk, flour, even plaster. It wasn’t about hiding spoiled milk like you suggest - it was about making terrible milk from unhealthy cows seem drinkable.
Ambiance6195@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Bro. Jesus fucking christ.
That’s literally the same thing. Did you just learn what a thesaurus is?
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Except it’s not the same thing. Spoiled refers to milk that has gone bad due to age or improper storage. That’s not what the swill milk scandal was about. It was milk that was bad to begin with - not spoiled, just poor quality because it came from sick animals.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Yeah. I get that…but the way it was phrased by OOP it was as of “chalk” was used by an example as if that makes it somehow worse. We still put “chalk” in milk, though.
It’s like those people who say “eww” to hot because there’s a regulation limiting how many bug parts are allowed in them…not even considering the alternative of “no limit on how many bug parts”.