Blog #10 - Syeda

Imagine this: you pick up a piece of cheese at home and mention a small fact to your roommate off-hand--”hey, you know it takes 10 pounds of milk to make each pound of cheese?”  But she retorts, “no it doesn’t. It takes 8.79 pounds, I learned this in my Analysis of Cheese and other Dairy-Based Products course, duh.”  So naturally, your obvious approach is to pull out your handy-dandy smartphone and whip up a quick Google search.  Your first search “how much milk for cheese” gives you results on the perfect ratio of milk to cheese for that perfect mac and cheese recipe, so you revise: “how much milk does it take to make a pound of cheese.”  There are a few random sites, but you come across the website for the International Dairy Foods Association (yes, it’s a real thing) which says that cheese requires nearly 10x its volume in milk to be produced. Aha, you’re right.

Now, the above situation might seem exceedingly trivial, but it almost is completely miraculous once you think about it.  Not to muse excessively, but if you think back to our parents’ time in college, say the late 1980s, finding the answer to such an insignificant question would require that they find some obscure textbook, or wander over to CFANS in St. Paul.  Now, we can pull out our phones and find an answer in the matter of seconds. Finding accurate information might be a bit difficult, but with enough searching and sifting through material, everything is there. Granted, finding accurate data and valid sources takes a little bit of practice, but it isn’t something that can’t be learned.  We’re all taught to find credible sources throughout high school and college anyway, aren’t we? This alone makes the internet a wonderful thing, even despite its faults or misinformation. We literally have the world’s information at our fingertips and it most definitely has changed the way we collectively think. Sure, we look for immediate gratification and answers, but on the other hand, we have so much information available to us that ignorance can essentially be a choice.  We can call each other out on our bullsh*t when we say dumb things and learn things that were originally obscure and reserved for library shelves--but come to think of it, when’s the last time you saw anyone sifting through BioMed’s bookshelves? Almost never. We can learn about social issues, little random facts about cheese, how to fix our cars, really anything, all from the comfort of our beds--or toilets.