Dr Bratt, some supermarkets in Tobago do not have locally produced ground coffee on their shelves but they offer for sale numerous brands of imported "instant coffees."When I asked the managers the reasons for this, the response was, "We sell what our customers want."In many of the retail stores in the USA and in Canada one cannot find coffee percolators. There are numerous brands of drip-type coffee makers where the hot water passes over or through the ground coffee.
The new models of these machines now accept pre-packaged coffee in small paper sachets.It appears to me that only South and Central American people, including those resident in Florida, know about coffee percolators and continue to use them.Coffee percolators are available in Miami and possibly in those areas where there is a high population of Latinos. But is instant coffee true coffee?Then there is milk. Recently when I called Nestle to enquire about the monitoring of the quality of their milk products.
The senior employee in the public relations department tried to convince me that their reconstituted milk products with added A and D and other additives was superior to fresh wholesome cows' milk. And she sounded as though she truly believed that to be a fact. Give her a raise.In the good old days of the 1940s when I was a child and lived at Belmont my parents bought fresh cows' milk from the Borde family, Chadees and Sankars who were dairy farmers in Belmont. There continued to be dairy farmers in Woodbrook and in St James up to recent years.
Dairy farmers from San Juan and Barataria brought their milk for sale in Port-of-Spain using as transport not only the trains and buses but often taking rides on the donkey carts bringing coconuts into town.Milk vendors gathered under the eves of the JB Fernandes rumshop at the corner of Prince and Charlotte streets where policemen would take samples of their milk for forwarding to the Government Chemist to test for purity (not adulterated) etc.
Today, what agency ensures the quality of the products reconstituted from powdered milk, which we now accept as milk?How many of our children of today have ever received true cows' or goats' milk? Did you notice that powdered skim milk now costs more than whole cream powdered milk? Funny eh!In recent years a product called "filled milk" has appeared on our supermarket shelves and passes off as condensed milk.
It contains a high percentage of vegetable oils. But it is selling because consumers do not check the labels for ingredients and because it is cheaper than real condensed milk. Similarly with "filled evaporated milk."Many of the brands of that product called yogurt contain pectins, gelatin, other thickening agents and even corn starch.But they are selling. I always check the labels on the "Greek style" yogurt which I prefer, to ensure that the product contains only milk, acidophilus and other "live" yogurt cultures.
I enjoyed reading your article published in the T&T Guardian earlier this week.
Ian Lambie