I was feeling strong and detail oriented, but not up to doing more damn nut trees, so I went tangential, and started working on food and food definitions. At some point I've got to figure out cooking, but that's shelved.
Instead, I got sidetracked into the bizarre and wonderful world of cheesemaking. For quite a few cheeses, you need rennet, which is basically an enzymatic coagulator. Rennet comes in sweet little tablets, which clearly will not be available in post-apocalyptic Michiconisota. But surely old time farmers didn't get their rennet from tablets!
No.
Rennet comes from one of the four stomachs of ruminants. There's something kind of neat about this - using the stomach of the animal to make its milk into cheese. Unfortunately, the game requires me to ask questions that sort of remain unanswered by the internet:
- how much does an average abomasum weigh, anyway?
- does it grow with the size of the animal?
Using Photoshop, I estimate that this kid's abomasum is about 100g. (109g, to be exact, using very rough estimates, so ~100g is about right.) That's dry weight, one assumes. At about a gram of abomasum per pound of cheese, calculations are kind of nice and easy.
It looks like only young animals are good for rennet production, which helps the size issue. Now if only I could find a calf abomasum weight to compare, I think I'd be all set to include rennet.
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