Sunny day today, but that just means that a little snow melts on top of the snow mounds near the streets, then refreezes on the streets, forming hazardous ice sheets. I saw one wide sheet today at the corner of a large street and a side street. Right-turning cars onto the side street risk skidding out of control on the turn – and maybe into a car waiting to make a turn onto the large street.

We’ve gone through a half-gallon (1.89l) of almond milk in a couple of days. A little expensive, but it’s tasty stuff, and probably healthful. But it’s not enough to market it as merely healthful. The container, which is exactly like a milk carton, goes to considerable length to assure buyers of its virtues as a food. It also assures us of its ritual purity.

Or at least the modern equivalent. It is:

FREE OF [caps in the original] dairy, soy, lactose, cholesterol, peanuts, casein, gluten, eggs, saturated fat, and MSG.

All Natural with added Vitamins & Minerals [caps again – though English is not, last time I checked, German].

Made from REAL Almonds.

Vegan.

Made in a Peanut Free Facility [I really want to add a hyphen].

and

This Almondmilk [sic] is made from Almonds that were not genetically modified.

That last one piqued my interest. By golly, I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that no Frankenalmonds have crept into my diet. I checked a little further, and found that the almonds used to make my almond milk are from California.

From there, I looked up the Almond Board of California. A handy Almond Board pdf tells me that there are no fewer than 30 varieties of almonds raised in California, 10 of which account for 70 percent of production.

Always nice to learn something new. The pdf also says, “All California Almonds are developed using traditional methods; genetically modified almond varieties are not planted or available in California.”

The carton, then, was making a virtue of necessity. Strictly speaking, though, “traditional methods” must involve breeding almonds for desirable characteristics over a good many years. A kind of genetic modification, in other words, just as agriculture has done for centuries. Just not the boogeyman kind from modern labs.