[MitzaLizalor]

Originally Posted by Isabella White

In the back of my cupboard in the pantry, I've found a box of croutons that are past the sell-by date. One wonders if that will suffice?

Sincerely, Isabella W.

Sounds like a South African "milk culture" scam! At least the "growers" got a return (unlike contributors to the Vatican treasury) and like all Ponzi schemes the returns continue until new "investors" dry up. Or the sceme is closed down as happened in the case of Kubus. Remember that name.

Kits Sold to Growers https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-06-09-fi-10042-story.html

Growers receive between $6 and $10 per batch of dried culture. Activator Supply Co. sells the activator kits to growers who sell the completed culture back to Culture Farms. Activator Supply recently moved from Las Vegas to Pahrump, a new community 60 miles west of Las Vegas, after being denied a business license by Las Vegas authorities … In the last two years, South Africans invested about $180 million in a similar soured milk culture developed by a South African farmer before the government stepped in last November and closed down the operation. The U.S. culture promoters have denied any connection between their business and the South Africa operation.

. . .SUMMARY:

• Company #1 requires Product A
  • Product A is a culture grown from Product B
  
  
• Company #2 sells Product B
  • Product B is added to milk and allowed to germinate
  • The resulting substance is dried out and sold to Company #1
    • This is Product A
  
  
• Company #1 only has one customer
  • The customer is Company #2

A completely new scheme, definitely unrelated to the other one. It's called Kibus.

Apparently the new scheme is legal because it involves a real product. Kaolin. The previous (and completely unrelated) scheme raised millions through a "milk culture" project. Thousands of South Africans fell for it, furiously buying the mixture of cheese and milk culture from Company #2, growing it in glasses, drying it into a powder for re-sale to Company #1 and recruiting others to do the same.

At the time Company A claimed that it needed vast quantities of the dried powder to develop a skin cream product. However, there never was such a product and investigators found that the milk culture was simply a cover for a pyramid scheme. Tons of dried milk-culture were found rotting in a shed. The flow of Products A & B would constitute a classic pyramid scheme but the flow of money would be more like a Ponzi scheme. Both schemes finally collapsed.

Enter Company #3 (definitely not related to other companies having similar names which is entirely coincidental) with an actual product.

Rotten milk entrepeneur has fresh idea https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/rotten-milk-entrepeneur-123121

The man behind Kubus, the notorious rotten milk pyramid scheme that took South Africa by storm in the early 1980s, has launched a new money-making venture. This time it's not rotten milk, but kaolin, a type of clay. He calls it Kibus. And the new scheme also involves people recruiting others in pyramid style … his new scheme is "totally above board" and will create hundreds of jobs for unemployed poor people.

It's obvious to anyone who reads their material (of which there is a vast amount) that no actual product has ever been available from the Vatican. Even if there were an intangible product, which is what they claim, the means of obtaining it are so bizarre and vary to such a huge extent from one century to the next (this is where the reading comes in) that they lose all credibility as a likely vendor of said invisibles. You'd be better off keeping the croutons. Who knows? They may sprout into something beneficial. But even if they don't, they're more use than the lugubrious personnel of papism.