{the astonishing story of real milk}
other Earth News is a publication that I have been inspired, encouraged, and informed by ever since I saw it on my Mother-In-Law’s table 4 years ago. If you have never looked into it, I would highly recommend it.
While we were in Europe, I brought the latest copy of Mother Earth News with me. Only a few pages in I ran across an article by Anne Mendelson, titled The Astonishing Story of Real Milk. Ms. Mendelson was able to share the two views, sides, and opinions in the history of milk and dairy options.
Thousands of years ago in the Near East, somebody saw an animal nursing her young and had the eccentric idea of getting in on the act. A strange custom, this, using another creature’s milk for food. But in regions where it took hold, milk became the object of prehistoric skills that we can still learn from.
In the late 1960s, before waves of immigration brought people from every corner of the globe to the United States, the American food scene had two goals: to get as many different products as possible before the buying public, and to weed out alternatives that would interfere with profits. Both aims merrily coexist today, with lunatic results exemplified by, let’s say, yogurt. You can now walk into a supermarket and take your pick of “amaretto cheesecake” nonfat yogurt, low-fat yogurt with Reese’s Pieces, or milk-free chocolate soy yogurt — without being able to find anything that people brought up on the real thing would recognize as real yogurt worth putting a spoon into.
Something curious happened to our ideas about milk about two centuries ago. Residents of England and North America began placing great emphasis on one particular way of consuming it: in fresh, drinkable form.
Up to a century or two earlier, most people actually drank soured raw milk. This is not the same as the soured pasteurized milk that may be in your refrigerator right now. When raw milk sours, lactic acid bacteria in the air create a fermentation that preserves the milk and yields delicious, tangy flavors. When pasteurized milk sours, any number of other bacteria may be responsible, and they aren’t going to produce the same result.
Then around that time, an urban market for fresh milk began to take shape, fostered by ideas about health that in a few generations would make fresh milk a nearly mandatory part of everyone’s diet, especially children’s.
I think it is realistic to hope that the United States will become a place where the best elements of all the world’s great dairy traditions flourish. That prospect makes this historical look at the worst side of our dairying traditions less discouraging than it would be otherwise.
