...as weird and/or gross as it may sound. (You're probably thinking, "Sheesh, this girl drinks the weirdest stuff... vinegar, raw milk...goodness!") :) This post will probably be *pretty* long, so I would advise you to warm yourself up some tea, grab your favorite blanket, and get as cozy as you can in your computer chair. I will be breaking it up into two or three parts over a period of days. Be prepared to be shocked and amazed at the real, untold story of raw milk. Hope you enjoy it :D
Here I will share with you the excerpt from Nina Plank's Real Food- What to Eat and Why. The "...." I use is either because I skipped a paragraph in order to make this as short and brief as I can, or because I eliminated her ancient earth/evolutionary thoughts. With that exception, it is still a great book and very impacting.
This post will be focusing more on the history of raw milk and the basics of its benefits.
There is a pleasant, lulling rhythm to milking. Even now the sounds are vivid: Mabel's noisy chewing and breathing, the soft rustling as the chicken s settled in for the night. At first, when the bucket is empty, the milk goes "ping" as it hits the tin. As the pail fills up. each squirt meets the foamy liquid and the itch drops. In the summer, her tail-- called a switch in dairy lore-- might miss the flies on her flank and sting my face. With Mabel, there was also a good chance she'd lose her poise and kick the bucket over or step right in it. You had to whisk the bucket away.
Before long her bag was loose and empty, and there were a couple of gallons of milk. If she'd been scratched by brambles, I rubbed her udder with a miraculous salve called Bag Balm, made in Lyndonville, Vermont, since 1899. (I still use it on my own cuts and scratches.) I carried the milk across the footbridge to the house and strained it through a striped pink cloth into glass gallon jars. We wrote the date, plus AM or PM, on masking tape and stuck it to the jar. That was it.
Historically, milk was more than a luxury; it was critically important in the diet. For peasants, the cow kept the grocery bill down and the doctor away. With her ability to convert inedible grass to milk and cream, the cow was at the center of the domestic economy. Rich in protein, fat, calcium, and B vitamins, milk was known as "white meat", capable of transforming an inadequate diet of bread and potatoes into a passable one, especially for children. In cucina povera (peasant cooking), vegetables are often soaked in milk before roasting.
....
Today the family cow is rare, but her role is the same. "The cow is the most productive, efficient creature on earth," writes Joann Grohman in Keeping a Family Cow. "She will give you fresh milk, cream, butter, and cheese, building health, or even making you money. Each year she will give you a calf to sell or raise for beef." The cow also provides manure for the garden, sour milk for the chickens, and skim milk or whey for the pig-- milk-fed pork being a delicacy.
....
Technology plays a big role in the history of milk; every advance in fencing, breeding, and preserving milk made milking more efficient. The result is the consumption of dairy foods is nearly universal in human groups. With the notable exception of East and Southeast Asia, all the European and Middle Eastern cultures, and many Asian and African ones, have a shepherding tradition.
Yogurt, the simplest form of preserved milk is probably as old as milking itself. Milk "invites its own preservation", writes food maven Harold McGee. Fresh milk curdles quickly, especially in hot weather. Yogurt would have been made-- or rather, made itself--simply for lack of refrigeration. The precise origins of yogurt are not known but easy to imagine. When fresh milk is left to stand at room temperature, local bacteria begin to consume the sugars. The milk thickens and becomes tangy with lactic acid. Depending on the bacteria, the result is yogurt, sour cream, or some other cultured milk that stays fresh longer than "sweet", or fresh milk.
....
Turning milk into cheese is the most sophisticated method of preservation. Gouda, Parmigiano Reggiano, and other traditional aged cheeses mature for two years or longer...Though cheese takes many forms, the basic method-- adding rennet to curdle milk-- is unchanged, and even particular recipes survive a long time.
The effects of milk on human diet and culture were widespread and profound...The Romans, too, were milk drinkers and cheese lovers, and spread the habit throughout Europe. Cattle-- in Latin pecus, from pascendum (put to pasture)-- were even used to conduct trades; hence the Roman word for money, pecunia. Caesar was evidently irritated to find that Britons in his far-flung empire neglected to grow crops, preferring to live on meat and milk instead.
The Bible makes dozens of references to milk, which represents privilege, wealth, and spiritual blessings, as in "land flowing with milk and honey." Shakespeare's plays are replete with flattering comparisons to milk, butter, and cream, and modern idioms glorify milk. To flatter someone, you butter him up; the very best is la creme de la creme.
Whether from the human breast or the bovine udder, milk is the universal perfect food--delicious, soothing, nourishing. Milk is delicate, sensuous, transient. It is both simple-- a nutritionally complete meal in a glass-- and marvelously complex, its various ingredients interacting as if the milk itself were a tiny ecosystem. Indeed, traditional milk is alive, teeming with enzymes and micro-organisms...
Milk is diverse. The milks of the ewe and the cow, the mare and the nak, are each different. Even within one species, milk is suggestible: the grass, flowers, and herbs the animal eats create further distinctions, affecting aroma, flavor, and nutrition. The hint of garlic-- or more than a hint-- in milk is not unknown when animals eat their way through a patch of wild ramps. Gracious and malleable, milk is capable of being transformed into cloud-like whipped cream, silken butter, wobbly yogurt, tangy kefir, creamy fromage frais, fluffy ricotta, and dense cheddar.
No wonder this noble food has inspired farmers, chefs, poets-- and even politicians. William Cobbett was a member of Parliament, pamphleteer, and reformer who toured the English countryside in the early ninteenth century. A self-appointed defender of farm life and the working man, Cobbett understood peasant life better than most politicians. "When you have a cow," he wrote, "you have it all."
...stay tuned for part 2!...
