southIndian dosas (fermented rice-batter crepes), and you may soon find yourself adoring the southern-style yogurt- or buttermilk-based cold beverages that they serve, laced with whole spices, garlic, herb sprigs, and hot peppers. WhereRussian immigrants have settled, wonderful sour cream and farmer cheese, prostokvasha (a pourable yogurt), and butter with the taste of clotted cream usually follow. The list can only grow as foreign-born cooks and food lovers put down roots here and find themselves able to introduce people raised in a narrow modern version of the Northwestern Cow Belt mentality to some of the “new” (though really old) fresh dairy products that have come to America.
And this isn’t to mention a growing revolt against milk processed to a fare-thee-well before any of us can get our hands on it. For all the continued prominence of horrible examples to the contrary, today it is more possible than it’s been in at least half a century for many of us to find honest, unhomogenized whole milk from small herds and dairies run by businesspeople who care about well-tended milch animals and fresh milk flavor.
In short, I think it is realistic rather than naive to hope that the United States will consummate the story of the great dairying zones by giving the best elements of all four a chance to flourish on American soil. That prospect makes a detailed historical look at the worst side of our own dairying traditions less discouraging than it might be.
THE STORY OF MODERNMILK
Or, Is This What We Really Want?
Y ou can love fresh dairy products as some of life’s best pleasures and still be saddened by the spectacle of modern dairying. Milk deserves many superlatives. But unfortunately, among them is the title of this country’s most misunderstood food. Nothing more cruelly illustrates the unholy wars between desire and fear, gratification and denial, cravings and paranoias that now beset millions of American consumers.
As I have pointed out, signs of improvement are now dawning. In fact, the unhappy story I’m about to sketch may be headed for a not-so-unhappy outcome. American consumers may be ready to develop an enlarged perspective on why milk matters, a question now sunk ingreat historical amnesia. Even if we grew up on dull, featureless milk, we now have the advantage of living alongside many people raised in livelier traditions of milk-based cookery. And part of what they have to teach us is that something very curious happened in the Western world’s use of milk starting about two centuries ago.
The story gets—to borrow from Lewis Carroll—curiouser and curiouser as it goes along. Its convolutions often reflect visions of dollar signs dancing in various heads. It zigzags through human digestive vagaries and cultural biases, science and pseudo-science, milk-processing technology, animal breeding and feeding, obscure consequences of refrigeration, the dawn of cyberfarming, and more. But little of all this could have been foretold at the outset, when popular eighteenth-centurynutritional theory leapt to wrong conclusions that suggested new entrepreneurial opportunities. Late in the century, residents of the area that I’ve called the Northwestern Cow Belt—especially England and its North American colonies—began placing great emphasis on one particular way of consuming milk: in fresh drinkable form.
At that time, commercial trade in fresh milk was only slightly more possible than trade in the morning dew. Up to a century or two earlier, people who drank fresh milk had generally gotten it by milking their own cow or goat. City dwellers willing to gamble could buy it from someone who drove a cow or goat about the streets and milked a few cups’ worth into a customer’s bowl or pot, or hawked it from pails. (The gamble was on not being killed by any plagues carriedby the animal, milker, or pail.) But everyone was at least as used tosoured as fresh milk until an urban market specifically for fresh
And this isn’t to mention a growing revolt against milk processed to a fare-thee-well before any of us can get our hands on it. For all the continued prominence of horrible examples to the contrary, today it is more possible than it’s been in at least half a century for many of us to find honest, unhomogenized whole milk from small herds and dairies run by businesspeople who care about well-tended milch animals and fresh milk flavor.
In short, I think it is realistic rather than naive to hope that the United States will consummate the story of the great dairying zones by giving the best elements of all four a chance to flourish on American soil. That prospect makes a detailed historical look at the worst side of our own dairying traditions less discouraging than it might be.
THE STORY OF MODERNMILK
Or, Is This What We Really Want?
Y ou can love fresh dairy products as some of life’s best pleasures and still be saddened by the spectacle of modern dairying. Milk deserves many superlatives. But unfortunately, among them is the title of this country’s most misunderstood food. Nothing more cruelly illustrates the unholy wars between desire and fear, gratification and denial, cravings and paranoias that now beset millions of American consumers.
As I have pointed out, signs of improvement are now dawning. In fact, the unhappy story I’m about to sketch may be headed for a not-so-unhappy outcome. American consumers may be ready to develop an enlarged perspective on why milk matters, a question now sunk ingreat historical amnesia. Even if we grew up on dull, featureless milk, we now have the advantage of living alongside many people raised in livelier traditions of milk-based cookery. And part of what they have to teach us is that something very curious happened in the Western world’s use of milk starting about two centuries ago.
The story gets—to borrow from Lewis Carroll—curiouser and curiouser as it goes along. Its convolutions often reflect visions of dollar signs dancing in various heads. It zigzags through human digestive vagaries and cultural biases, science and pseudo-science, milk-processing technology, animal breeding and feeding, obscure consequences of refrigeration, the dawn of cyberfarming, and more. But little of all this could have been foretold at the outset, when popular eighteenth-centurynutritional theory leapt to wrong conclusions that suggested new entrepreneurial opportunities. Late in the century, residents of the area that I’ve called the Northwestern Cow Belt—especially England and its North American colonies—began placing great emphasis on one particular way of consuming milk: in fresh drinkable form.
At that time, commercial trade in fresh milk was only slightly more possible than trade in the morning dew. Up to a century or two earlier, people who drank fresh milk had generally gotten it by milking their own cow or goat. City dwellers willing to gamble could buy it from someone who drove a cow or goat about the streets and milked a few cups’ worth into a customer’s bowl or pot, or hawked it from pails. (The gamble was on not being killed by any plagues carriedby the animal, milker, or pail.) But everyone was at least as used tosoured as fresh milk until an urban market specifically for fresh
Similar Books
