Or to put it another way: If we can shed the notion that chugging down so much milk a day is a duty, perhaps we will be free to discover different forms of it as a joy. People whose ancestors never consumed milk products may be able to make up their own minds about it without well-meant ethnocentric mistakes distorting the picture. Those with the right genes may taste the really, truly fresh milk and cream just starting to reach certain retail sources and for the first time realize what exquisite works of nature these are. And those whose understanding of milk products and milk-based cooking has revolved around a few narrow Western models may rejoice in the glorious culinary plenty and diversity now opening up to all of us.
In short: Everyone who honestly loves fresh dairy foods should tune out the noise of hucksterism and fearmongering, and recognize what milk can contribute to the pleasure of not all but very many sound and satisfying diets.
RAW VS. PASTEURIZED, ORGANIC VS. CONVENTIONAL
A Minority Opinion
People who learn that I’m writing a book about dairy products often ask whether I think raw or pasteurized milk is better for children and adults, or how organic milk stacks up against conventionally produced versions. Unfortunately, I don’t have any clear-cut answers.
Certainly the questions spring from sincere concerns about the potential of a basic foodstuff to nourish us or bring down disasters on our heads. But I find the usual course of public debate troubling. It is waged with great eagerness to discuss issues of food and health by slinging around as many claims and counterclaims as possible in the service of preformed agendas, and all too often without elementary caution, fair-mindedness, or patience to entertain any answer that falls between two stools. And in the case of milk, the loudest opinions often come from people who know very little. I can only offer my own opinions in the hope that they’ll be of help to someone.
RAWNESS AND RATIONALITY
To be blunt: Every time I hear or read any discussion of raw milk in any public forum, I know I can look forward to endless repetitions of a few misleading, simpleminded claims on both sides, with either no attention to or no technical understanding of taste factors (which are my preformed agenda).
Most of those who want consumers to have unfettered access to raw milk insist that pasteurization destroys nutritional value. Sometimes they also assert that raw milk tastes better, period. Neither claim is unconditionally true. On the other side, adherents of pasteurization are bent on warning the public that without it we can expect the unhindered spread of milk-borne pathogens that used to kill people en masse but are eliminated in the pasteurizing process. This, too, is only partly true.
To start with flavor, though it’s the last thing many of the polemicists think of: Certainly a glass of raw milk sampled at the farm is going to taste different from the supermarket milk in somebody’s refrigerator. But pasteurization is only one of the industrial processing steps responsible for the difference. As explained earlier (see this page), virtually all the pasteurized milk that reaches us has been centrifugally separated, recombined to standardized milkfat percentages, and homogenized. These steps do more to denature milk than anything else that happens to it in manufacturing. The creamier “mouthfeel” and fresher flavor of whole raw milk at a well-run Jersey cow dairy farm (and, by the way, plenty of Holstein-Friesian farms) reflect not just actual freshness but the fact that the basic milk structure is intact. You can get nearly all of the same effect from unhomogenized pasteurized milk—at least, if it comes to you very fresh and was pasteurized by the right method.
This brings us to the second great factor usually left out of the debate: There is pasteurization and pasteurization. As we’ve seen, at one time it was routinely done at a comparatively low temperature for a long time by pumping batches into and out of a vat. This method eliminated harmful bacteria with minimal impairment of flavor. The more cost-effective approaches that are almost universal today involve higher temperatures with near-instantaneous heating and cooling by continuous flow. They tend to impart a slightly more cooked flavor while denaturing some of the water-soluble milk proteins—but it’s hard to attribute particular flavor effects to these techniques alone, because they are almost always carried out together with homogenization.
Then there is the intrinsic quality of the milk itself. Rawness and pasteurization have nothing to do with the plain fact that milk produced by farmers with sane breeding-and-feeding priorities tastes better than milk cranked out with an eye only to volume. Some of the best milk I’ve tasted has been raw, and so has some of the worst. I have awful memories of one watery, dismal brand that I naively tried several decades ago when New York State permitted retail sales of raw milk in health-food stores.
When we come to the question of health and safety, people on both sides usually seem to have their minds closed before they open their mouths. The most frequent argument I hear about the health-giving properties of raw milk is that the heat of pasteurization destroys the vitamin C and most enzymes present in raw milk. Quite true—but not of great importance to anyone’s health. Compared with other plentiful sources of vitamin C (most fruits, some vegetables), milk contains very little in the first place; the loss through pasteurization isn’t going to drastically affect our access to an adequate natural supply of this nutrient.
As for the large array of enzymes that disappear in heating, they are a highly species-specific aid to the digestive systems of newborn calves and don’t need to greatly concern nonbovines—except cheesemakers, who are sorely handicapped when intricate sequences of enzymatic changes are interfered with through pasteurization. With due respect to people who swear that raw milk cleared up their children’s ear infections or other problems, I have yet to see convincing proof that it automatically improves our general nutritional welfare.
But I am only marginally more sympathetic to the claims of the other side. The health authorities who have brought about blanket prohibitions on the sale of raw milk in most states seem to me to represent muddled governmental thinking at its officious worst. They are perfectly correct in pointing out that raw milk is a known vector for spreading such deadly diseases as tuberculosis and brucellosis. They are just as wrong in trying to impose the presumption that all raw milk is guilty of such evils until proven innocent. In fact, the means have existed for more than a century to ensure that it is innocent: very frequent, very scrupulous inspection of cows, milking facilities, and milk.
What spreads disease is not raw milk but raw milk contaminated by harmful bacteria—or in some cases, pasteurized milk contaminated by bacteria. Pasteurization is a great blessing that does indeed keep most fresh dairy products from spreading lethal infections. As practiced today, it also saves a lot of money for all parties. But it is a crude and imperfect solution to a problem that ought to admit of more than one solution.
Treat milk by continuous-feed pasteurization methods at high temperatures, and you will not (usually) cause mass outbreaks of disease by pooling the output of many thousands of cows on many dozens of farms at colossal processing facilities hundreds of miles from the point of production, then shipping it over equal or greater distances to many hundreds of retail stores where it may reach consumers close to a week after milking. Clearly, there are precautions that have to have the force of law if that’s the only way anyone is to get milk—but why should it be? What’s wrong with devising other precautions for milk to be sold without pasteurization?
The real answer is cost-effectiveness. Anyone can see that producing and distributing raw milk in the same way as HTST (high-temperature/short-time) or ultrapasteurized milk (see this page) would be an invitation to disaster. Economies of scale are impossible here. The milk must be handled and stored in much smaller volumes, transported (if at all) over much shorter distances, and sold within a much shorter time than milk for mass distribution. And any given unit of HTST or ultrapasteurized milk is not only cheaper to produce for retail sale than the same amount of raw milk, but cheaper to regulate. It would be insane t
o allow the sale of raw milk without frequent official inspections of herds and facilities, ultravigilant testing of all cows, and a strict schedule of bacterial counts done on the milk—all of which adds up to longer man-hours and higher personnel budgets than the far laxer supervision of HTST and ultrapasteurized milk. No wonder that most state regulatory agencies faced with any suggestion about licensing raw-milk operations automatically switch to the “How Not to Do It” mode of Dickens’s Circumlocution Office. If they had concrete motives for figuring out how to do the job, clean raw milk could be gotten (at a price) to the small number of consumers who want it.
Even under the strictest supervision, raw milk can’t be guaranteed to be uniformly and absolutely free from pathogens. But neither can pasteurized milk. Any fair-minded person will recognize that pasteurization is a generally effective public-health measure that hugely reduces bacterial populations in milk. But occasional cases of recontamination after pasteurizing not only occur but seem to be on the increase, especially in certain kinds of cheeses made (for Latin American clienteles) by direct acidification instead of lactic-acid fermentation. The pathogen Listeria monocytogenes crops up oftener than any of the other usual suspects. The question of whether it can actually survive the pasteurization process has not yet been conclusively settled. Most authorities now think that it can’t, and that episodes such as the 1983 outbreak of listeriosis in Massachusetts—traced to pasteurized milk from several different dairy herds, after forty-nine people had been sickened—represent recontamination that escaped monitoring.
I don’t mean to soft-pedal the danger of pathogens in “natural” or “alternative” foods beloved of some counterculturalists—indeed, I’d seriously caution anyone against galloping off to the nearest dairy farm and trying to buy raw milk with no questions asked. But it’s only just to point out that every year more and more cases also come to light of pathogens spread through mass-distribution channels—let’s say, in hamburger—and undetected at the time by the usual public-health regulatory machinery. The difference is that nobody as far as I know is proposing to bring raw milk to the public through mass-distribution channels.
As a food writer, I believe it is irresponsible to recommend certain raw animal products—oysters or clams on the half-shell, fish in sashimi or Andean tiraditos, beef in steak tartare or carpaccio, unpasteurized milk—without pointing out that they are better disease vectors than most other fresh raw foods. You don’t have to regard all raw milk as a deadly poison in order to think that people looking to buy, sell, or regulate it should pay superfanatical attention to the cleanliness of cows, milking equipment, and storage conditions. But if produced and handled under eagle-eyed supervision it should be no riskier than other raw foods that command happy followings among food lovers—indeed, probably less risky than raw clams and oysters, which sicken dozens or hundreds of people every year.
The monkey wrench in the analogy is that these other foods never inherited the bizarre nutritional mythology of fresh fluid milk. Consumers feel free to enjoy any one of them or not, without imagining that they must shovel it into their children or themselves as a scientific duty. If the “Milk Is Indispensable” notion were not so entrenched, the subject wouldn’t rouse such passions. In fact, if we all had access to sources of good, fresh, locally produced unhomogenized milk batch-pasteurized by slow methods, less nonsense might be spouted about rawness and pasteurization. Meanwhile, it certainly isn’t irrational to point out that the risk of spreading disease through raw milk lies not in its rawness but in the absence of carefully designed, well-enforced regulations requiring that it be handled under very much stricter supervision than the HTST or ultrapasteurized milk in ordinary retail stores.
“ORGANIC”: IMAGE AND REALITY
The second major controversy that has pitted mainstream interests against people looking for better alternatives concerns organic versus conventional farming practices. Here again, I usually wish the debate could be conducted with more reason and less yelling. But there are two other thorny factors: a hazy public understanding of what is meant by the word “organic” and a rapidly shrinking distance between mainstream and organic agriculture.
“Organic” is a term tricky enough to pin down when applied to plant crops, and becomes ridiculously arbitrary where livestock are concerned. The organic criteria submitted by the National Organic Standards Board in 2002 exclude any crop raised with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, though there is a certain amount of hair-splitting about just what falls under those categories. Organic milk is supposed to come from animals that have been fed nothing prohibited under organic-crop guidelines. Treatment with recombinant bovine somatotropin (see this page) is also forbidden. But what consumers think they’re getting when they see the words “organic” and “milk” together on a package label goes considerably beyond these yardsticks.
This is not the place to review the entire meaning of organic agriculture or evaluate its promise for better soil management and better food. But pious-sounding rhetoric and pictures of contented cows on milk cartons are no guarantee of either humanely tended animals or more “natural” milk. For better or worse, organic agriculture is big business. The bigger it gets, the more eager many producers are to interpret organic requirements in ways that serve the bottom line instead of reforming conventional agriculture’s faults—for example, haggling over how long an interval should pass before cows originally raised by nonorganic regimens can be deemed free enough of banned substances to be milked as part of an organic herd. And they bank on the assumption that consumers don’t know enough about milk to look beyond the “organic” label and compare concrete markers of production values. Here are some jarring facts to take into account before ascribing any ethical or other advantages to organic milk:
• The organic dairying business is tremendously concentrated, with the great preponderance of milk coming from three or four very large producers owned by vast agribusiness conglomerates. The biggest facilities are in the Rocky Mountain and West Coast states, and milk regularly travels thousands of miles from there to reach retail shelves throughout the country. As with conventional milk, gigantic farm operations with several thousand cows now dominate the business.
• The largest farms depend on the same breeding-and-feeding methods as their conventional counterparts, including high-energy rations to increase volume (see this page); thrice-daily milking; and as much confinement with as much restriction of access to grazing as the managers can get away with. (The NOSB regulations mention “access to pasture” and to the outdoors generally, without spelling out how much or little.)
• Milk entering the pool at large organic dairies is separated and homogenized by the same arbitrary numbers games as conventional milk.
• The milk is also usually ultrapasteurized, the better to transport it across vast distances and permit weeks rather than days between time of milking and time of use.
So far, the major organic-dairy producers have managed to cash in on the widespread popular view of pure, simple, pastoral, animal-friendly organic food without acknowledging how little their wares justify the image. In fact, milk is one of the fastest-growing segments of the organic market. Sales of organic dairy products reached about $2 billion in 2005 and are increasing by about 20 to 25 percent annually; Horizon brand is now familiar in mainstream supermarkets from coast to coast. But this is one gift horse that really should be looked in the mouth. Why should we support new-style versions of factory farming clad in airs of moral superiority to factory farming?
Other people may come to other conclusions. But I ignore every organic brand of dairy products on the shelves unless it has some solider selling point than simply being “organic”—for example, also being unhomogenized, or coming from small dairy operations in my own part of the Northeast. I try to support these whether or not they have organic certification. I urge other consumers to exercise some judgment about the “organic” label, and to seek alternatives to mass-produced conventional
milk in places such as farmers’ markets or a few specialty retail sources that encourage locally based agriculture.
WHITE MAGIC 101
I’m sure that no institute of higher learning offers a course called “Milk Science for Dummies,” but in my opinion it would be a blessing for cooks and consumers. To learn even a few basics about the biology and chemistry of this supposedly familiar substance is to see a bottle or carton of it with new eyes. And without new eyes few Americans can look past the externals to see milk’s connection to living animals (the biology part) or fathom the reasons it tastes and behaves as it does (the chemistry part).
MILK AND MOTHERHOOD, OR LACTATION IN A NUTSHELL
Every carton of milk in every supermarket started out inside an animal, in most cases a cow, who was giving milk because she had given birth. This will make perfect sense to any human mother who has done the same.
Cows and women both have nine-month gestations, compared with about five months for goats and sheep. Milk wouldn’t exist if mothers’ bodies didn’t undergo intricate hormonal changes during the process. These cause the specifically female apparatus that lends its name to the class Mammalia (mamma is Latin for “breast”) to crank up from neutral into high gear. Between conception and delivery a semi-undeveloped system of ducts and lobes that has been biding its time in the mother’s breast, udder, or mammary gland by any other name expands tremendously, putting forth subdivided lobules and the minute capillary-embroidered sacs called alveoli that do most of the milk synthesis. (A nursing cow’s or goat’s udder, by the way, is not a hollow space that gets filled with liquid like a water balloon, any more than is a nursing woman’s breast. It has a lot of room for internal expansion depending on how much milk has been secreted, but most of what’s inside is living tissue in a somewhat spongelike, elastic arrangement.)
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