One of my best friends recently told me to read The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid (#13,355 on Amazon) and see if I could get my hands on some raw milk. She’s the only person in the world who drinks and loves whole milk as much as I do (pretty much our favorite part of college was the all-you-can-drink milk spigot in the dining hall), so I got the book and starting looking looking for some milk to taste. She lives in California where it’s legal to buy and sell, but I live in Brooklyn (where it’s not) so I drove to the closest place to legally get it (Walter Stewart’s Market in New Canaan, Connecticut) and bought two half gallons. They both cost around five dollars – one from Deerfield Farm, and the other from Sankow's Beaver Brook Farm.
I’ve always wondered why I like milk so much and lately my brother mentioned a theory that people crave what their bodies are allergic to. This made some sense to me because I have psoriasis, but to give up milk (which all psoriasis diets demand) is unfathomable. Milk makes me feel full and satisfied the way nothing else can. I’ve also heard anecdotal stories, like the lead of this Salon story about raw milk, about how it can solve skin issues and jump start your immune system into working the way it was meant to.
There’s a chapter in Schmid’s book (he’s a naturopathic physician) about something called "the milk cure" which uses raw milk medicinally, and about how what pasteurized milk exacerbates, raw milk heals. There was a big fuss at the turn of the 20th century over the pasteurized versus raw milk debate. Physicians who prescribed milk therapeutically were horrified at the idea of raw milk not being available anymore and so they formed an organization of doctors who pushed for what they called "Certified Milk." But ultimately because big business was behind pasteurization, they lost. For the best explanation of the traditional versus industrialized milk story read this essay by Lori Lipinski. The bottom line is that pasteurization (a process of heat treating milk to kill bacteria developed by Louis Pasteur for preserving beer and wine, not milk) not only kills friendly bacteria but also destroys the nutrient content of the milk. From Lipinski: “Pasteurized milk has up to a 66 percent loss of vitamins A, D and E. Vitamin C loss usually exceeds 50 percent. Heat affects water soluble vitamins and can make them 38 percent to 80 percent less effective. Vitamins B6 and B12 are completely destroyed during pasteurization. Pasteurization also destroys beneficial enzymes, antibodies and hormones. Pasteurization destroys lipase (an enzyme that breaks down fat), which impairs fat metabolism and the ability to properly absorb fat soluble vitamins A and D. (The dairy industry is aware of the diminished vitamin D content in commercial milk, so they fortify it with a form of this vitamin.”)
So, how does it taste? ...
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