Ever so often I come across health articles that make me think we might be eating or drinking something that could be silently killing us. I’m easily persuaded by the pleas of whole food/health food proponents, and I’m sure the Spouse cringes a little every time I start a sentence with, “Today I read this article…” because it rarely has a good ending.
See, the thing is… I do care what we eat. And, I feel a sense of responsibility for what the girls eat/drink since they can’t make educated decisions yet for themselves.
So, this week my concern has been our milk. If there’s anything we drink a lot of, it’s milk. I saw some news about the “six secrets” of skim milk {our preferred variety}, and if the claims are true, we should all make the switch to drinking whole milk from happy cows grazing on the grass of a local farm… or we’ll surely die. Sadly, though, making that switch is not easy.
For one, this child continues to reject milk altogether.
We’ve tried whole, soy, almond, 2%, organic, … she’s not yet taken to any of it. And, she has some dramatic ways of showing her distaste for dairy drinks.
Secondly, though, when you’re used to drinking watery milk, it’s a big leap to acquire or re-acquire a taste for full-fat creamy whole milk. We tried this for a short season before, and quickly fell off the “real milk” wagon. So, before we go down this path again, I thought I’d share a post from two years ago chronicling our first attempt to go fresh and local.
{originally published in February 2011}
Last night we purchased our first gallon of farm-fresh, local milk. I keep running across articles and blogs lately that promote non-homogenized milk, and I thought we should give it a try. Usually when I get an idea of this sort about some change we should make in our grocery shopping rituals, the Spouse rolls his eyes and prays that the phase will pass quickly. And, often it does… like the time when I decided we should switch to organic Oreos thinking the change-up would go unnoticed. Well, some things simply work better when they’re processed just a little bit. Take Oreos, for example.
Anyway… back to the farm-fresh milk. I was so excited to finally discover the gallon sitting on the shelf in the store that I could hardly wait to get it home and try it out for ourselves. We made a quick run through the Krispy Kreme drive-thru (because, after all, nothing is as organic as enjoying a hot-glazed, fried doughnut with a glass of non-homogenized milk), and headed home. The Spouse played along with my excitement about the milk and eagerly opened the jug as soon as we arrived at La Casa de Healthy Eating.
It was then when, to his horror, he discovered what he kept describing as “a huge glob of sludge” on top of our brand new “real” milk. Being the dairy expert that I am, I calmly explained to him that the milk was still a week away from expiration and was surely perfectly safe for consumption by him and the girls and anyone else who likes textured milk. Meanwhile, as his drama over the “sludge” escalated, I called my mom (the daughter of a dairy farmer) to ask her if she remembers anything about non-homogenized milk looking strange. And, this is an excerpt from our conversation:
Mom: Did you shake it up?
Me: No. It didn’t say anything about shaking it up on the jug. (Shouldn’t important instructions like this be spelled out in bold print somewhere on the packaging?)
Mom: Well, it’s probably just the cream from the milk that’s risen to the top of the jug. Try shaking it up.
Me: Ok. Well, do you remember it tasting different?
Mom: Oh, I don’t know about that. We didn’t drink it.
Me: What do you mean you didn’t drink it?!
Mom: Well, we bought our milk at the store, and by then it had been homogenized.
Unbelievable. The dairy farmer’s family didn’t even drink their own farm-fresh milk.
While I had been on the phone with my pseudo-farm girl mother, the Spouse had been googling pictures of non-homogenized milk himself and had discovered that it was indeed normal for the cream to rise to the top. The great milk mystery was solved, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing that our milk had not been tampered with or maliciously injected with “sludge.”
So, after wildly shaking the jug for a few minutes, we sat down to begin enjoying our new, creamier milk in peace.
And, that would be the sweet and happy ending to this story, if only it had gone so well. The real truth is, the creamy milk tastes different. Very different. And, sometimes change is hard.
I would have never made it on the farm. Well, maybe on my mom’s version of a farm.
So, here goes our second attempt to do the {almost, not raw} real milk thing. We’ll see if anyone notices when I top off their cereal with fresh paste cream tomorrow morning.
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