Cheers
Scott

My husband is English and I have in-laws in London. If we ever moved there (isn’t likely- my husband feels like he escaped England) I would seek out a dairy farm. I *love* the cream in the UK. I never knew what real cream could be like until I had a piece of apple pie (prior to knowing I had blood sugar problems) served with a pitcher of cream. I dripped some on teh table cloth as I poured the thickest fluid cream I had ever seen over the pie (feeling so guilty as I did it because I had the low fat mantra going through my head then).

I tried to wipe up the dripped cream and it was butter! The liquid had soaked into the table cloth and left a layer of butterfat on the top! Whoo-hoo!

I realize that those who go more “paleo” in their food choices probably eschew dairy and I can understand the rational behind that on paleo and evolutionary grounds.

But for those who do include dairy, I know there are good sources in the UK for high quality, safe raw dairy products. Nina Planck, the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why, is an American who grew up on an organic farm in Virginia before organic was a household word, later lived in London for many years and started a farmer’s market in London. She is back in the US now, in NYC, but she would have connections to good dairy producers in the UK if you were interested. Her partner is a cheese guy in NYC’s Greenwich Village :-). (www.ninaplanck.com)

What with you, Kelly and myself, I think I detect a burgeoning pro-(unadulterated)milk flavour to this forum. Scott will have to tread carefully!

Dan

It’s clear you know your way around a farm and dairy cows, which is a lot more than most dairy consumers know. And you certainly have more hands-on experience with dairy cows than I have. My uncle in Ohio, who grew up on a dairy farm, had similar thoughts to yours (their cows produced milk that tasted like onions because of the wild onions in the pastures - Joel Salatin would have a cow - get the onions out!). Many, if not most of those zoonosis diseases are now well-controlled for with vaccines and careful herd management.

But something to think about is that those who produce raw dairy these days are doing it specifically for the raw dairy market, not for the co-mingled bulk tank that is destined for pasteurization. That’s very different in significant ways. The raw milk customers are quite different; they know more about the product and the production methods, and there often is a face-to-face relationship with the supplier. Folks who are seeking out raw milk, either through direct from the farm sales, farmer’s markets, co-ops or herd shares, or as here, in CA, buying milk in the store from one of the two pastured raw only Grade A dairies in the state (only grade A dairies can sell in grocery stores), are people who want the *whole* milk, not skimmed milk. We are seeking whole foods that are *better* than the milk that is produced for the centralized processing plant.

Since I live in an area in So California, where land and irrigation costs are now too high to make a local pasture-based dairy viable (not to mention increasing urbanization and suburbanization created pressures for the few livestock farms that remain), I buy my raw dairy (milk, cream, butter) from a local store, but it comes from a farm about 300 miles up north in the Central Valley area of CA, a productive agricultural region. Even there, the pastures must be irrigated, though. The bottled raw dairy deliveries come on delivery trucks owned and operated by the dairy farm, not through a distributor. I have visited the dairy farm, toured the creamery, and met the owner (he conducted the tour). He is not your typical farmer in any way. He even developed a mobile milking barn that goes to the cows, so they can stay on pasture!

In contrast, I tried to find out more about the pasteurized milk I used to buy, a private label milk from a chain of stores. They not only wouldn’t tell me which dairy supplies their private label products, they wouldn’t tell me if the herd were on pasture or in grain-fed CAFOS. Knowing that the vast majority of So California’s dairy farms are seriously huge CAFOS, and the cows never see a blade of grass and stand in muck all day eating grain rations (imagine moving 5000 head in and out twice a day to milk!), what conclusion am I left with, with such a non-transparent situation?

And my college roommate is married to a former dairy farmer in upstate NY, where pasture is abundant. But the bulk rate he was paid was too low to keep it going so he left farming. He told me that he fed old bread and bakery products to the cows and it increased the milk yield. Yield was all that was important, not quality. He also fed them snacks and candy bars that were past their sell-by date. But I think one can more easily to that if selling their milk to the co-op. I think honest people have a harder time doing that when they invite their customers to tour the farm, when they hand them the bottle of milk, when their is a relationship with each other.

Joel Salatin, a biodynamic farmer and writer in Virginia (Scott has written about his books before), has a lot to say about how honesty stays in the transaction when it is personal. Take out the personal relationship, add distance, and layers of barriers, and people lose sight of what they are doing and why.

The thing to think about is that dairying changed a lot in the past 150 years or so, especially as urbanization and technology grew in the century, not to mention companies and dairies. Dairies that had been rural became surrounded by suburbs and cities. Direct-to consumer dairying waned as dairy co-ops and centralized processing increased. The worst of the raw milk problems in the US were from urban distillery dairies in the late 19th and early 20th century, where leftover grain mash was fed to dairy herds adjacent to the distilleries. This was an industry specifically to make money off the distillery waste (guess what waste product from ethanol production is being fed to CAFO dairy herds now?). The problem with the milk was the perversion of the production method, with sick herds, unhealthy feed, and little thought to quality. In some cases, the milk was so awful looking that chalk was added to to make it look better (I guess that makes the modern practice of adding dried milk solids to skimmed milk look pretty tame in comparison).

The cheap, dirty substandard milk was sold to the burgeoning urban poor - primarily immigrant populations, who fed their babies cow’s milk (many of the mothers worked and couldn’t breastfeed). With lack of sanitation, a population of dairy workers who probably transmitted the TB to the milk, and a motivation of only profit, raw milk began to get a bad name, as the technology for pasteurization advanced. Ironically, the more well-off people could still get wholesome raw milk from the countryside - it came in on trains. Many physicians took part in a certified raw dairy program around the turn of the century to ensure that their patients had access to good few milk from honest dairies. Fresh raw milk from pastured herds in the country was actually used as a TB cure for many years - the world famous Mayo Clinic in in the US was a raw milk TB sanitarium in its early days.

There’s a lot more on how the dairies changed over the years and we came to have a system of dairy production and processing like we do. A very good book on milk throughout the ages is The Untold Story of Milk, by Ron Schmidt. It’s a rather long book, but it details all sorts of historical aspects of milk and dairy as well as modern trends and issues and is quite thorough and complete. I know of no other book with nearly the depth of info.

Kelly, I feel that way about milk and I feel the same about eggs - I’m not going to stop making mayonnaise, for example, because of the tiny risk of salmonella. However, we have to consider that most people are likely to be more nervous and thus that raw milk is unlikely to ever become the popular food it once was. Especially if those squeamish people work in the FDA.

The blue-ish (not blue!) colour came about as a result of skimming the thick layer of cream off the top of the milk. This “carpet” of cream would set solid enough to support small objects (like a penny) so it could be removed with a ladle into a small bowl, leaving - tada! - blue-ish skimmed milk. I hated skimmed milk so I used to use cream whenever I could, such as on my weetabix, either straight or in conjunction with skim milk.

The amount and thickness of the cream (and the degree to which it migrates from the milk to a clearly distinct layer, I guess) depends of course on the butter-fat content. We kept a couple of Jerseys in the herd to improve butter-fat ratios and we generally used milk from one of these for the house. At one point we had an infernally complex hand-cranked “separator” that took milk and neatly split it into cream and milk but it had dozens of chrome or steel parts that needed to be washed afterwards. For a couple of gallons it was much easier just to leave the milk for a few hours then skim it by hand.

Dan

Also, our milk is good for a week before it sours, but it’s always gone by then anyway. I’ve never seen an icky blue color to our milk at all.

Good discussion!
Kelly

I dunno Kelly, I can agree only in part. At the time we are discussing effectively all staple foods in Britain WERE local as refrigeration did not exist. People still became ill or caught diseases through drinking this local milk.

Buying locally is better than buying at Wal Mart, but it is not in itself enough - every farmer is local to somebody after all, including the bad ones. I don’t think that people can easily tell which local farmers are trustworthy and which are not. Developing an eye for livestock takes years and in any case medicines and hormones are invisible. Even if consumers knew what to look for (which they won’t) most farmers would not be able support regular farm tours - if every potential customer wanted to see the farm and the cows the farmers would never get anything done.

And what’s to stop farmers from simply lying? Just to give a real-life perspective on this, I grew up on a small dairy farm with about 30 head of cattle, as I may have mentioned before. Every day for decades my family drank “raw” (not that we ever thought of it as raw) milk that came straight from the milk bucket. All the processing we did was strain the milk through muslin cloths into a bowl and put the bowl in the fridge. We had more milk and cream than we knew what to do with.

Now, when a cow had mastitis or was on antibiotics we used to pour the milk away. This was required by the buyer, which in the 1980s in the UK was the Milk Marketing Board. One of our neighbours saw us pouring away milk and was dumbfounded. As he pointed out, the odds were very good that if we just threw the tainted milk in the tank with the good milk we would never be caught. Given that we were paid by the gallon, we were pouring money away, he said. I think from this we can infer that he sold contaminated milk to the MMB. And he was a “local” supplier. If you met him you might think he was a typical Land Rover-driving, salt-of-the-earth farmer, an inherently trustworthy person - but you’d be wrong.

Raw milk needs careful handling and sours rapidly in my experience so if you don’t pasteurise you will have a shorter shelf life, which means higher costs. If you want thorough testing to catch the cheats, you will have higher costs. Raw milk is not homogenised so it quickly separates in the bowl into a thick layer of cream and a rather icky blue-ish thin milk. This is a cosmetic issue that people may find difficult to deal with. Educating them to accept this characteristic of real milk, a characteristic that I personally still dislike, will increase costs.

None of these problems are insoluble but they all require money. How many consumers will accept dramatically more expensive milk if they have a choice? This is the issue that concerns me.

Dan