A Very Belated Wrap-Up and a Short(ish) Essay on Raw Milk

Hello there! If there is anyone there after more than a week without posting. I have definitely been putting this off. Conclusions are always the hardest.

the morning after a lot of rain

You see I left the farm on October 1st, so I've been back for a week now. So I have been doing some serious procrastinating for the last seven days (but I got a cold! See that's a valid excuse.) Part of the reason why is that the last week at the farm was a bit stressful. We were scrambling to get the barn ready for the wedding on Saturday and it was raining a lot, most days, I think. And not just drizzling, or not even just raining, like coming down in buckets sort of downpour which made my mold allergies act up (even with the Claritin.) Once we got the hay out of the barn it wasn't too too bad to get everything else out--a freezer, a very heavy desk like the kind teachers have, a couch (all of which were brought to the side of the house in classic country-style. Sally's dad calls it 'blight-o,' apparently a three stooges reference? Anyway blight-o is when there's a ton of crap all over the yard) and then random things like glass cut in various sizes, coolers, and leftovers from the kids summer camp that used the barn--a little child's shoe and a little child's sock.

a glimpse into the pouring rain

dreary

But once it was all emptied of the big stuff and all that was left were the carpentry work stations for the handicap ramp that was being built, it looked really good! Sadly I don't have any good pictures because my flash doesn't work and it was really low-light anyway. But the barn was built in the 1780s and then modified in the early 1900s so it's got that great really-old feeling to it and it was built with a wood that ages to a reddish brown. The wedding people came on Thursday afternoon to start setting up and they strung lights from the center of the barn to the corners and it looked really lovely and cozy. Here is a horrible picture that absolutely doesn't do it justice:

After we emptied the barn, I swept up and cleaned off some of the furniture in there that the wedding people wanted to use. One thing that I think is universal across barns that keep hay is the bits of floating hay in all of the crevices. There are so many spiders in barns (yes I'm aware) that have webs, and then the little bits of hay get stuck of them and they just float there. I love that it's the same no matter where you are. So anyway, my job was to go around and knock those things down with a stiff little hand-broom.

But! After the clean-up I was helpful in a very limited-capacity. All that needed to be done was finishing cutting and nailing the barn board to the drywall, and then building the handicap ramp. And since I'm not a carpenter, there was a fair bit of me milling around and asking if there was anything I could do, and then going off to clean the property or something. It's too bad that the wedding ate up the last week, but I did learn a fair bit just about building codes and holding events and the fact that weddings are stressful no matter how tangentially you are associated with them.

I left Saturday morning after doing the morning eggs and before the wedding craziness in the afternoon. I think that the ramp was built in time and hopefully the weather cleared up. I forgot to remind Sally to get the dead chicken head out of the pasture, so hopefully she remembered.

Overall it was a really great experience and I'm so glad I went. Western Massachusetts is beautiful and full of interesting people. There are a lot of things I really like about it and miss about it, but I definitely missed being close to Boston and close to friends and family. Sally and everyone at the farm were wonderful, though, and I really enjoyed getting to know them over the three weeks. I'll hopefully go back sometime this fall with Alex so she can see the farm too!

So, I also wanted to talk a bit about the actual milk at the farm, as it's a fairly integral part of it. Here is a totally non-contrived picture of the milk sitting on a table with a pasture in the background:

a half gallon

The milk is raw and non-homogenized. You can tell it's non-homogenized because of the creamline on top--see the cream sitting up there on top? In homogenized milk the fat molecules have been broken apart so they float throughout the milk instead of rising to the top, though that's a very generalized description of what happens (science nerds: on page 23 of Harold McGee's James Beard Award-winning On Food and Cooking he describes it in more detail.) And for anyone else out there with whom the expression "the cream rises to the top" never sat quite right (maybe they were talking about whipped cream? I wondered) this explains it. It used to be that cream actually rose to the top, but in the ubiquitous homogenized milk of today, it is just mediocre like the rest of the milk solids.

a closer look at the creamline

The author Anne Mendelson of the book Milk (which I highly, highly recommend for anyone that likes history, dairy products, cooking, and any combination of the three) believes that the homogenization destroys the character of milk more so than pasteurization does (though it depends on the type of pasteurization--see more below.) In any case, non-homogenized milk does have a different mouthfeel than homogenized milk does. My first experience with it was from the farmers markets in DC, and the non-homogenized milk I tried tasted much thinner than my usual homogenized whole milk, though remembering back I don't remember there being nearly as much cream on top as the milk at the farm in Cummington. In any case, the milk at the farm did not at all taste or feel thin, instead it tasted full and creamy and delicious. 

The milk at the farm also had a legitimate taste to it that I had never tasted before in milk--grassy notes (cliched food writing term I know) and something that as I spent more time there I realized was the taste of the land, or the terroir. Terroir is a French term originally used with wines, basically summing up how a certain vineyard can give a unique taste to the wine, and has since been expanded to describe a whole slew of things, including milk (or at least now it has.) I distinctly remember one night where my entire dinner consisted of only things from the farm--potatoes, brussels sprouts, kale, shallots and garlic grown in the garden, eggs from the chickens and a glass of farm milk to wash it all down and the only way I can describe it is that everything tasted like the farm, and it was the terroir shining through every element of the meal. In any case, this is something that we could not possibly experience with commercial milk in supermarkets because that milk comes from cows that live seasonless lives with regimented feeding that is aimed towards nothing but maximum production, with the resulting cartons of milk being pooled from hundreds of cows. Pretty much the exact opposite of the milk that comes from three happy cows that live naturally on one single farm in Massachusetts.

So, the other thing about raw milk is that it is not pasteurized. Pasteurization was invented by good ol' Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, originally for beer and wine, and then was later adopted to milk (McGee, page 22, he says everything more concisely than I ever could.) There are three types of pasteurization: batch, HTST and UHT pasteurization. Batch pasteurization affects the flavor of milk the least as it's the most gentle of the three. It consists of heating the milk to 145° F for over half an hour and then cooling it down to below 40° F. This does little to affect the proteins in the milk, though it does kill the enzymes in the milk and any harmful pathogens that may be present. High-temperature short-time (HTST) pasteurization is next, and this involves bringing the milk to a minimum of 162° F for 15 seconds. Because of the higher temperature, it denatures some of the proteins in the milk, which affects  the flavor though we wouldn't know it because it's pretty much all most people have ever tasted. The last and most intense kind of pasteurization is ultra-high pasteurization (UHT, also just called ultrapasterization.) In this method, the milk is heated to over 265° F for about two seconds and then rapidly cooled to below 40°. It changes the taste of the milk most of all and also its behavior in cooking. Many recipes for cheeses for the DIY-cook specifically call for non-ultrapasteurized milk because (and this is speculation on my part) too many of the proteins have been denatured so that the milk doesn't act (or react) properly with the enzymes that make cheese and results in an off texture.

The raw milk debate is pretty contentious these days. Each state has their own laws regarding if and where you can buy raw milk. In Massachusetts I believe it's that you can buy it on the farm where it's made (or have a CSA.) Raw milk advocates believe that there are health benefits to it, while people on the other side of the debate think that the health risks are too great, and I think both sides have a point. There are many stories out there about raw milk being a cure for anything from acne to thyroid problems. One day at the farm Sally, K and I went to another farm to help out with some land that had been affected by hurricane Irene, and there was a farmer there that Sally told me was 51 years old, and the man had the most beautiful skin I'd ever seen on any human being. I mean it was really striking (and odd, on this otherwise gristly farmer) but it was totally smooth, no wrinkles, and really glowing (like how I imagine pregnant women must look.) I mentioned it to Sally and she said the man had been drinking raw milk his whole life. And that was enough evidence for me.  

But not all milk is created equal, and I wouldn't recommend drinking it from just anywhere under any circumstances. In my opinion, it should only be consumed by people that have personally visited the farm (or know someone that has) and seen the conditions under which the cows have been milked and the milk has been bottled. This necessarily means that raw milk should be extremely local. Sally has a few CSA customers that have signed up from Northampton (about 40 minutes away) and she thinks that even that is too far away and it isn't the customer base she wants; she wants to serve people right in Cummington or in the towns close by. I feel conflicted about it because I still want to drink raw milk, and wish I could buy it here in the suburbs of Boston (I guess there is a place in Framingham, I need to check it out), but then it would be the same story of the milk not really serving the community it is intended for. It's one of the things I really like about raw milk--that pretty much by definition it encourages local consumption (which I support.) But because pastured cows need a lot of land, the communities are almost all rural and not where most people (and I) live. So even if I do manage to find raw milk to buy in the Boston area, it's going against the "support your local farmers" idea that I believe in. And it's something I can't quite see how to get around as land prices nearer to cities likely won't be falling any time soon, making it completely economically infeasible for pastured cows to take up residence.

In any case, what is for certain is that the current distribution model for pasteurized milk is totally infeasible and ideologically incompatible with raw milk. All I can say is that if you are ever near a farm that sells raw milk, I encourage that you try it! It's not as deathly as some people say.

One more quick thing I wanted to talk about was cow-shares, which are something that came about as a way to get around the laws against raw milk. Basically, you would "buy" part of a cow, and then the farmer would milk it for your convenience and give you the milk. So it wasn't illegal because the milk wasn't actually being bought or sold because each person owned part of the cow. The problem with this model, though, is that it is completely unregulated. Whereas Sally has her milk tested by a federal dairy inspector every month to check if it's safe (she then receives a whole printout of the various levels of everything you can imagine in the milk--fyi, the milk is very healthy), the cow shares have nothing of the sort so there is no way to know if the milk has been handled properly. So if you would like a steady-stream of raw milk, you may want to stay on the safe side and avoid this arrangement. 

Sally has been a real inspiration. When she started the farm she was told that a micro-dairy and a raw milk CSA couldn't be done. But it has been! While I personally think that the current laws regarding raw milk should be relaxed, Sally has shown that there are ways to work within the current system. A quote from her that I think sums up her attitude and, again, I find really admirable is this: "They said it couldn't be done, but it can! Just read the goddamn code."

Thanks for reading! I think I will sign off here on Udder Nonsense, but I've had a lot of fun writing it. Do email me if you want to know anything more about anything I've written.

-E