Greener Pasteurs

One of the “gotcha” questions that seems to be popular with presidential candidates is the price of some pedestrian everyday household item like a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a gallon of gasoline.

While it would certainly behoove anyone hoping to be president to have some sense of what us “average Americans” grapple with, day in/day out, I actually don’t hold it against someone running for the highest office in the whole wide world if they don’t spend a lot of time pushing a grocery cart or filling ‘er up. If you do spend a lot of time pushing a grocery cart or filling ‘er up, you are not likely the type who’s going to have the inclination to seek the highest office in the whole wide world to begin with.

Personally, I prefer that would-be presidents spend their time trying to figure out what’s going on in Vladimir Putin’s steely little mind, what a decent balance might be between mad-dash stimulus spending and Dickensian austerity, and how to explain to his/her fellow Americans that our exceptionalism isn’t going to keep the waters from rising if the polar ice caps melt.

I, however, am low enough down on the food chain that I generally have a vague idea of what a gallon of milk costs – $4-ish? - even though I only ever buy it by the pint (or, on occasion by the quart). There’s only so much milk that two adults are going to use up in the course of a week slopping a bit on cereal or scrambling up with their eggs.

And even though I only buy in small amounts, I always check the expiration date, and paw my way to the back of the dairy cabinet to grab the latest and greatest.

Lately, when I buy my milk-for-tea to leave at The Writers’ Room, I’ve been getting the ultra-pasteurized stuff that lasts a couple of months. I actually have no idea what this stuff tastes like as milk, but it does just fine as tea-lightener.

One question that presidential candidates are not likely to be asked, I’m guessing, is how much a gallon of raw, unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk will run you.

Talk about a gotcha.

John Kerry was dinged because he spoke French – mighty suspicious!  Can you imagine if it were revealed that a candidate were a raw foodie?

Talk about out of touch.

The answer, by the way, is that a gallon of raw milk in Massachusetts – where it’s for sale legally – will, as far as I can figure, run you about $8 a gallon. But in California, where it’s illegal, you’ll have to shell out about $16 a gallon.

What the raw milk folks believe they’re getting is more access to all the good stuff in milk that’s heated out of it through the pasteurization process, let alone the ultrapasteurization process. And that drinking raw milk thus gives you stronger bones, better teeth, and less asthma than those who drink processed milk. One might counter that families that can afford to pay $16/gallon for raw milk are likely to be the type who are already going to have stronger bones, better teeth, and less asthma than your average poor folk shopping at the local bodega or living in a rusted out trailer with car parts and skunkweed in the yard. Just saying.

But what raw milk consumers also get exposed to is the pathogens that pasteurization wipes out. So, while those who consume raw milk may get healthier, they also get sicker. Dairy-related outbreaks of illness tend to be associated with raw milk ingestion.

Anyway, there was a fascinating article on a crackdown on a California raw food club in a recent New Yorker (April 30th), which included quotes from those extolling raw milk, using terms that one would be more likely to associate with folks attending a wine-appreciation class:

“…layers of complexity, layers of aromatics…haunting…sensitive indicator of terroir…originality.”

Hey, I know up close and personal that all milks are not created equal.

When we were kids at my grandmother’s lake house in the country north of Chicago, we were sometimes sent to Elmer Wolfe’s to pick up some emergency milk. Elmer had a beach front picnic grove on Sand Lake, and among the amenities were a seedy bar where you could buy a few necessary groceries. Emergency milk from Elmer’s was yucky – thin and blue – nothing like the real milk we had at home, delivered to our door by the milkmen of the Blanchard Dairy in Worcester.

But worrying about a milk’s terroir?

And as for those aromatics? That’s what those in the know refer to as “cow butt.”

That’s because one of the items that pasteurization destroys is bovine fecal matter.

I don’t know about you, but I would prefer my milk to not smell (and presumably taste) like “cow butt”. But maybe that’s just me. I suppose if you squirt enough Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup into it, you can disguise that “cow butt”. Not that raw milk aficionados are likely to have a squeeze bottle of Hershey’s on-hand. But they could probably hand melt some 100% cacao chocolate over a candle made by clean-living nuns from organic beeswax, then stir it into their raw milk, if they wanted to disguise that fecal bouquet.

Rawsome is the name of the outlaw foodie club profiled in the New Yorker piece, and it’s not just “cow butt” we’re talking here.

In the meat cooler, there were raw bison kidneys, spleen, hearts, and testicles, which customers often sliced open and ate on the spot.

Nothing like a raw bison testicle washed down with some cow-butt-ery milk.

Not for me, thank-you.

But I’m not in favor of a crackdown on it, either.

If you want to pay $16 a gallon and risk a pathogenic illness for the privilege and pleasure of drinking milk that smells like shit, I’m enough of a libertarian to say ‘have at it.’