Louis Pasteur might be blamed for the current debate of natural versus processed as it relates to the cow and the kitchen.
Pasteur, as everyone knows from their health classes of decades ago, is the French microbiologist who discovered that if you heat certain products to just below the boiling point, all sorts of germs and pathogens and other bad things will be killed, making the product safer for human consumption.
His theory worked for various wines and therefore, it was believed that it would also work for milk — hence the introduction of pasteurized milk to the refrigerators of North America back in the 1890s.
Eventually, pasteurization was adopted as an enforced government rule and rural residents who milked cows were not allowed to sell their raw milk to their neighbours without the benefit of this heating process.
Those rules are currently being challenged by some folks in Ontario and British Columbia who feel raw milk is healthier, that raw milk contains natural goodness that is destroyed by pasteurization.
To get around the existing sales rules, enterprising herd owners have sold shares in the milk cows so in effect, the milk is not being sold, but is being consumed by the owners — fully within a law that allows farmers to consume their own products.
The raw milk debate caught my eye, not because I have any valid legal opinion to express but rather because I have an opinion on taste as it relates to milk.
As a town kid I was rarely exposed to raw milk but when I stayed with friends on the farm, it was a morning and evening ritual to head to the barn to view the milking process. Part of the fun was to watch the cats enjoying a bit of milk directly from the source, and for yours truly to carry the miniscule amount of milk I had successfully extracted from a cow who was reluctant to share with this fumbling stranger.
My excitement ended at the table when my glass was filled with milk — milk that unbeknownst to me was still retchingly warm. Milk, in my childhood mind, was supposed to be ice-cold as it was when it came out of our refrigerator, and from the bottles we picked up at the city dairy.
But being taught to eat and drink what my friend’s mother put on the table, I drank the milk and I don’t believe I gagged once. I do remember politely refusing a second glass in favour of water. And what a story I had to tell when I got home after my farm visit . . . thinking this was my first experience with “farm milk.”
I remember my dad grinning and asking me what I thought I had been drinking when we visited my aunt’s farm.
It turns out I had been drinking “cow’s milk” at her table too, and hadn’t been any wiser — at least it was cold milk, even though it did have small white globs drifting in the glass — the cream that was separating because the milk wasn’t homogenized — or so I was told.
My farm friends still insist city milk isn’t real milk, that it has lost its taste. I definitely agree that farm cream whips like nothing I have ever whipped from the grocery store.
I’m not sure I should seriously think about buying a share in a cow for I honestly don’t know if I could drink raw milk after being sold on pasteurization all these years.
But then again, maybe those farm cats had the right idea all along.
Joyce Walter can be reached at 691-1259.
