FEATURES DAIRY QUEEN:ANNE MENDELSON’S FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON MILK By Kathryn Campbell
memories. “It was another landscape – another existence – altogether,” says Mendelson. “I remember farmers putting out the milk cans.” Mendelson’s Milk includes 120 recipes and a thorough examination of this chameleon ingredient’s role in the history of food. She writes lines like, “One reason for cream’s fall from grace was, of course, the general move away from full-fat dairy products…It’s a sad development, because when real creaminess is what you want, there’s nothing like fresh cream.” Chapter sub headings include Brave New Milk, Clotted Cream and Milk and Motherhood, or Lactation in a Nutshell. She explains, “to most American cooks, the idea of milk or cream as a vehicle of vivid or concentrated flavors comes as a surprise…no one expects them to be anything but bland.”
PAGE 15
URSINUS MAGAZINE
WINTER 2009-2010
It’s unclear if people are moving away from or toward real dairy products, she says. The constant and conflicting gush of information about alleged health benefits of foods is disorienting. “Today’s mix of societal and supposedly scientific attitudes toward food makes “Jabberwocky” look rational,” she says. “This is good for you, -- oh, sorry, pardon delay in deleting last week’s official opinion; we meant to say BAD for you. Imitation milk based on soybean milk or other vegetable sources has a huge buyership among people who have some vague notion of immense health benefits and never pause to read the lists of ingredients in most of this stuff, or to think about the huge amount of technological processing necessary to make it look even remotely like milk. The main reason people buy these non-milk travesties is that they mistakenly think milk has to be a critical part of everyday diet. This is pure myth. Actually, anyone can live very happily and healthily without milk,” says Mendelson. As it happens, the book’s arrival comes at a dire period for American dairy farmers. With milk prices plummeting, farmers can’t recoup production costs. Some have opted to sell for slaughter most or all of their herds. And much of the public remain deliriously uninformed on how poorly dairy cows are treated. Mastitis is common in large farms. The cows are riddled with hoof infections because of their high grain diet, she says. And though she favors the idea of small farms where the animals can graze on pastures, they are expensive to run and hard to find. “It’s very lucrative to handle milk in mass producing way,” she says.
The dairy farmers are anything but greedy plutocrats, says Mendelson. “The space-age technology like computerized rations, or robotic milking machines, is such a Faustian bargain,” she says. “The farmers are forced to rely on it more and more, and it just ends up adding to the problem of chronic surpluses.” According to Mendelson, most of the world’s peoples scarcely touch milk except in the form of fresh fermented products yogurt, cultured sour milk or a few simple fresh cheeses. “We, on the other hand, place a weird emphasis on the one form of milk -- unfermented, fluid, and fresh in the sense of nonsour -- that’s the least interesting from a flavor standpoint and the least digestible by most human beings past the age of weaning,” she says. “It happens that the British and northwestern Europeans who colonized North America belong to one of these odd groups. Even stranger,” she says, “we’ve invented nondairy imitations of fresh drinkable milk and persuaded ourselves that they fill some true medical need.” Views differ on the necessity of milk in human diet, or its general healthfulness. Yes, milk provides nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D, which are important to bone health, says Martin Donohoe, MD, FACP Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Community Health Portland State University. But it is not a necessary part of a diet, as calcium and vitamin D can be obtained through other foods or in supplement form, he says. “Organic milk is produced without antibiotics, pesticides, or artificial hormones, including recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Pesticides and rBGH harm cows and are linked with higher rates of human breast, prostate, and gastrointestinal cancers,” says Donohoe, who is Chief Science Advisor, Campaign for Safe Foods and Member and a member of the Board of Advisors for Oregon Physicians