Milk (12 page)

Undisputed though all these figures are, the interpretations different people have placed on them are anything but. We can start with the campaign to point out saturated fatty acids—and foods like milk that contain a great deal of them—as artery-clogging menaces. This movement was led during the ’50s and ’60s by the energetic, influential
Ancel Keys, whose country-by-country comparative studies of diet data and mortality statistics provided the initial evidence for a sustained public-health war on saturated fats and
cholesterol.

Several aspects of this battle, however, remained strangely underreported for many decades. One is that Keys’s attempts to link national dietary habits and coronary heart disease ignored many populations in which high consumption of saturated fats wasn’t accompanied by high rates of atherosclerosis. (The most obvious examples are parts of Asia, Africa, and the Near East with heavily milk-dependent diets, and various tropical regions where palm or coconut oil historically was the cooking fat of choice.) Another is that his contentions about the genesis of arterial plaque have proved surprisingly hard to verify in detail as he first proposed them. And from the start, many equally qualified frontline researchers came to conclusions different from those of Keys.

As time went on, both interpretive disagreements and official course corrections began to strain the public patience, until a certain popular backlash erupted late in the 1990s. The first hints of trouble to come appeared when Ancel Keys and his allies in the public-health sector realized that they had oversimplified the saturated/unsaturated–fat dichotomy by telling people that “more unsaturated” automatically equaled “more life-saving.” To their surprise, monounsaturates turned out to afford more cardiac benefits than the polyunsaturates in which they had initially placed their trust. Links between dietary cholesterol and the levels that show up in the bloodstream as builders of arterial plaque also failed to meet early expectations. Some years later
researchers realized that blood-serum cholesterol was not one uniform substance but an amalgamation of different fractions with different effects; moreover, its path from dinner table to artery wall didn’t match the beautiful simplicity of the first formulations. A yet more jarring discovery was that the labels “saturated,” “
monounsaturated,” and “
polyunsaturated” were inadequate to indicate different fatty acids’ roles in triggering or protecting against atherosclerosis. Certain saturated fatty acids in milk and meat didn’t seem to raise blood cholesterol levels. Certain monounsaturates appeared to be desirable, others quite the opposite. As for polyunsaturates, they turned out to come in several molecular configurations that now are thought to play dramatically different roles in cell chemistry and plaque formation.

Epidemiologists surveying twentieth-century mortality figures further weakened the Keysian argument by failing to agree on whether there had ever been an “epidemic” of fatal heart disease, as opposed to statistical shifts during a period of increasing longevity and decreasing likelihood of dying from diseases of childhood or youth before cardiac conditions had had time to manifest themselves. Another embarrassment surfaced in the early 1990s, when the authorities had to do a highly public about-face on blanket recommendations of shortenings and margarines. Far from being beneficial, it developed, the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils responsible for these test-tube wonders contained possibly atherogenic
trans fatty acids in hugely greater amounts than plain
butter. The turn of the twenty-first century saw a far worse setback: The general lean-and-trim diet blueprint to which the antisaturated fat agenda belonged was thrown into disarray when a vocal wing of dietary specialists denounced low-calorie, low-fat alternatives to such traditional full-fat foods as milk, butter, and cream as factors in a rising national tide of obesity and diabetes.

By the mid-1990s some rebellious types were heretically celebrating a return to steak. A few years later red meat and eggs—early victims of nutritional McCarthyism—were getting a small, grudging rehabilitation from the self-constituted food police. Not so butter and full-fat milk, though they happen to have a striking piece of negative evidence on their side. As shown by
USDA and census statistics, consumption of both whole milk and butter was steadily
declining
during the 1950s and ’60s while the number of fatal heart attacks rose—along with decreasing use of animal fats overall and increasing use of vegetable oils. Yet to this day the
American Heart Assciation—which readily accepts money from manufacturers in return for putting AHA approval stickers on products like Cocoa Puffs breakfast cereal and Smart Balance De Luxe Microwave Popcorn—still inveighs against milk with the milkfat that is simply part of the nature of milk. And the shakiest tenets of the Keysian party line continue to inspire tinhorn politicos like the school-district administrators
who have succeeded in getting whole milk banned from public schools in both Los Angeles and New York City. Probably most people who think of themselves as nutrition-savvy would be astonished to learn that evidence of whole milk’s being a ticket to an early grave is conspicuous by its absence.

How did a good and useful food come to be buried in such misunderstanding? For one answer we can look to well-meaning authorities on nutrition and disease who have spent fifty-plus years repeatedly issuing blanket dietary recommendations for the whole population without waiting to think through many ifs, ands, or buts that have had to be inserted piecemeal at erratic intervals. Their pronouncements, as rehashed by a corps of food and health journalists, have reached most of us as a series of disjointed bulletins compared to which the blind men’s reports on the elephant were marvels of coherence.

Add an endless chorus of commercial persuasions to buy more and more (for obvious reasons, never less) of this or that value-added
niche product targeted to real, imaginary, or highly misrepresented needs and deficiencies, and you have what I can only call a schizoid mentality. Consider the millions of people taught to fear and distrust a common food to the point of banishing it from their diet. Do they look elsewhere for ideas about eating that don’t involve its use? On the contrary, they rush forth to spend extra bucks on crude artificial mimicries of the dreaded offender.

This sad ending might have looked like the only ending a decade or two back, but I see increasing evidence that it doesn’t have to be.

Seventeen years ago I went to a “milk tasting” organized by the New York branch of a national gastronomic organization, meant to illuminate some of the factors affecting milk flavor, like what animals it comes from and what sort of processing it undergoes. The next week a
New Yorker
“Talk of the Town” reporter—unable to taste any particular difference among the six samples on display “except for the chocolate milk, which tasted like chocolate”—had a quiet snicker at the general foofaraw (especially the lunatic aspirations of any anti-pasturizers trying to turn a public health hazard into “
chic milk,
” in scornful italics). Moral of story, as of 1991: Modern dairying had been working to treat an innately variable, highly perishable biological secretion like a bulk commodity long enough for wags to chortle over even a modest attempt to call this absurdity into question.

I doubt that an exercise designed to stimulate curiosity about milk from various animals, handled in different ways, would draw the same sort of putdown today. The idea that milk doesn’t have to be a gastronomic neuter wished on
the public under misguided dietary assumptions, but actually is capable of
tasting
like something, is not quite as foreign to people who eat and think about what they eat. What now seems to be happening, for at least some of us, is a more liberating perception of food in general as a source of both sustenance and pleasure.

Notwithstanding the Babel of sales pitches and ideologies charging us to view everything we put in our mouths as either a miracle cure or a death warrant, a gathering conflux of the independent-minded is recognizing the really great thing about today’s food scene: It gives us the stuff of
several different kinds of enjoyable and nutritious diets
based on time-honored foodways of peoples everywhere in the world. It feeds and nourishes a mentality that seeks varied, flexible answers to the question of what to eat rather than competing Doctrines of the Faith about what
not
to eat. There are, for instance, different ways to be a vegetarian, inspired by eating patterns from parts of the Far East, Near East, Mediterranean basin, and India—routes paved with choices of pleasure, not deprivation, and blessedly free of products arm-wrestled into simulations of what they are not.

If this dietary liberation theology has any prime doctrine of its own, it’s that starting with a “what to eat” firmly centered on a very wide spectrum of minimally processed fresh fruits, vegetables, and vegetable protein sources ought to free us from agonized struggles to ration out other foods—for example, milk—by miserly formulas from this or that ministry of fear. No food has to pretend to be all things to all people. Nothing has to suffer exaggerated reactions against false labels like “Nature’s Perfect Food.”

Or to put it another way: If we can shed the notion that chugging down so much milk a day is a duty, perhaps we will be free to discover different forms of it as a joy. People whose ancestors never consumed milk products may be able to make up their own minds about it without well-meant ethnocentric mistakes distorting the picture. Those with the right genes may taste the really, truly fresh milk and cream just starting to reach certain retail sources and for the first time realize what exquisite works of nature these are. And those whose understanding of milk products and milk-based cooking has revolved around a few narrow Western models may rejoice in the glorious culinary plenty and diversity now opening up to all of us.

In short: Everyone who honestly loves fresh dairy foods should tune out the noise of hucksterism and fearmongering, and recognize what milk can contribute to the pleasure of not all but very many sound and satisfying diets.

P
eople who learn that I’m writing a book about dairy products often ask whether I think raw or pasteurized milk is better for children and adults, or how
organic milk stacks up against conventionally produced versions. Unfortunately, I don’t have any clear-cut answers.

Certainly the questions spring from sincere concerns about the potential of a basic foodstuff to nourish us or bring down disasters on our heads. But I find the usual course of public debate troubling. It is waged with great eagerness to discuss issues of food and health by slinging around as many claims and counterclaims as possible in the service of preformed agendas, and all too often without elementary caution, fair-mindedness, or patience to entertain any answer that falls between two stools. And in the case of milk, the loudest opinions often come from people who know very little. I can only offer my own opinions in the hope that they’ll be of help to someone.

To be blunt: Every time I hear or read any discussion of
raw milk in any public forum, I know I can look forward to endless repetitions of a few misleading, simpleminded claims on both sides, with either no attention to or no technical understanding of taste factors (which are
my
preformed agenda).

Most of those who want consumers to have unfettered access to raw milk insist that pasteurization destroys nutritional value. Sometimes they also assert that raw milk tastes better, period. Neither claim is unconditionally true. On the other side, adherents of pasteurization are bent on warning the public that without it we can expect the unhindered spread of milk-borne pathogens that used to kill people en masse but are eliminated in the pasteurizing process. This, too, is only partly true.

To start with flavor, though it’s the last thing many of the polemicists think of: Certainly a glass of raw milk sampled at the farm is going to taste different from the supermarket milk in somebody’s refrigerator. But pasteurization is
only one of the industrial processing steps responsible for the difference. As explained earlier (see
this page
), virtually all the pasteurized milk that rea
ches us has been
centrifugally separated, recombined to standardized milkfat percentages, and homogenized. These steps do more to denature milk than anything else that happens to it in manufacturing. The creamier “mouthfeel” and fresher flavor of whole raw milk at a well-run
Jersey cow
dairy farm (and, by the way, plenty of
Holstein-Friesian farms) reflect not just actual freshness but the fact that the basic milk structure is intact. You can get nearly all of the same effect from unhomogenized pasteurized milk—at least, if it comes to you very fresh and was pasteurized by the right method.

This brings us to the second great factor usually left out of the debate: There is
pasteurization and pasteurization. As we’ve seen, at one time it was routinely done at a comparatively low temperature for a long time by pumping batches into and out of a vat. This method eliminated harmful bacteria with minimal impairment of flavor. The more cost-effective approaches that are almost universal today involve higher temperatures with near-instantaneous heating and cooling by continuous flow. They tend to impart a slightly more cooked flavor while denaturing some of the water-soluble milk proteins—but it’s hard to attribute particular flavor effects to these techniques alone, because they are almost always carried out together with
homogenization.

Then there is the intrinsic quality of the milk itself. Rawness and pasteurization have nothing to do with the plain fact that milk produced by farmers with sane
breeding-and-feeding priorities tastes better than milk cranked out with an eye only to volume. Some of the best milk I’ve tasted has been raw, and so has some of the worst. I have awful memories of one watery, dismal brand that I naively tried several decades ago when New York State permitted retail sales of raw milk in health-food stores.