Milk
This is what it’s all about for me, right here. This “product”, this substance. Milk: Unadulterated, unheated by humans, simple yet so very complex and alive. I went 12 years without consuming dairy. And I’m not lactose intolerant, it was all by choice. The first lick of ice cream I had after that decade plus was revelatory. I first heard about raw milk in a collection of conversations entitled “The Confessions of a Well Nourished Woman”. This same collection is where I was also introduced to consuming raw egg yolks and organ meats among other things. I had been completely convinced by vegan rhetoric that all dairy was very bad for you. I was not a vegan at this time, I ate meat and eggs but dairy? No, that stuff is poison, I thought. And, frankly I do not regret not consuming dairy during those years because the vast majority of dairy available in cities is pasteurized and if we’re talking milk then its most likely also homogenized and enriched with vitamins. I’m glad that I wasn’t consuming that. The concept of raw dairy came to me through conversations between women who were approaching the topic through the lens of nourishment. Optimal, deep nourishment. I was not immediately convinced on raw milk. For some reason raw egg yolks was an easier sell for me and I started adding them to smoothies and felt an immediate difference in my vitality. Have you ever felt your hair get shinier? Anyways, I started with the egg yolks. At first one or two and then at some point I was having like 8 in a smoothie. Delicious. I don’t really do that anymore. I think when I started consuming some of these ultra-nourishing foods that my body had never had before I needed a lot of it. When I started eating liver I ate it most days for at least six months. And now I barely ever eat it. When I got to the point where I wanted to try raw milk I had major difficulty finding it. I was living in inner city Portland, Oregon and I could find non homogenized milk and “flash pasteurized” milk but not raw milk. I found that even flash pasteurization was enough to alter the product. It made me phlegmy and didn’t digest well. Eventually I realized I needed to cross state lines. Some herd shares were available outside of Portland but it turned out to be far more convenient to drive into Washington state where raw milk can be legally sold at grocery stores. My life changed. Shout-out to Chuck’s Produce in Vancouver. I was able to buy raw goat and cow milk. I drank it by the gallon. My teeth started gleaming, my head sprouted new curls, my muscles grew and I became so aware of the sky with its quality of light. The same light that nourished the grass that the cows and the goats were eating. I experienced an attunement to time and place through hyper local food. Living food.
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I believe that raw dairy is a call back to the here and now. It’s a delicious, nourishing, sustaining food and it is meant to be locally produced on a small scale. Milk didn’t start getting pasteurized because something is inherently wrong or dangerous about milk, it was because the scale changed. The industrial revolution happened. Big dairy happened. It makes sense that if we want to buy our food purely through ultra-convenient, always available, massive outlets that milk and milk products would have to be pasteurized. It’s very difficult to pool the milk of hundreds of cows into a huge vat and ship it while guaranteeing the cleanliness of all parts of that process. The milk is not the issue, it’s the contaminants that are introduced when we try to milk on mass scale. It simply isn’t meant to be that way. Not if we want the raw, real stuff. The stuff in stores is a completely different product on a molecular level than what comes out of our dairy cows. It’s dead, our milk is alive.
