I mentioned the advantages of my customized Google News page yesterday, and here today is another example of its serendipity. One of my categories is "Basel Switzerland," which I'll admit is not usually very interesting as it usually contains only stories about banks, drug companies, and the occasional Paris Hilton slip-up. This morning, however, I was greeted by the headline, More Dairies Go Raw. That sounded interesting, given my interest in foods natural and unpasteurized, and my observation that, while Switzerland does cheese very, very well, the milk—at least that available in the grocery stores—is less than stellar. Just like here, everything is pasteurized and homogenized, and if you want skim milk (as I do), you are reduced to buying that which has been so denatured as to be able to sit, unrefrigerated, on the shelf for an indeterminant time. No thanks; I got my dairy from yoghurt and cheese while we were there.
So what was a story from the Boston Globe doing in my Basel news feed? Because of these sentences:
Researchers at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Basel in Switzerland followed nearly 15,000 children ages 5 to 15 in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany from 2001 to 2004. The study, sponsored by the European Union and published in 2007, found that children who drank raw milk had a lower incidence of asthma and allergies.
I bought organic milk here in Australia, pasteurised but unhomogenised. I first thought it had gone bad when I saw all the little chunks floating around. Can you tell me why unhomogenised is better? I find it annoying more than anything else - I don't want to have to stir my milk before I drink it or eat cereal!
I find it ironic that today I bought milk from a farmer in a little town in Switzerland that you bottled yourself from a machine that squirts fresh milk. It didn't say whether it was pasteurized or not, but I did notice little flecks on my milk glass. I don't like whole milk, but this stuff tasted great. Sorry I didn't discover it before your visit. You'll just have to come again!
Come again to Switzerland? Sounds like a great idea, even if a tad expensive for a milk run.
An Internet search will tell you a lot about the harm people think is done to milk (and those who drink it) by homogenization (as well as by pasteurization). I'm not convinced they're right, just as I'm not convinced by the folks who say that microwave ovens do harmful damage to the molecular structure of the food. But I'm not convinced they're entirely wrong, either, and my own experience tells me that the more processed and artificial a food is, the less it has to offer. If the orange juice and maple syrup didn't convince you, think about the difference between a good Gruyère and cheese-in-a-can. Oh, wait -- maybe that was a bad example. ;)
Besides, there's the natsukashii factor. When I was growing up, milk was pasteurized but not homogenized, delivered every morning to our door, in glass bottles with the cream risen to the top. You could skim the cream off to use as cream, or shake the bottle for richer milk. We didn't have our bread delivered, but I loved the bread delivery van because it was still horse-drawn. Pollution was not invented with the automobile....
Well, the internet will also tell me that 9/11 was a CIA ploy and that Bigfoot exists, and perhaps even that he played a role in 9/11. I used the unhomogenised stuff in my tea this morning and found that the lumps melted into little globules of fat. A glass bottle would have improved things because I would have seen the lumps and shaken the bottle first - the carton allows neither for prior inspection nor for safe shaking after opening the container. I still drank my tea, but look and texture and, I believe, even taste suffered.
I agree, glass is better, even for homogenized milk. I don't usually get it -- it's more expensive and harder to find. But I still remember the amazement I felt when -- some 15 or 20 years after my last bottle of home-delivered milk -- we visited a friend's house in the country and once again tasted home-delivered farm-fresh milk from a glass bottle. What a difference! To be fair, I haven't tasted such a radical difference since, or I'd be buying those glass bottles all the time despite the price. (Side note: this was no Luddite or country hick friend -- we were visiting to buy from him our first piece of computer equipment and see his own computer setup, in the pre-personal computer days.)
I wonder if something is wrong with your bottle of milk. Oddly enough, I had the same thing happen with a bottle of unhomogenised milk recently; it was in a glass bottle, even, and I shook it well first. Some of the cream had clearly turned to butter, and I'll admit that butter in my hot chocolate was not what I had expected, though it didn't taste bad. I attribute the problem to the fact that the milk had been frozen (I stuck it in the freezer when we left town). I've never seen globules of fat in unhomogenised milk before; even when I forgot to shake it, all I got was extra-creamy milk. Fortunately, it was Heather's glass I was pouring. :)
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest rudely that you do your own Internet research. It's just that because I'm not convinced, myself, about anything other than taste and the desirability of minimal processing, I didn't feel right just repeating someone else's argument. I couldn't do it justice. For all I know, arguments on either or both sides could be a CIA ploy. :)
