Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita. (The opening lines of Dante’s La Commedia Divina)

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of. (Seamus Heaney’s translation)

In literature, a physical journey has often been symbolic–representing the path of human life, a spiritual quest, a trip into the unconscious, across cultures, or through time.

Yet, of all journeys, a milk run seems like it would be the least interesting. The phrase “milk run” comes from the route taken by the milk truck or milk cart, making its morning rounds, delivering milk to each household. From this, the phrase has come to mean a boring, local route, where nothing unexpected or eventful happens. As a regular “round,” it does not lead anywhere and it takes its time doing it. It is safe, untroubled, and entirely predictable.

These thoughts were very much on my mind when I came across this road sign, just half a mile from my destination, in the center of the Amish community around Arthur, Illinois. What could it mean to have arrived at the zero point from north to south and the zero point from east to west, at ground zero? Did it mark some apocalyptic end-point in human history or some post-apocalyptic re-beginning? Had I arrived at the center, the very heart of things, or had I reached some outer edge–a border, a limit–beyond which lay the unknown? Was I somewhere or nowhere? Lost or found? And what did this bewildering sign indicate about our relation to the Amish? When we travel into their community, are we simply travelling back in time, visiting some throwback or museum specimen, or are we, by some roundabout route, travelling back to the future, getting a glimpse of a community that has figured out how to live more sustainably on the earth?

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I made more butter with this week’s batch of milk. Since I’m up to 2 gallons now, I tried an experiment. While I inoculated the cream from one gallon with a few tablespoons of buttermilk leftover from the butter some friends had made with a specially-formulated culture from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I left the cream from the other gallon to ripen naturally.

There were quite a few differences. Just sitting out on the counter, the cultured cream thickened up and developed a nice sour tang in a day, while the uncultured cream needed an extra 12 hours and never thickened quite as much. And while the cultured cream stayed pretty homogenous, the other one seemed to separate out into a thick, clotted-like cream and a more or less defatted milk. Once the butter was churned out, the cultured cream left a nice-tasting, thick buttermilk, while the uncultured one produced only a watery buttermilk that had a more pungent, riper taste.

As far as the butters go, they both taste great.

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“You must want to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you want to become new unless you have first become ashes?”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“On the Way of the Creator”)

Returning to Harold McGee’s fabulous book, On Food and Cooking, to learn more about milk, I came across this intriguing sentence: “The presence of such biochemical machinery has led to the description of milk as an ‘unstructured tissue,’ since even after it leaves the animal’s body it retains some of the characteristics of a living system” (11).

There’s a lot to digest here. The lens of science, through which McGee looks, tends to reduce “a living system” to the operation of so much “biochemical machinery.” By reductively comparing its functioning to that of a man-made mechanism, this view implies that, however complex such a system might be, it is ultimately understandable and thus masterable. Any mystery is only temporary, not essential. While it would be easy to overlook this patriarchal/scientific reductionism as minor lapse, we can’t ignore the fact that McGee chooses to open his book with “the nature of milk” because this substance defines “our very biological nature as mammals (from the Latin mamma, meaning ‘breast’)” (3). Far from being an isolated, accidental, or individual mistake, this misprision of milk is exemplary, fundamental. It recapitulates an entire western history, in which the struggle over “our very biological nature” begins with milk.

After all, how can male dominance be established as long as we remain dependent on our mother’s milk? From the beginning, patriarchy requires a control and revaluation of female fertility, of the life-giving and life-sustaining female power exemplified by milk.

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When I introduced raw milk last time, I looked at the health claims made by both sides on the issue and came down firmly on the side of “Eh. I’m not sure who’s right, I’m not sure I care that much, and I’m not sure how relevant the debate is. What matters to me is the taste.” Having milk in the house that actually tastes pleasurably reminiscent of cows and grass is a small pleasure, to be sure, but an even bigger reason for getting ahold of really fresh, unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk is the chance to learn some more about this most basic foodstuff. As Margaret Visser points out in her wonderful book Much Depends on Dinner, “Milk and honey are the only substances people commonly eat which are created by animals specifically to feed their young.” Because of this, milk and the foods that come from it are endowed with a certain cultural “mystique.” After all, the promised land does not overflow with Hot Cheetos and Little Debbie Cakes; it is “flowing with milk and honey.”

I’m curious to learn more about the foods that come from milk, about what goes into them, about all that goes into making them really well–and about what shouldn’t go into them at all. It’s an opportunity to try my hand at making my own butter, buttermilk, sour cream, crème fraîche, yogurt, and ice cream, and to delve into the history of this part of our food culture.

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As long as I’m giving the food-phobes at the Champaign Urbana Public Health District hell, why don’t I keep turning up the temperature and feature another food that gives them the heebee-jeebies: raw milk. [Just in case you think I'm exaggerating here, in my salad days, when I was yet green in judgment, I belonged to a group who sponsored a local tasting of raw milk cheeses. Even though these cheeses are perfectly legal in the US (when the cheese has been aged for 60 days), word got back to me afterwards that some folks at the Health District had got wind of this and had hunkered down in their bunker, brainstorming for ways to stop the tasting.]

How can milk be “raw”? Or rather, when do we ever buy cooked milk? The fact is that all pasteurized milk, which means all milk sold in supermarkets in Illinois and approximately 99.5% of all milk consumed in the US is “cooked” or heated to a minimum temperature of 161º F for 15-20 seconds. Ultra-pasteurized milk is heated to 280º F for a fraction of a second or really cooked. Pasteurization was mandated in 1924 by the United States Department of Public Health, which set the standard for state regulation of milk production. In Illinois today, raw milk can only be sold directly on the farm where it is produced and only as long as the farmer does not advertise the raw milk in any way and the customers supply their own containers. (If the producer used his own bottles, he would be operating a “bottling plant.” I don’t understand the restriction on advertising–you can sell it, but nobody can know that you have it?) Only whole milk can be sold, and not cream or butter from raw milk.

23 states do not allow the sale of raw milk under any conditions. Why all the restrictions? Why is raw milk about as hard to come by as a Schedule I Controlled Substance? What is the danger? Are there groupies or raw milkheads out there who pose a serious threat to public health?

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