The Domestic Empress

This weekend I had the opportunity to try raw milk for the first time. I went with a few friends out to a farm where you can board your cow(s).

(Raw milk, if you don’t know, is unpasteurized milk. It’s something that has people harshly divided.  I encourage you to do some serious research before you form an opinion either way. And by serious I mean something along the lines of doctoral dissertation-worthy work – not, “I googled.”)

So we arrived on the farm and met some gorgeous animals. We’re talking all pesticide-free grass-fed cows who are treated like pets – not products. The cows are not given antibiotics (unless it’s a life-threatening situation) or hormones. They were calm, friendly, and cute with each other (forgive me, I’m not a farm girl – seeing cows nuzzling each other is a foreign concept).

We were able to watch as the cows put themselves into a neat row for milking. The farmer explained the process she uses to milk the cows as she was going through it, and we got to see every step of the process.

And of course, we got to taste the milk (somewhere my mother just had a stroke). Cold, fresh from the cow, not damaged by heat. It was delicious.

I expected that it would be completely new and different – but I was wrong. This milk tasted just like the organic whole milk I’ve had in the past (my mother – still stroking out over that whole fat milk idea). Obviously taste is not a measure of quality – it can’t measure the amount of bacteria or nutrients – but I was surprised because I expected that the milk would be very different from what I am used to.

I know there are a number of things that can impact the taste of milk – food being one of them. Right now the cows are eating silage (corn and hay) but the rest of the year they’ll be eating grass so that will change the way the milk tastes and looks. We were told the milk would be “golden” colored in the summer instead of the creamy white color it is right now.

As far as cleanliness goes, it’s difficult to say. The farm looked clean – for a farm. They’re not scrubbing down the milking barn between milkings, and they’re not washing the mud (which let’s be honest, must be part manure) off the cows before they milk them. It’s not a “sterile” process by any means – the milking apparatus isn’t cleaned between cows, just between milkings, but the cow’s teats are dipped in iodine before and after milking (the same pot of iodine was used for all the cows).  I work in healthcare so I’m a bit sensitive to infection control procedures and this made me a little leery – but can you imagine the things that happen when the farmer knows the milk will be pasteurized before it gets to customers?

Ultimately the raw vs. pasteurized debate is an interesting one, and I sure don’t have the answer. My visit to the farm didn’t change my opinion on raw milk but it gave me a lot to think about.

Have you ever had an experience that changed the way you think about food?