Mother's Milk or Ruminate On This

The treatment of milk and its consumption has been a source of debate for years. A local restaurant sent me a newsletter a while back and in it they told why they buy their milk products from Meadowbrook Farms in Clarksville, NY, one of the only remaining family owned dairies in NY State. The flavor of the milk is the primary reason that we only use their heavy cream when we make ice cream. Here's another reason:

"To make things worse, milk is now routinely 'homogenized' to prevent the cream from separating from the milk. This involves the fragmentation and pulverization of the fat molecules to the point that they will not separate from the rest of the milk. But it also permits there tiny fragments of milk fat to easily pass through the villa of the small intestine, greatly increasing the amount of denatured fat and cholesterol absorbed by the body. In fact, you absorb more milk-fat from homogenized milk than you do from pure cream!"

Gastropoda has a link to an article in Harper's that shows to what extent the dairy industry will go to prevent you from drinking raw milk.

"By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular organism appeared. They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to reproduce once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive waste. We exist only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment saturated with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering allies and rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems."