Drinking Milk Fresh From the Cow

I gave my cat Opal a treat today — a tablespoon of farm fresh heavy cream. I use this in the evening to make my night time drink which is a tea made from freshly grated ginger, fresh turmeric, cinnamon, a bit of black pepper (so your body can absorb the nutrients from the turmeric), a little bit of raw local honey, and a good dollop of the cream, all well mixed together.

I have cancer, and a lot of those ingredients help my body fight the disease.

However, the cream itself is only low temperature pasturized, which would freak out a lot of people.

They would also warn me that giving cats milk will give them digestive issues. This is true if you give your cat milk from the supermarket. But not all milk is the same.

Once upon a time, many Americans drank raw milk, as did people around the world, at least if they owned their own cows and kept them clean. In some parts of the world, people continue to drink raw or slightly heated milk.

America (and most of the world) used to have a lot of farmers, because, once upon a time, most people grew a lot of their own food. This was true as late as the 1970s. My ex, who grew up in the late ’50s and 1960s told me about visiting his grandfather’s farm as a boy and watching the old man milk the cows.

While he did that, the cats would line up politely at the barn door, and every once in a while the farmer would squirt a stream of milk back at the felines. They loved it and never took any harm from it.

My ex’s grandparents, and, in fact, the whole family, drank this fresh milk while at the farm. Many people who grew up on farms did. Their animals were clean and healthy because they had access to sunlit pastures instead of standing in their own poop in a small confined space.

My ex’s grandather obviously cared for his farm animals, including the barn cats.

Today people are warned not to give cats milk because it will give them digestive issues, but the milk I give Opal has not been denatured this way — it’s been low temperature pasturized. That means she can digest it without getting sick, just like those barn cats never got sick from their daily portion of fresh raw milk.

My Mom also drank fresh milk as a young girl. She and her siblings spent their early years on Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram since Mom’s father worked for Gandhiji as part of his organization.

He and his family lived on the ashram and had a plot of land where they grew vegetables. They also had their own cow, which Mom’s father milked every morning.

Each child lined up and my grandather would milk the cow straight into his or her tumbler. That was their breakfast. He would also milk into a small pail that my grandmother used to make yogurt. The rest of the milk was for the calf.

My grandparents explained to me years later that they appreciated the generosity of the cow in sharing her milk, but it would be wrong to take too much and leave the calf hungry. So they only milked the cow in the morning and the calf fed freely the rest of the day.

In this case, the cow was very clean. According to Mom, it was a very pretty white cow and grandfather always cleaned it well with soap before he milked it.

They consumed the milk raw, and no one ever got sick from it. In fact they were remarkably healthy because they lived in a clean environment at the ashram and ate moderate amounts of healthy, home cooked and home grown food.

However, later, when the family moved to Mumbai, my grandmother would pasturize the milk on her stove. Her family no longer owned the cow that was milked — instead, a local farmer brought a few cows to the apartment where she lived, and she’d go down the stairs with a pail.

When my brother and I visited her in India, we drank this milk and never had a bad reaction. However,by the time we drank it, it has been low temperature pasturized.

While Grandma knew the guy who sold the milk, made sure he cleaned the cow’s udder in front of her, and used a thoroughly clean pail, she still gently heated the milk on her stove. She was extra careful because the cow did not belong to her and she wasn’t sure the man kept it up to her standards.

We drank that milk the whole time we were in India, and only drank water that Grandma filtered or the occasional bottle of Fanta, which was very popular in India. We never got sick from anything we drank while we stayed with them.

Nowadays, I am careful about the sources of my milk and cream, not only because I care about my health but I also care about the cow. Is she being locked in a tiny enclosure, forced to stand in her own filth and breathe stinky air? That is not good for the cow and it’s not good for us either if we drink her milk.

For a while I was able to get my milk from a local dairy where the calves stayed with their mothers until they were weaned and both cows and calves freely roamed sunlit meadows.

When I checked out the farm, I was impressed with how careful they were to meet modern standards of hygiene.

I felt safe knowing the milk was clean and the cows were well treated.

Unfortunately, the farm eventually closed, so now I buy low temperature pasturized milk. It’s still very digestible and tasty, but I don’t know how the calves are treated. I’ve called the farmer and he seemed to care about his animals, but I can’t visit him to check for myself because of the cancer.

However, there are still ethical dilemmas if you drink milk, even if the dairy cows are well treated.

When I bought milk from the farm, male calves were slaughtered at 6 months, but the farmer hired a friend to come to the farm and do it, so that the calves weren’t traveling for days without food or water.

In India, in my grandparents’ day, the surplus male calves were neutered and used to pull carts and plow fields. Now? India is just as bad when it comes to animal rights as other countries.

However, it’s no longer possible for families in town to have a cow. When a family kept its own livestock, I imagine the animals were better treated because there were daily interactions. You got to notice the different personalities, you noticed immediately if an animal was sick and could care for it, and there were even religious strictures.

If you were a Christian, you got a day off on the Sabbath and your animals were supposed to get a day of rest, too.

Now, no one cares how the cow was treated that gives us milk. So why are we suprised that it’s become so much harder to find healthy milk?

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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Photo credit: iStock.com