Today I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. As a part of the endless ongoing project to be be more clean/green/healthy/sustainable. Which often feels so daunting, but today felt easy & fun.
I’ve been reading about the evils of pasteurisation of milk. How it kills the healthy enzymes etc. How ‘dairy intolerance’ was pretty well unknown until the 1950’s, when they started pasteurising milk.
Today I finally went to the dairy farm - friends told me about it a while ago - where you can fill your own bottles for a dollar a litre with raw milk, which is straight from lovely Jersey cows. Any afternoon at milking time.
Now let me stress here that the good farmers are not selling raw milk for us to drink - No, no no, because that would be ILLEGAL. We have no intention of drinking illegal, un-pasteurised milk or of putting it on our cereal, in our tea or making yoghurt with it, or giving it to our children, no way! We are going to...bathe in it, as a beauty treatment!
This beauty treatment is so fresh, so pure! And so economical! And there is no excess packaging, there are no transport costs, no advertising costs. Just a good local product.
So, I rattle along a rutted road past peaceful green paddocks to reach the old milking shed, where three or four generations of the same family have milked their cows. I suppose by hand originally. Now by machine. Ninety year old grandpa is still there helping herd the cows in and out of the bales. Waving them in with his walking stick. Inside there are big, cool vats of milk.
There is also an old copper like my grandmother had in her out house laundry. A concrete floor, a little dog, some chooks pecking in the yard.
There’s the smell of cows and cow pooh and grass, and the gentle mooing and shuffling of cows. With their big, brown, long-lashed eyes. I think about how cows are sacred to the Hindus. Gentle beasts, who give us such nourishment.
The help-yourself milk is paid for on an honesty system. You leave your dollar in the tin. A couple of other healthy-looking people are there, also getting their bath milk. Someone shows me where the pouring jug is, where the tap is. Nobody is in a hurry. The farmer seems to know everyone, waves his greetings, while busily supervising the milking shed.
I drive home with my two glass bottles of precious stuff feeling like the cat that got the cream.
2 comments:
It is becoming a sort of pleasure to spy in your daily goings and doings. It is like listening to a tale. I guess it is your writing technique :-) that hooks me, it can not be just a bottle of raw milk. But I am a bit slow with your ironies, if in fact there was one here. Did you drink the milk, didn't you? I would have drink it, but then in Spain we do not take the law as above everything, you know, you have to make some exceptions. After having read True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey -some time ago - I came to believe that Australians were, at least, raw milk drinkers if they feel like it :-)
I'm not going to answer your question - on the grounds that I may incriminate myself!
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