Alessandra is reading…

Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages by Anne Mendelson – Review and Thoughts

Originally picked up for the raw milk vs. pasteurized milk chapter, I also read the beginning of this book for the origins of milk. Which was actually more informative than I would’ve presumed, giving general info about ruminant animals and the different kinds of animals that I never would’ve thought of humans consuming their milk. 

“Why should we support new-style versions of factory farming clad in airs of moral superiority to factory farming?”

Milk by Anne Mendelson

Mendelson discusses the origins of grain crops (from present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, if you were interested), why we shouldn’t drink milk from pigs and that buffaloes (which can be milked, and are used for milk in some countries) are adaptive and resilient to environmental changes. 

Mendelson also went over good oils (Mediterranean olive oil and Middle Eastern sesame oil), seed oils (highly processed oils extracted from seeds not originally invented for consumption), and the history and science of dairy cows in the US. 

Here’s the info she presented on seed oils (which are fucking horrible for you to consume) vs. butter

• Vegetable oils – 10-18 grams of saturated fatty acids, 82 to 80 grams total unsaturated fatty acids, with widely vary proportions of monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fatty acids
• Olive oil – 14 grams saturated fatty acids, 77 grams monounsaturated fatty acids, 9 grams polyunsaturated fatty acids
• 100 grams of cows’-milk butter – 62 grams saturated fatty acids, 29 grams monounsaturated fatty acids, 4 grams polyunsaturated fatty acids

Raw vs. Pasteurized Milk

“Dairy farmers are not to blame for the punishing realities of modern commercial milk production.”

The author proposes that drinking raw milk vs. pasteurized milk does not matter in retrospect to 1) if the milk has been homogenized and 2) if the dairy cows were bred and milked properly. Meaning that the cows should not have been bred to ensure that they would produce the highest volume possible of milk combined with hormone injections and the standard American cow diet consisting of that which cows cannot really properly digest.

Standard American dairy cow diet – “chopped hay, cornstalk or other silage, corn or cornmeal, ground soybeans or cottonseed, and beet pulp or molasses, and chemical buffers like sodium bicarbonate, dicalcium phosphate, and powdered lime.”

Mendelson proposes that you can get the same tastes from raw milk and unhomogenized pasteurized milk (if it’s fresh and pasteurized by the correct method). She also discusses that it is irresponsible of the food industry to tout certain raw foods while villainizing others – we eat sashimi, beef carpaccio, and oysters and no one bats an eye, but raw milk is illegal to sell in certain US states. 

“Consider the millions of people taught to fear and distrust a common food to the point of banishing it from their diet. Do they look elsewhere for ideas about eating that don’t involve its use? On the contrary, they rush forth to spend extra bucks on crude artificial mimicries of the dreaded offender.”

Milk by Anne Mendelson

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More to come on the current cow industry in my future review of Sacred Cow by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf.

Fun fact before ending – did you know there are about 9.4 million dairy cows in the US?

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Read on.