Free Milk by Anne Mendelson

“ultrapasteurization” for short—at or above 280°F for about two seconds has been gaining ground.
    Early pasteurization initiatives went along with calls for much stricter governmental supervision of sanitary conditions at dairy farms. Whatever the public-health benefits, these pushes toward modernization drove small and marginal farmers out of business if they could not afford the necessary capital investments. Meanwhile, a certain medical faction continued to oppose pasteurization as an unwarranted interference with the natural qualities of milk. For several decades the “certified milk” adherents not only kept commercialraw milk before the public (at premium prices) but energetically publicized the quite valid view that superstrict hygienic supervision and testing at critical points could reliably prevent milk-borne infections without recourse to pasteurization. Certified milk production was, if anything, a harder option for farmers, since the certifying “medical milk commissions” held them to stricter standards (especially regardingbacterial counts) than the local authorities enforcing requirements for pasteurized milk.
    The one factor that both sides insisted on was a low-enough temperature to keep the milk fresh—i.e., unsoured, with the original lactose intact. By the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific means existed to distinguish “putrefaction” from benign bacterial fermentations, but advanced Western food preferences now had little room for plainsour milk. In the early days of 145°F pasteurization,Southerners, many Ashkenazic Jews, and ex-rural types nostalgic for the sour milk of their youth still could still “clabber” pasteurized milk at home by leaving it out at room temperature. More up-to-date people clapped it straight into the icebox or refrigerator. This latter practice tipped the population of invading bacteria toward the kinds called psychrophilic, or psychrotrophic, meaning “cold-preferring.” Such organisms feed not on lactose but on milkfat and milk proteins. When they go to work the result is inedibly bitter, truly putrid milk. The HTST and UHT pasteurization methods that eventually carried the day posed further bars to natural souring, because the very rapid, thorough heating and cooling of the milk virtually eliminatedlactic-acid bacteria along with other microbes.
    Though the pasteurization and certification campaigns were a tremendous public-health success in many ways, they played a distorting role in others. In their single-minded focus on one goal, they helped to relegate naturally fermented fresh dairy products to some lesser realm and wipe out home cooks’ already fading knowledge of how to work with milk for multiple purposes. They capped and legitimized both the equation of pure, first-class milk with nonsoured milk for drinking and the idea that such milk is not just one food among many but a fundamental necessity for human survival. By the time Western medical opinion belatedly noticed the phenomenon of lactoseintolerance in the late 1960s, American consumers and most of theirnutritional advisors were too automatically conditioned to a milk-in-every-fridge mentality to grasp two clear implications: first, that anyone can happily live without using milk in any form; and second, that drinking large amounts of unsoured milk is foreign to the habits of most dairying peoples throughout the world.
    Neither of these thoughts seems to have seriously affected public-health education. By and large, unsoured milk for drinking continues to be treated as a core food or defining element of the American diet in a way that soured milk is not—and this despite the fact that it has been losing any resemblance to realfresh milk for the better part of a century. The ins and outs of the story are tortuous, but the basic reason for the debasement of quality couldn’t be simpler. From early milk-train days on, milk for drinking commanded higher prices than milk meant to be