Source

Land of Milk and Honey

Overrated and overpriced

My Geriatric Journal 12

Note: I am featuring some of my favorite rants here while on a sabbatical thanks to Hurricane Fiona. I plan to publish it in a book of essays on Amazon soon.

Is nothing sacred? Of course not. Is anything perfect? Ditto. The latest target of dubious nutritional news is milk: real milk, produced in the mammary glands of an animal, in most cases, a cow. Or millions of cows.

People in the USA have drunk trillions of gallons of milk since some hapless postdiluvian farmer first put his lips to a teat. “What’s good enough for the calf is good enough for me,” I imagine him saying, while visions of growing strong as a bull danced in his head.

When I was a child (you knew this was coming — after all this is my geriatric journal), milk was the perfect food. It was rich in nutrients such as calcium (to make strong bones), protein (like meat), fat (like butter) and carbohydrates (like potatoes).

Among my fondest memories of my distant youth was rushing out in the winter cold to bring in the glass milk bottles our milkman faithfully delivered every morning — and do it before they froze and broke. My reward was getting to scoop out some of the frozen cream that popped out of the top (milk was not yet homogenized): ice cream!