Land of Milk and Honey
8/8/07
Yesterday I was talking to my colleague Cheryl at London Farmers' Markets about one of our vendors. A chef, he makes ice cream from the raw milk and cream of one of our dairy farmers. Flavors like strawberry (an all-summer, not spring-only, fruit in England) with black pepper got me wishing we had more brands of ice cream made with regional milk and seasonal flavors. It is my favorite dessert.
If you can find good local milk and cream, ice cream is easy to make at home, which I'm afraid I haven't done lately. Panna cotta is another easy dessert and both can be made with raw milk and cream which is kept raw. For a simple ice cream, you can freeze the raw dairy mix directly - ie, still raw - or, if you're making a custard base with eggs, you can gently cook that bit of milk with eggs, and mix the base with the rest of the raw milk. Panna cruda (as I call it) is easily left raw because the gelatin (rather than cooking with eggs) is what makes it set. Then it's simply chilled in the serving cups. I like it with honey and pine nuts.
It's all very biblical. 'Land of milk and honey' means a lucky land, a land of plenty, and you can see why. Milk would have been plentiful from cows, sheep, and goats - as a nursing mother, I know something about the relentlessness of milk production: just feed that machine and the supply keeps coming. But milk is also highly perishable. It spoils quickly, especially in hot climates. Honey was the opposite: rare and thus special (because it's difficult to collect) but easy to store. It is antimicrobial and also drives out water, the main cause of spoilage. A dessert of milk and honey would have been a fine thing. And both were raw, until very recently in human history.
Anyway, all this is on my mind because if anything I am becoming a more lazy cook, and less fancy, and lately I am settling for something even simpler than ice cream: raw cream with raw honey or fruit. Yesterday I made chicken stock, which Julian drank from a cup. He had a piece of chicken too, and I made a chicken salad with parsley and walnuts and a little raw cream from Organic Pastures in California, because we haven't yet found raw milk where we're staying this summer. For dessert, we had raw cream with fruit and after dinner, we had raw cream again, this time with a little honey and cinnamon, a spice he seems to like.
Yes, Julian, who is nine months old, drinks raw cream and milk, as The New York Times reports today. Why do we drink raw milk? It contains heat-sensitive nutrients we value. They include vitamins B and C, fats (omega-3 fats, found in the milk of grass-fed cows), beneficial bacteria, and enzymes. Enzymes damaged by pasteurization include lipase (to digest lipids, or fats); phosphatase (to absorb calcium), and lactase (to digest lactose). We drink whole milk (not skim) because the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, K) are found in the fat; and because saturated fats are required to build bones.
That bone study, which I found in a geeky tome on lipids, now packed away in the city, is fascinating. They compared bone density after eating polyunsaturated oils such as corn and soy (containing omega-6 fats) or saturated fats, and bone density was better in those eating saturated fats. Omega-6 fats from polyunsaturated vegetable oils are abundant in the industrial diet and were relatively rare in traditional ones. We eat far too many. The polyunsaturated fats you want to eat, of course, are the omega-3 fats found in cold-water wild fish, such as mackerel. They prevent obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Yesterday, I learned they also build bone density. (The omega-3 articles are in the April 2005 and May 2007 issues of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.)
Of course it is vital that the raw milk you drink comes from a healthy herd, a sparkling clean dairy, and a dairy farmer with high standards. Industrial milk from crowded dairies where cows eat grain may well be teeming with pathogens. Grass-fed and local milk is best. Some foods, like peaches and fresh raw milk, don't travel well - though milk freezes fine. To find traditional milk near you, try www.realmilk.com.
Julian has eaten a little raw honey, too. They warn against raw honey for infants under one year, because it may contain botulism, a common soil and air-borne pathogen. But I couldn't find satisfactory science to back it up. Or at least it doesn't seem riskier than feeding Julian other foods that can carry botulism. Not that babies need much honey - sweets can come later. It's just that plain whole yogurt, a good baby food in my book, is quite sour compared with breast milk, I'm not keen on white sugar, and I don't think a touch of honey is a bad thing. We could try maple syrup.
Rudolf Steiner, founder of biodynamic farming, said that milk is good for babies and honey for older people, and that gradually, you decrease the milk and increase the honey. Certainly they go together. In Ayurvedic medicine, milk is said to be 'cool' and 'sour' and honey and spices are used to 'warm' it. It's often a question of balance in traditional cuisines and medicines.
Steiner says that honey builds bones. I've read his thinking, in lectures from 1923, on bees and honey, and I haven't figured out the modern science behind this claim. He says it has to do with the hexagonal structure of the honey comb and the bones. Certainly a hexagon is very strong, as structural engineers know. But I would like to see some modern biochemical logic for the bone-building effects. I bet it's there, because lots of what Steiner said has proved true.
In 1923, he predicted the coral reef destruction and bee colony collapses we see today. He said the bee problems would be caused by industrial beekeeping methods, which had already begun in his day. Today these include artificial breeding, feeding sugar, antibiotics, plastic honeycombs, and pasteurization. Most commercial honey is a blend of different countries, filtered, and pasteurized - it is effectively sugar water and lacks the pollen, propolis, and phytonutrients that reduce allergies and promote health.
So, in addition to shopping for local, raw, and unfiltered honey, ask your beekeeper if he feeds his bees sugar, uses plastic combs (instead of allowing the bees to build their own from wax), or uses antibiotics for disease prevention or control. Bee problems are showing resistance to antibiotics, according to the government of British Columbia. Who imagined that the short-termist practices of factory farming (in, say, poultry, where overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic resistance in pathogens doctors must fight in when humans get sick) would one day apply to bees?
Rudolf Steiner did.
