Milks

Milk has become the most standardized of our basic foods. Once upon a time, people lucky enough to live near a farm could taste the pasture and the seasons in milk fresh from the cow. City life, mass production, and stricter notions of hygiene have now put that experience out of reach. Today nearly all of our milk comes from cows of one breed, the black-and-white Holstein, kept in sheds and fed year-round on a uniform diet. Large dairies pool the milk of hundreds, even thousands of cows, then pasteurize it to eliminate microbes and homogenize it to prevent the fat from separating. The result is processed milk of no particular animal or farm or season, and therefore of no particular character. Some small dairies persist in milking other breeds, allowing their herds out to pasture, pasteurizing mildly, and not homogenizing. Their milk can have a more distinctive flavor, a rare reminder of what milk used to taste like.