Reclaiming the Kitchen
(Page 4 of 8)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Kingsolver
“Ask your grocer where your milk comes from,” Ricki instructed us; the closer to home, the better. You may find a dairy that isn’t too far away, and hasn’t ultra-pasteurized the product for long-distance travel. Better yet, she suggested, ask around to find a farmer who has fresh milk. It may not be for sale, since restrictions in most states make it impossible for small dairies to sell directly to consumers. But some allow it, or have loopholes. You may be able to buy raw milk for your pets, for example. You can pasteurize raw milk yourself if you like, but most outbreaks of listeria and other milk-borne diseases occur in factory-scale dairies, Ricki said, not among small dairies and artisans where the center of attention is product quality.
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The Struggle of the Small Producer
The subject of regulations touched a nerve for several milk producers in our workshop. Anne and Micki, two mothers raising families on New England farms, got interested in home dairying after their pediatrician suggested switching to organic milk. If a family can put one organic choice on their shopping list, he’d said, it should be dairy. The industry says growth hormones in milk are safe; the pediatrician (and for the record, he’s not alone) said he had seen too many babies with abnormal genitalia to believe it, and too many girls going through early puberty.
So Micki and Anne acquired their own Jersey cows, happily guaranteeing their families a lifetime supply of hormone-free milk. Anne also makes kefir, which she would like to sell at her farmers market, but can’t. Micki’s daughter makes ice cream-and-cookie sandwiches using their own milk and eggs — a wildly popular item she could sell to build her college fund, except it’s illegal. “We’re not licensed,” Micki said, “and we never will be. The standards are impossible for a small dairy.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Most states’ dairy codes read like an obsessive compulsive’s to-do list: The milking house must have incandescent fixtures of 100 watts or more, located near but not directly above any milk tank; it must have employee dressing rooms and a separate, permanently installed hand-washing facility (even if a house with a bathroom is 10 steps away) with hot and cold water supplied through a mix valve; all milk must be pasteurized in a separate facility (not a household kitchen) with its own entrance and separate, paved driveway; processing must take place daily; every batch must be tested for hormones (even if it’s your cow, and you gave it no hormones) by an approved laboratory.
Pasteurization requires three pieces of equipment: a pot, a heat source and a thermometer. I’ve done it many times without benefit of extra driveways and employee lockers, little knowing I was a danger to the public. In fact, later on when I went poking into the codes, I learned I might stand in violation of Virginia state law 2VAC5-531-70 just by making cheese for my own consumption. It takes imagination to see how some of these rules affect milk safety. But it’s easy to see how they might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.
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