Reclaiming the Kitchen
(Page 6 of 8)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Kingsolver
This is not an allergy or even a disorder. Physical anthropologists tell us that age 4, when lactose intolerance typically starts, is when nature intended for our kind to be wholly weaned onto solid food; in other words, a gradual cessation of milk digestion is normal. In all other mammals the milk-digesting enzyme shuts down soon after weaning.
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But there’s no animal weirder than Homo sapiens. Over thousands of years, a few isolated populations developed intimate relationships with their animals and a genetic mutation gave them the peculiar new ability to keep their lactose-digesting enzymes past childhood. Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromosome that causes lactase persistence. This mutation occurred about 10,000 years ago, soon after humans began to domesticate milk-producing animals. The gene rapidly increased in these herding populations because of the unique advantage it conferred, allowing them to breast-feed for life from another species. The mutation emerged several times independently, alongside the behavior of adult milk-drinking.
And then, to make a long story short, one of those populations took over the world. If that’s a debatable contention, let’s just say they’ve gotten their hands on most of the planet’s billboards and commercials. And so, whether or not we were born with the La Leche for Life gene, we’re all hailed with a steady song and dance about how we ought to be drinking tall glasses of it every day. And we believe it, we want those strong bones and teeth. Oh, how we try to behave like baby cows.
My elder daughter and I are lactose-intolerant. But still, like most everyone else, we eat some dairy. I can’t blame dairy industry propaganda, purely, for our behavior. The milk of mammals is a miraculously whole food for the babes it was meant to nourish. For the rest of us it’s a tempting source of protein, calcium, minerals and wholesome fats.
It’s no surprise that cultures the world over have found, through centuries of experimentation, countless ways to make it more digestible. Yogurt, kefir, paneer, queso fresco, butter, mascarpone, montasio, parmesan, haloumi, manchego, bondon, emmental, chenna, ricotta and quark: the forms of altered milk are without number. They all keep longer than fresh milk, and their production involves reducing the lactose sugars.
The chemistry is pretty simple. Milk is about 85 percent water; the rest is protein, minerals, butterfat, vitamins, trace elements and sugars (lactose). When the whole caboodle is acidified, the protein solids coagulate into a jellylike curd. When heated, this gel releases liquid whey (lactose and water). The milk is curdled by means of specific bacteria that eat — guess what? — lactose. These selective bugs munch through the milk, turning the lactose into harmless lactic acid, which causes the curdling.
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