Preserving the Harvest

As the summer winds down, I’ve been filling my crisper, root cellar and freezer with bushels of the bounty my garden, family’s garden and local farm market has to offer. Fruit and vegetables, like beer, taste best fresh. They also taste best locally grown – heirloom and farm fresh varieties tend to be grown for taste as opposed to simply transport and storability. However, no matter how many good foods came into fruition this past month or so, we’re all limited to how much of them we can eat. Greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peaches and now apples, pears and squash; it seems like you’ve just arrived and already the weather is cool and your harvest is nearing its end. Human culture is based on this seasonal change, and before Trans- national and continental refrigerated transport, everyone was required to eat “seasonally”.

Nobody, however, was happy with just squash for four months of the year, so techniques such as freezing, drying, fermenting, pickling, salting and canning were slowly developed and perfected by the world’s cultures for preserving and storing the harvest for the long winter months ahead. As kitchen authority Harold McGee writes, “Fruits and vegetables can be preserved indefinitely by killing the living tissue and thus inactivating its enzymes, and then making it either inhospitable or unavailable to microbes.” Peoples of the past utilized the natural preserving qualities of salt water, dark caves, lake ice or simple holes in the ground to achieve this end. Today, canning and fermenting would allow me to savor my modest harvest over the darker months to come.

To get started canning, gather the necessary knowledge and supplies (the university extension publication found at: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pdf/pnw/pnw355.pdf is an excellent guide.) Minimally, you’ll need a burner, enamel canning pot, jars and lids and canning salt along with the various spices called for by the recipes. Almost anything can be canned for prolonged preservation. I decided to make some simple tomato sauce from my neighbor’s excess Roma tomatoes, also Colorado Hot Mix, banana pepper rings and bread and butter pickles which would preserve my green, red and hot peppers along with small cukes from the market. The process is simple: wash and prepare the vegetables, heat with spices on the stove and ladle into hot jars. Secure the top on the jars (making sure to wipe the contact lip clean) and process in boiling water for the time designated by the recipe (usually about ten minutes). As the jars are removed, the contents cool and compress, vacuum sealing the lid. Throw the ones that don’t seal into the fridge and eat them first. Wait a few weeks for the flavors to meld and enjoy!

Beyond hot pack canning, my next step was to try fermenting some food. Pickles and cabbage for sauerkraut, two of my favorite foods, were currently cheap and abundant. To ferment pickles or cabbage, the vegetables are submerged in acidic salt brine which inhibits the growth of unwanted microbes. Lactic bacteria naturally residing on the vegetable’s skin, however, go to work fermenting the vegetable’s sugars into lactic acid, carbon dioxide and alcohol. McGee explains, “(lactic bacteria) leave most of the plant material intact, including its vitamin C (protected from oxidation by the carbon dioxide they generate); they often add significant amounts of B vitamins; and they generate new volatile substances that enrich the food’s aroma.” A whiff of my week-old sauerkraut and I knew exactly what McGee was getting at. Pungent and sweet veggie fumes now slowly seep up from my basement and trips to the kegerator inevitably end up with a fermented dill pickle sampling.

Grassfields Cheese

At the heart of West Michigan’s Dutch farming tradition, nestled along the Grand River just south of Coopersville, sits the small village Lamont. From downtown Grand Rapids, it’s a short but slow paced thirty minute drive west on Leonard. Upon arrival, however, one feels that they’ve headed significantly further from the modern city and its expedience. On Lamont’s outskirts, a mile west and another north on the unpaved 60th Ave., Jesse and Betsy Meerman and family raise Holstein, Normandy and Jersey milking cows on their Grassfields farm and make traditional aged Dutch cheeses from their unpasteurized and non-homogenized cow’s milk.

To most of us, cheese is yellow foodstuff processed from milk products and other small print ingredients, chemicals and additives at a distant factory. Not so for Jesse Meerman, the sole cheese maker at Grassfields, for who cheese is an art, business, lifestyle and practical manner in which to utilize his dairy herd’s excess milk.

Since 2002 the Meermans have been selling “cow shares,” a program in which people pay for the boarding of a cow and receive its milk in return, to an ever increasing number of families. Now totaling 9 cows which supply 115 families, Betsy Meerman explains the growing popularity of their raw, unpasteurized milk, saying, “People want to know where their food is coming from.” As we stood outside the milking barn, she stressed how her customers seek authenticity and “real products” which taste better and are better for you. This type of critical consumer mentality, now so chic and trendy in our academic and professional city life, is just ordinary common sense out in farm country.

Past the milking barn and silo is the cheese shop, which also houses the cheese making and storage rooms. Here Jesse met me amidst many of his busy family members, especially babies, to explain his dairy work. Every few days he’ll draw fresh warm cows’ milk directly from the barn into a large, shallow steel vat in the sanitary cheese making room. With tiled floor, stainless tanks, hoses, bottles of iodine sanitizer and an air of sterility, the resemblance to a brewery is strong. Cheese is made from coagulated milk solids so rennet is added to the warm ripening milk to encourage this physical change. Next, various bacteria cultures are gently stirred-in according to the desired cheese style. Milk sugar, called lactose, is converted by both natural and inoculated bacteria into lactic acid or is run off in the residual liquids, making these aged raw milk cheeses perfectly suited for those who suffer from lactose intolerance. After a rest, the curds are scooped with plastic colanders from the clear liquid whey and are then formed into 13 pound wheels. The whey is fed to pigs and the young cheese wheels are then boiled in heavy salt brine which will protect the food from bacteria during the 3 – 6 months spent ageing in the adjacent environmentally controlled room. Meerman currently makes six varieties including Edam, Gouda, Cheddar and the same with various herbs and spices added.

Without succumbing to pasteurization, the Meermans must always be wary of bacterial contamination. Their cows freely roam rotated grass pastures, which is indelible to the operation. When allowed to live and eat in a natural, outdoor environment, free from antibiotics, corn based feed and cramped manure filled living conditions, these healthy and happy ruminants produce healthy and clean milk. The milk from conventionally farmed dairy cows, however, is unsanitary must be pasteurized. Unlike organic and biodynamic farming, modern industrial farming practices go against the nature of cows and must be heated before safely imbibing. Also, at Grassfields, each batch of raw milk and subsequent cheese is tested scientifically for microscopic intruders where as in conventional practices fewer tests are done in the hope that pasteurization will clean it up in the end. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Organic and raw milk farmers will tell you pasteurized cheeses, not raw cheeses, have been culpable in all recent human pathogen mishaps.

Both the raw milk and cheese have additional benefits afforded to them from the lack of physically and chemically damaging heat pasteurization: the naturally occurring enzymes and animal friendly bacteria alive in raw milk create a hostile environment for foreign microbes and potential pathogens. Producing raw milk and raw milk cheese must be done then in accordance with the laws of nature, which are ever present on this organic farm. The Meerman’s cheese making seems a predestined process, one that they are managing stewards of, rather than the sole contributing performers. First the sun, then the grass, the cows and finally the bacteria perform the actual intrinsic, microscopic work from which cheese results.

How’s it taste – exquisite! Creamily textured and strongly aromatic, the complexities easily outshine any store bought pasteurized equivalents; a pure and simple pleasure to enjoy. Like wine, the time spent ageing in a cheese cave hones the product’s attributes, often simplifying over-complexities and rounding out overt flavors and aromas. Eat the cheese warm, never cool, which masks its depth. For me, the real test of cheese is how well it melts, so I tried it with this recipe for Nebraska style Mac & Cheese:

First, gently heat some white wine in a large sauce pan while bringing a gallon of water to boil on another burner. When the pan is warm, slowly layer in thin slices of Edam, Gouda and Lamont Cheddar. (The recipe works especially well with various left over cheese ends and bits.) The sauce may be tempered with a little milk or butter, but the cheese and wine seem to work out fine alone. Add elbow, shells, or your favorite pasta to the water and boil until tender, careful not to overcook. Drain the pasta and combine with cheese sauce in a shallow baking dish. Top with yesterday’s bread crumbs and bake at 300F until the top begins to brown. Serve with pan steamed local broccoli and green beans.

Grassfields cheese is widely available in West Michigan; locations are listed on their website. Meet Jesse and Betsy Meerman in person downtown Grand Rapids at the Guest House September 11th where they will be sampling their cheese along side wine at Siciliano’s Michigan Wine Tasting. Details: www.sicilianosmkt.com and www.grassfieldscheese.com.

H 2 Ohhhhhhh

Gene Simmons walked jubilantly into the classroom. Not Gene Simmons the rock star, but my new Sociology professor at the local community college. This late middle-aged man with frazzled grey hair and a hidden, but tested vigor shook his head and laughed cynically. “If water is free,” he questioned, “why are we all buying it?” This was 1998. The American consumer, now readily paying money for something that was generally abundant and free, flummoxed Sociologists and delighted corporate bottling companies. This was a cultural crux perfect for analyzing late capitalist American, convincing evidence of our exponentially mindless consuming. A new need had been created – plastic bottles of untraceable water filled somewhere by someone else – and we were ready to pay for it.

Today’s trendy bottled waters did not, however, start out in plastic, but glass. Green, light blue and clear glass imported from the French Alps or Italian glacial springs filled with mineral laden naturally sparkling water preceded the present craze. These opulent products helped evolve a relationship between exclusive status and rare imports, one that is even more widely exploited today. (The best example being Bling H20.) Born out of locales where the public drinking water really was in question, they slowly became more common and profitable in the US market. At your grocery store, what was four feet of low traffic shelf space five years ago is now its own isle.

Sales have doubled since 1998 and as far as individually packaged beverages go, only soft drinks are more popular; so why the boom? We didn’t drink water from 16.9 oz. PET bottles growing up, so why do we now need cases stacked in the garage, pantry and refrigerator?

Obviously, we all need water to live. Only now it seems we need a specific brand of water. Here’s the message the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) exudes: Tap water is for the common, unscrupulous person. Its integrity has been questioned and faults have been found. The daily Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tests are evidence of its inferiority. Bottled water is clean, healthy, natural, and tastes the best. You buy a case at Costco for three dollars!

In actuality, tap water, being regulated by the EPA, is much more closely monitored than bottled water; which is not to say that all US municipal tap water is perfectly safe. Alternately, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looks after the bottled water industry, and it’s a wonder more of us aren’t dead. Bottled water is not subject to anywhere near the same regiment of mandatory tests and evaluations as municipal water. Much of the testing is in fact voluntary and even that little bit of oversight is deemed unnecessary as long as the product is not moved across state lines.

Coca-Cola Corporation and Pepsi, producers of Dasani and Aquafina, respectively, dominate the current bottled water market. But before all the filtering, reverse osmosis and chemical flavor posturing, these products actually started out in a public water supply, not a pristine spring somewhere in the mountains. Coke and Pepsi are actually selling public water. So despite the minimum bottled water testing requirements, I’m sure they understand what a contaminated bottle of water would do to their profit margins. Drinking these particular products will of course not make you sick. They will, however, end up in your landfill and out last every living thing on this planet. Also, it takes more water to make a bottle of Dasani than is actually in the bottle, which is absurd. Unfortunately, convenience and the resulting profits neutralize irrationality.

Some would also call bottled water healthy, which in a sense it is, considering the corrosive and fattening high fructose corn syrup alternative. Yet ultimately it’s the water which is healthy, not the use of 17 million barrels of oil annually to make the packages.

The commodity is wrapped up nicely with what the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) tagged “a perception of purity.” Most of us do not really know what’s in our water. With all the world’s diseases, food pathogens and other health concerns, we’d like to at least believe that the cold plastic bottles of water now found in each and every convenience store are safe for us and our loved ones. Just like the health propaganda of margarine and the real butter scare, we wanted it to be guilt free and eagerly swallowed everything we were fed. It takes a long time to expose such authoritative chicanery.

A survey of the various bottled and municipal water watchdog groups turns up problems with both old and new ways of hydrating. Pharmaceuticals and poisons are commonly found in major public drinking water sources, and who knows what’s in many of the various brands of bottled water. With water now off the list of assumed health products, it seems there’s nothing left that we can take for granted. As far as food goes, our innocence has been lost and our trust broken by corporate food industries.

So what should we drink? Bottled water, a product of the loosely regulated free market, or municipal source tap water, a continually contaminated and cleansed natural resource? If we follow each option to its logical conclusion, it seems that the choice is ultimately one between private corporations and public governments, a curious position which has inspired me to tap my own personal artesian well. The bottled water industry, regulated by the FDA as a food item as opposed to a public need, seeks only to make a profit. Public water sources attempt to supply potable drinking water within a non-profit based framework. Both systems, along with irrigation and many other major public and private uses of water, rely on much of the same natural resources and will therefore always be at ends.

Becoming aware seems the first step towards healthy water consumption. Let’s stop assuming everything for sale is safe. And for the cynically critical, not everything is deadly, so participative decisions do make an impact on your and other’s health. If your local tap water is convincingly safe, try to choose it over the stuff sold in plastic. Currently only 1 in 5 plastic water bottles are recycled, so pay attention to your personal waste. Let’s question this bizarre system of single serving throw away packaging while simultaneously demanding clean water from our public sources.

Soy Bomb

Up until recently, soy milk had been a staple food item in my family’s diet. Like with millions of other Americans, lactose intolerance kept cheese and milk intake to a minimum, and the soy industry had a tasty answer for our dry cereal bowls, baked breads and cakes and other culinary needs. While soy was slowly integrating itself into my home cuisine, I was broadening my food awareness in other culinary areas: pasteurized and homogenized milk, out-of-state produce, Thailand shrimp farms, processed “cheese”, Genetically Modified veggies. All of these and many other ethically and environmentally questionable food items were making it into our grocery basket unnoticed on a weekly basis. Nowadays, instead of blindly purchasing and consuming, my family investigates the food we eat. We've since become conscious of the fact that our country does a very iffy job of feeding itself.

Soy milk is touted as a delicious and easy to digest alternative to cow’s milk. Its mainstream image is that of healthy, nutritious and conscious eating. The problem with those ideas is that nobody knows if they are true. There is, in fact, as much evidence that imbibing soy milk on a daily basis may be as harmful for you as it is said to be healthy.

In his book On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, respected food authority Harold McGee explains that the soybean, along with canola and corn, account for a vast majority of all the genetically engineered food we eat, which is 75% of all processed foods. It’s no wonder then that soy milk was there when my family’s lactose intolerance seemingly called for it; we’re a target market! Millions of dollars and decades of industry funded research and flavor manufacturing have resulted in the soy milk we now see packaged for sale at all grocery stores. Its naturally beany flavor, unacceptable to Westerners, has been removed and its heath benefits government approved. A miraculous, meat-free, high protein, easily cultivated and processed food is now available for your consumption. Now that we’ve heard meat and potatoes are no longer safe, eggs are unhealthy and milk is unnatural, soy seems then to be the answer. But before you pour another tall glass of sugared and cooked bean juice, let’s take a look at some of the arguments against soybeans and the soy milk industry.

Thousands of years ago the Chinese and then Japanese first cultivated the soy bean – as a fertilizer. Soy bean plants were tilled back into the earth to prepare the soil for farming and the beans were only eaten in times of famine. The bean itself was a poverty food. Fermented salty soy foods like miso and soy (shoyu) sauce eventually entered the Asian diet later followed by soy beans which had been cooked and processed into solid foods such as bean curd and tofu, both of which make up the majority of soy bean processing in contemporary Asia. However, unlike what the modern soy industry will tell you, the Chinese and Japanese have not been gulping down chocolate, vanilla and plain soy milk for thousands of years, the notion that they have is quixotic. We therefore cannot possibly understand its potential health effects on Westerners by studying the health of people in the East. Not only do they eat less soy than we believe, theirs is usually less processed or fermented. Our American heated and chemically altered soybean products seem to pose the greatest touted risks.

Upon survey, one finds that the story of American soy consumption is intimately tangled with many varied health topics. A quick Google search yields information on soy and its petulant relations with Osteoporosis, coronary heart disease, cancer, hormone production, and especially mineral ingestion, Thyroid function, antinutrients and baby formulas. Interestingly enough, for every study which says soy milk helps fight cancer, lowers cholesterol and is good for babies, there’s others which say not so. While plowing through documents, evidence presented to the Food and Drug Administration, articles and other similar scholastic pieces, I found it helpful to inquire who was funding the reported findings. If the sale of soy milk was paying the bills, nothing bad was said. Others have steadily hoisted a black flag. Harold McGee’s take is consistent with our incomplete understanding of this bean: “It’s too early to say whether soybeans are more beneficial to human health than any other seed, or whether it’s a good idea to eat them often.”

Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD, writing for the Weston A. Price Foundation, a non-profit food awareness group based in Washington, D.C., are adamant about the dangers of soy consumption for our society. While their attack is more easily understood by chemists and nutritionists, they basically argue soy is too highly inadequate nutritionally to be used as a replacement by vegetarians for dairy and meat. One reason is phytic acid, known as phytates, which occurs at excessively high levels in the soybean, and serves to “…block the uptake of essential minerals-calcium, magnesium, iron and especially zinc-in the intestinal tract.” Processing the soybean does not alleviate this effect, however, these levels are much lower in traditional soy products like soy sauce, which, unlike highly processed soy foods, also contains anticarcinogenic substances not found in soy milk. Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food, agrees, adding: “All modern (unfermented) soy products carry a load of antinutrients and toxins including protease inhibitors, phytates, saponins, isoflavones and other components that have been proven to cause digestive distress, immune system breakdown, thyroid dysfunction, (and) reproductive problems.” Many other health professionals had much of the same to say.

Also, there’s the concern about hemagglutinin, a blood clotting agent found in unfermented soy products which slow the body’s oxygen respiration, the growth depressant trypsin, the toxin lysinoalanine, dangerously high levels of MSGs, and some other flavor and substance additives which are at best suspect.

Most US soybeans, which represent half of the world’s production, are originally processed for animal feed or soy oil which is made for hydrogenated fat products like margarine and shortening, foods which surreptitiously replaced butter. Consequently, butter has gotten a bad rap. As butter consumption has steadily dropped, heart disease and cancer have risen rapidly, paralleling soy, corn and canola oil consumption. With modern food production technology, the insipid byproducts of soy oil can be processed further into the spray-dried protein-rich soy protein isolate (SPI) powder laced with all the questionable soy components listed above. Much of this is then turned into the controversial soy baby formula which contains not only the phytates, but also high levels of aluminum while lacking cholesterol and lactose, ingredients essential to breast milk and healthy infant development. While adults may intake soy as part of a varied diet, new babies only drink their formula. Not only then is soy missing the basic things our body requires from staple foods, it could actually be detrimental to our health. Few “staple” foods are further from “natural” than soy milk.

If soy is so unhealthy, how and why is it becoming more and more popular? In reading about the powerful soy industry, its meetings, campaigns for consumer acceptance, lobbyists to the FDA, thousands of dependant growers, millions of planted acres, development of new products like soy yogurt, soy ice cream, cosmetics, and other model consumer goods, it was easy to see how we bought into it. The soy industry, headed by Archer Daniel Midlands, the world's major soy processor, fought for years for FDA and consumer approval of its products and continues to do so. Millions of dollars of advertising works on Americans. If it’s supposed to be healthy and is widely available, cheap, and made to taste good, we’ll buy it. For the vast majority of us, that’s all the further we need to investigate. Learning about where our food comes from is a thing lost in the confusion and spectacle of late capitalist America. Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig eloquently explain, “Advances in technology make it possible to produce isolated soy protein from what was once considered a waste product—the defatted, high-protein soy chips—and then transform something that looks and smells terrible into products that can be consumed by human beings. Flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, emulsifiers and synthetic nutrients have turned soy protein isolate, the food processors' ugly duckling, into a New Age Cinderella.” From toxic, inedible byproduct waste to our dining room tables, that’s where soy milk comes from.

Speaking out against soy is uncommon because of how powerful the industry really is. I’m pretty sure Wide Eyed just lost a sponsor. The soy industry spends millions on advertising and those are dollars the media does not want to lose. It also payrolls major PR firms which insert pro-soy reports in newspapers, magazines and politician’s mail boxes. However, if you start putting your ear to the growing cracks of this highly exposed industry, you’ll begin to hear others rumbling about the health myths of soy. Here’s a quote from the beautiful www.Silksoymilk.com: “Soy milk is loaded with vitamins and minerals your body needs to maintain peak health. It also provides special nutrients called isoflavones that scientists believe may help reduce the risk of certain cancers and provide other important health benefits.” The Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) has categorized soy isoflavones as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) with the FDA, but not everyone agrees. In an article submitted to the FDA by Michael Fitzpatrick and the Weston A. Price Foundation, estrogen-like isoflavones are condemned as under-studied and toxic. His biggest worry: “The potential for chronic endocrine system and reproductive toxicity and alterations to the immune system.”

I now understand that while soy milk may contain vitamins and minerals, almost none of them are naturally occurring. The phytates found in soy milk reduce the body’s ability to absorb such nutrients anyway, so what’s the point? The health consequences of soy milk are still mostly unknown, and that’s what scares me the most.

Beer and yogurt: tasting the difference

Quintessentially, brewing beer is cooking food. One who participates in the practice invariably begins to see food and drink as more than staple necessities, and those who enjoy craft beer eventually begin to ask for more from the solid foods portion of their diet. If good craft brewed beer, made in the spirit of homemade goodness, tastes so much fuller, more malty and flavorful than the dumbed-down stuff, perhaps then other foods may have more to offer too.

In modern times, food is manufactured predominately with the producer’s, not the consumer’s, needs in mind. We eaters and drinkers have our minds made up for us. Really, it’s true. Millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying has us all eating artery clogging margarine and shortening, thyroid disrupting soy milk, and defatted and elutriated skim milk; none of which tastes even relatively good. That was not our decision. It’s time we make our own food again or at least start buying it from people who care about more than just profits derived from the sale of a commodity. It worked for beer, saving us from the dark age of post prohibition yellow lagers, so where else can we apply this model? How about yogurt and cheese?

Traditionally, cheese is a food made from milk: the nutritious life-giving liquid mammals use to feed their young. Humans utilize the milk of a specific group of mammals called ruminants which evolved from deer and possess the ability to produce milk from their natural diet of fibrous grasses. They include cattle, sheep, goats, water buffalo, yaks and camels. Before modern plastic packaging, homogenization, pasteurization and refrigeration, people quickly drank milk before it soured and solidified. Cheese, thought to have originated when an ancient middle easterner filled the yak stomach she was using as a camel pack with fresh milk and then left it in the sun, is created when the protein rich solids (curds) in milk coagulate and the other liquids (whey) are run off. Making cheese was simply a way of preserving the edibility of milk. Butter is much the same in the sense that the milk solids, fat in particular, are massed together and the buttermilk rinsed away. Sour cream and yogurt, fermented milk products which include the complete milk liquids, are much creamier.

“One of the remarkable qualities of milk is that it invites its own preservation,” writes food authority Harold McGee in his masterpiece On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Yogurt is one of the best representations of this miraculous microbial process. Like the relationship between yeast and malt sugars in beer, naturally occurring bacteria convert milk sugar (lactose) into lactic acid which preserves the altered milk and inhibits the growth of competitive pathogens. It also makes it taste smooth and tangy. Folks who have a digestive problem with dairy products most likely do not have enough of the enzyme lactase in their small intestine to eat up the lactose before it enters the large intestine and wreaks havoc. Fortunately, milk bacteria Lactococcus and Lactobaccillus, encouraged to propagate in yogurt, take care of the lactose problem, allowing easy and comfortable digestion.

Yogurt and beer have lots of other similarities too. No longer do brewers or dairy producers rely on wild yeasts or bacteria to ferment their sugars: isolated and highly predictable cultures are now used instead. The better the ingredients used, the better the product. Also: the fresher the better. For beer, aromatic hops are most pungent in brewery fresh beer. For milk, the only ingredient in yogurt: the closer to the dairy the better. Most all people buy homogenized and pasteurized milk and milk products. We didn’t make that decision. Most craft beer is unpasteurized because heating food is cooking food; why cook something that’s already done and ready to eat? However, modern milk is produced using highly unsanitary methods, making pasteurization indelible.

To keep the ignorant masses safe from last century’s plagues, the FDA has hence banned the sale of unpasteurized milk. Milk is now in its prohibition. However, a few rum runners are working loop holes known as “cow shares” in order to stick it to the man and deliver farm fresh, sanitary, organic and necessarily local raw milk. The farm cannot sell you milk, but they won’t keep you from buying the cow, or at least part of it. With a cow share, what you are technically paying for is their care of the animal, but we all know what’s really going on. Here in West Michigan are two great places to contact if you’re interested in farm fresh natural milk – grassfieldscheese.com and lubbersfarm.com. The health benefits are extraordinary – check out realmilk.com – and the taste? Remember your first sip of IPA?

Most all the cheese, butter, yogurt and sour cream commercially available is made from pasteurized and homogenized milk, so obviously its possible to make great food despite these industrial processes. Only twelve dairies in the US even make cheese from unpasteurized milk that they themselves produced and Grass Fields in Coopersville is one of them (you can find it at farmer’s markets, organically persuaded grocers, and on their farm.) For beer, the equivalent would be if a barley, wheat and hop farmer fermented and sold her own ales and lagers. I’m not sure if that has ever happened.

Being a beer connoisseur has hence led me to ask more from all food and drink. I’m not sure if there’s much of a difference flavor wise between generic band yogurt and the big specialty producers, especially considering FDA mandates, because yogurt is such a simple thing. Cheese, however, is not simple. Processed “American” and other similar Kraft or generic inexpensive “chunk” cheeses really deserve another title altogether in order to properly describe their attributes; how about “Macro-cheese?” The good stuff, like good beer, is produced in far smaller batches by far smaller diaries with a much larger price tag. Don’t feel like paying for it? Make it at home.

My first attempts have been with culturing yogurt. The process goes something like this: raise a quart of milk to 180F and chill to 116F. Stir in yogurt starter culture and hold temp in a thermos for 6 – 12 hours or until the milk coagulates. Refrigerate and enjoy; preferably with fresh local blueberries, cucumbers, or Naan bread. Try sicilianosmkt.com for the yogurt and cheese making info. Get crazy, share a cow, eat seasonally and make your own food!

The craft beer facade

The beer brewing industry is made up of three major segments: large domestics, imports and craft. The post prohibition dominance of conglomerated domestic breweries has since homogenized most of the world’s beer into cold yellow fizz. For decades now, U.S. craft breweries have fought back, reinventing flavorful lagers and ales and steadily educating a consumer base for their products. Although still relatively small, the success of craft brewed beer is beginning to weigh on the other segments, forcing major adjustments in the world of brewing.

All beer is made from four natural ingredients: barley, wheat and/or rye malts, hops, water and yeast. Mega breweries, like Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Labatt supplement the malt portion of their recipes with corn and rice (known as adjuncts) to lighten and cheapen their products. Craft breweries typically use more expensive versions of these ingredients and brew their products relatively inefficiently while large scale breweries use cheaper ingredients and but much more efficient methods. By the numbers, the Brewers Association defines a craft brewery as producing less than 2,000,000 barrels a year and large breweries more than that amount. This results in $10-$15 retail priced 12 oz. six-packs of craft and $6-$8 six-packs for large domestics. However, like cheap gas, cheap beer is a thing of the past. As barley and hop farmers continually opt for the more profitable subsidized corn, soy and biofuel crops, no brewery is safe from rising ingredient costs. This agricultural change, along with the lessening value of the U.S. dollar and increased global climate change, exasperates production expenses and forces brewers and beer drinkers alike into a new world of challenges where things are no longer quite what they seem.

The large domestic brewing industry segment is dependant on sales growth, not mere sustainability, which has been difficult to achieve with costs perpetually increasing. Yet there’s another problem for the big breweries: the craft beer segment just keeps growing, 12% in 2007 as compared to non-craft’s static 1.4%, hence cutting into their profits. Even though breweries at the top of the U.S. beer market are still growing, the increase isn’t happening fast enough. These challenges are stressing the current shape of the beer industry and cracks are starting to show. In response, large breweries like A-B and Coors are brewing products which resemble craft beer in an attempt to move into the growing market. This confuses both the definition of craft beer and the people trying to buy it. At the other end of the business, Belgian beer conglomerate InBev (Beck’s, Bass, Stella Artois) is attempting a takeover of A-B, the last “American Owned” mega-brewery, furthering homogenization of what the world understands as “beer”.

One may wonder how a large brewery like A-B could even make a craft segment product, and the fact that they do calls into question the definition of “craft” itself. The Brewers Association distinguishes using production volume, Dogfish’s Sam Calagione adds that a craft brewery must be independently owned and utilize expensive and flavorful ingredients. Craft beer brewers and drinkers understand what Calagione is saying, but the concept is still a little ambiguous, especially when one considers all breweries must turn a profit. Just like the big boys, the business is to turn beer into money.

However, domestic and craft brewed beer is different not only in formulation but also in conception. Domestic producers take these differences with them as they pry into the craft market, driven by their crazed need to constantly secure new markets for future sales growth. Although not all craft breweries are guiltless in this policy, many of them do realize not every gas station in every state, not to mention across the globe, needs to have a cooler full of their product. Or do they?

Such circumstances enculture mirrored phenomena within the brewing industry segments. While A-B, Coors and the rest try to sell craft-like products to increasingly educated beer drinkers, craft breweries continually look to grow and disseminate their products to more and more markets. While the business models may be similar in theory (increase profits), large domestics and craft breweries obviously have differing approaches selling to craft beer segment consumers: large breweries imitate craft products while craft breweries attempt to convert domestic beer drinkers. Both sides take it personal.

Here’s what you’re going to get from large domestics: consistent, light body, light flavor, easy drinking, large budget, colored and flavored lagers and wheat beers. A-B’s “Sundog Amber Wheat” (I thought New Holland made Sundog?), “Stone Mill Pale Ale”, “Wild Blue Blueberry Lager”, “Michelob Marzen”, “Shock Top Belgian White” and Coor’s “Blue Moon” are all designed to dupe the consumer into believing he or she has just purchased a small hand- crafted beer, possibly even made locally from the finest and freshest ingredients available. Craft brewers vehemently oppose both the actual beverage in the trendy bottle and the attempt to pass them off as being independently brewed. They argue these products are tenuous imitations of true craft quality products. Less harsh and concerned critics may just find they like these beers, no matter their lack of brewing integrity, helping level the playing field in the craft brew arena.

What you’re going to get from craft brewed beer is largely determined by the individual brewery. It’s well known craft does not necessarily imply quality; however, most successful and many not-so-well known craft breweries produce high quality historic and experimental styles of beer. True iconoclastic renegades, such as Jolly Pumpkin, Dogfish Head, Founders, Three Floyd’s and Surly breweries (note the vast disparity in production volumes) seem to actually brew what they want as opposed to what is wanted. However, the current grass roots and online network of support for these and other ultra hot breweries seems to have created a special environment in which successful growth feels imminent.

As far as craft brewer’s complaints against “culture vulture” duplication attempts, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. One-dimensional, commercially hyped proxy craft beers may eventually earn themselves a small niche, probably right next to Pete’s Wicked “Strawberry Blond.” Not likely will craft beer consumers confuse a Jolly Pumpkin “Madrugada Obscura” with an A-B “Wild Hop Lager.” Come on guys, I think you can handle them. But if you are new to craft beer, read the small print!

recoilmag.com volume 8 issue 7 july 50

Raw Milk...in a Pasteurized World

A dive into the world of Raw Milk is vertiginous. With just a little questioning, our basic health and diet concepts, which we naively assume to be given truths, start to melt apart like good mild cheddar. As Americans, we’re supposed to eat less fat, and lower our cholesterol. Whole grains, veggie snacks, skim milk, fat free chocolates; these are a parent’s weapons with which to help their family fight obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. So how come they’re not working? Could the way we process our milk and dairy products be part of our nation’s health problems?

In the debate between conventional dairy wisdom (mandated pasteurization and homogenization, grain fed “super-cows”, large scale farming) and the Raw Milk campaign (no pasteurization, grass pasture fed cows, organic and smaller farming practices), personal education is most likely the path to wisdom and a useful understanding of the subject. One the one hand, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, representing convention, informs us: “The pasteurization process uses heat to destroy harmful bacteria without significantly changing milk's nutritional value or flavor. In addition to killing disease-causing bacteria, pasteurization destroys bacteria that cause spoilage, extending the shelf life of milk.” Raw Milk advocates argue, “Pasteurization destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B12 and B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.”

To summarize the positions, the largely funded pasteurization proponents argue that the vitamins and flavors lost during the processing of milk are acceptable collateral damage considering the total health benefits of eradicating human pathogens, and they have financed the research to prove it. The less funded opponents feel pasteurization is not only unnecessary, but symptomatic of a society dangerously disconnected with the food it eats.

Since its institution over one hundred years past, pasteurization has greatly reduced human suffering and increased mortality. Today it’s the law, with its particulars mandated separately by each state. If we were only to weigh the greater good afforded to dairy consumers over the past century by the practice of heating milk before imbibing there would be no valid argument against its practice. So what gives? Conventional “proven” wisdom is not often taken to task. Generally, American consumers do not question what the scientists and policy makers at the U.S. FDA tell us. It’s a very confusing world and we must trust to their wisdom. However, the core of the Raw Milk position is not based on falsifying the FDA’s testimony, rather in exposing what it has no interest in addressing: blatant problems, alternatives and natural, holistic betterments. The negative effects created by pasteurization are little known, under-researched and, arguably, no longer even necessary. For whom then is the sustentation of pasteurization good for, the consumer or the dairy industry?

Raw Milk advocates will tell you that a combination of better dairy practices and modern refrigeration neutralizes the necessity of pasteurization, arguing the disease causing organisms which occur in pre pasteurized milk are simply a result of a haphazardly managed, inorganic, “we’ll clean it up at the end with heat” philosophy. ww.Realmilk.com, the website for the Campaign for Real Milk, funded by the Weston A. Price Foundation, will tell you that modern dairy farms do not operate in the cleanest, healthiest, and most ecologically concerned manners, and why should they? Pasteurizing the dirty pathogen laden milk before packaging should clean up the mess. The campaign critically evaluates our modern dairy farming practices waving pasteurization as its black flag and shaming homogenization, standardization of fat percentages, fat free fetishes and other ultra modern practices, exposing them for what they truly are: the cheapest and easiest way for the dairy industry to get their products to market.

According to critics of institutionalized pasteurization, heating milk physically destroys nutrients, healthy bacteria, and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which is touted to have anticancer properties, along with those pesky human pathogens. The FDA’s own research has yet to prove similar results. Along with applying heat, Homogenization is employed to standardize and control the fat content in milk. This is done by force filtering milk through tiny holes, breaking down the milk solids and inhibiting the rich cream to rise to the top, completely altering the physical and chemical properties of milk.

Raw Milk, being unheated with its milk solids intact, contains higher amounts of fats and cholesterol than its processed and homogenized counterpart. In our processed and preserved diets, fat and cholesterol are supposed to be the bad guys. Unfortunately, too few of us currently understand that there are many different kinds of fats and cholesterol, some bad, but many necessary for survival. In general, these two chemical substances affect our circulatory systems. According to www.raw-milk-facts.com, “Overeating sugar or white flour products causes a spike in insulin, the hormone which, besides controlling blood sugar, also triggers the formation of fats destined for storage. The fats in raw milk aren't the problem. It's the half a bag of chocolate chip cookies you're dunking in it.” Raw Milk’s cholesterol is similarly healthy in that it combats levels of clogging plaque cooked animal cholesterols found in many of our diets.

So where does this leave low fat milks and the highly revered skim milk? Since such a large portion of milk is water, and homogenization and other separating procedures are used to remove and reprocess the rich top cream and buttermilk, the dairy industry has a large excess of extremely low fat content “milk”. Even they have little to say about the benefits of skim milk beyond its low level of fat, and the Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions is calling them out: “When children are denied the high-fat and cholesterol-rich foods they need to develop normally, the result is behavior problems ranging from autistic withdrawal to uncontrolled consumption of processed food.” The short piece, titled “Food Puritanism” published last fall, concludes that tasteless plain grain, skim milk, low fat diets encourage fits of “food pornography” – binge eating of candy, processed sweets and sodas – and an unhealthy diet pattern of extremes.

Is the FDA then a puppet of the powerful “got milk?” dairy industry, conspiring to deprive Americans of health and well being? In learning about the benefits and concerns of Raw Milk and pasteurization, a complex paradigm in which the individual, family and community confront the machinery of bureaucratic industrial progress is exposed. Pasteurization and homogenization simply works better for the dairy industry, its regulatory agency, and the total infrastructure for production and distribution of dairy goods. But what’s good for the system isn’t necessarily good for you.

Is Raw Milk then the answer to our society’s dietary woes? The Raw Milk renaissance itself, like home beer brewers, wood burners, clothe makers, small self sufficient farmers, and other self empowered pioneers, is symptomatic of a much wider collective movement which began in the 1960’s after one unofficial and two official wars, of closing the gap between us humans and the natural world. Like home wine, vinegar, maple syrup and cheese makers, Raw Milk drinkers and producers are not in the business of replacing the current infrastructure: they simply attempt to bypass it.

Even if legalized, a Raw Milk industry would not work on a large scale. For one, many of the benefits of unpasteurized dairy products are determined by the cow, goat, sheep, water buffalo, yak or moose’s diet. The dairy industry is currently grain based and Raw Milk yields the most health benefits when the cows, Jersey instead of Holstein, are fed on green grass pastures. Cows are ruminants, natural grass eaters, and do not do well living on grain, soy and alfalfa diets. Breeding and drugs keep the modern dairy cow going and increases the milk production but ultimately shortens their life span. The cow’s overused teats and udders react by filling with white pus which must eventually be centrifuged away from the milk. The conventional attitude towards this: no worries if a little pus gets in the milk, pasteurization will take care of it! Therefore, today’s dairy farming practices make pasteurization absolutely necessary.

Any hope for change in sight? On a large scale, no change will happen until consumers shift their support away from large industrial dairy producers and begin to seek out healthy alternatives. How about trying to buy your milk from a local dairy farmer? If this isn’t possible, at least inquire about where your milk comes from and how it is processed.

The Raw Milk debate should help remove a little bit of our nation’s naivety concerning our diets. Milk fat and cholesterol are not the enemies – processed, refined, additive laden, artificially preserved sugars, vegetable oils and flours are. It cannot be stressed enough: not all Raw Milk is the same. If it’s not produced in a sanitary manner, it could prove deadly! However, disconnecting ourselves completely from this sweet, nutritious and life giving fluid may also prove to be yet another small step towards our civilization’s demise.