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Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)
01:05:55
An interview with Anne Mendelson
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Meditation Instructor
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
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Meditation Instructor
And breathe.
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- [00:28]
Ann Mendelsohn
1-800-contact contacts.
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Meditation Instructor
How old were you when you realized you were the son of a president?
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I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before. FX's love story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette. I didn't think I could love someone like this until you. From executive producer Ryan Murphy.
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Ann Mendelsohn
It's not a question of if I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It's if I'm cut out to be
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Ann Mendelsohn
Don't chew on that.
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Narrator/Trailer Voice
Max Cooper loves that chew, too.
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Ann Mendelsohn
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food.
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Pet Owner
Wow, he is loving it.
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Ann Mendelsohn
What do you feed Cooper?
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Narrator/Trailer Voice
Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies, and wholesome whole grains.
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Ann Mendelsohn
Looks like we're switching to Blue Blue Buffalo.
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Ann Mendelsohn
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I am Dr. Melek Fra Talthai, a musician and a neuroscientist. My research focuses on deciphering the pathomechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Today, I will be your host and we will be talking to Ann Mendelsohn about her new book, Spoiled the Myth of Milk as Superfood. Mendelssohn's book is a history of the food she describes as drinking milk, referring to dairy animals, milk that is consumed in fluid form rather than as some kind of fermented sour milk or cheese. Contrary to popular belief, it never figured prominently in human diets until very recently. Mendelssohn argues that milk's rise to the status of nutritional mainstay, the first scientifically anointed superfood of the modern industrialized world was one of the great flukes of food history. The purpose of this book is not to portray drinking milk from dairy animals as a dangerous poison, but to explain how milk is produced and to debunk the idea that milk in unfermented, fluid form is a food of unique virtues whose use goes back to remote proof prehistory. Along the way, she provides an interesting look at the history of the roll versus pasteurized milk debate and how it has developed into not only a public health debate, but also a personal choice question adopted by those on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Ellen, thank you very much for joining us today and welcome to the show.
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Ann Mendelsohn
How are you? I'm fine. How are you?
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
I am slightly ill, but as you might have noticed already, but other than that, everything's great. So let's start with you first. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your training?
- [03:30]
Ann Mendelsohn
Well, I started out as a medievalist studying the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. And a lot of people who write about foul have similar stories of having begun in a completely different career and kind of accidentally wandered into food writing. Well, long story short, I married a freelance photographer and switched career to book reviewing. And a close friend of my husband was the New York editor of Bon Appetit magazine. And she asked me to start reviewing cookbooks for the magazine. And one thing kind of led to another, and I found that I absolutely loved writing about food and the history of food.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
And how did you get interested in milk? How did you come to write spoiled? And why now?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, this is, this may sound irrelevant or off the point, but I grew up in a part of the United States, a part of Pennsylvania, where there were lots and lots and lots of little farms where the people had, they grew a bit of everything and they contributed to local markets in a small way. They would have some apple trees. There might be a pig or two. And there were always a few cows. You would see the milk cans sitting out waiting to be picked up by a local dairy company at the in the morning, possibly the afternoon. And that whole way of life is something that I miss to this day. Just seeing a landscape with different kinds of small farming going on and a few cows who are just behaving like normal cows sitting in the pasture, coming into the barn to be milked in the morning and the evening. And this is all gone. And it may not seem relevant to this book, but it is. I always wish I could recreate that world.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Sounds very relevant indeed, actually. And I see a lot. I live in Switzerland and I can tell you I see a lot of cows every day. So in Spoiled, you talk a lot about the biology and chemistry of milk, which I found really interesting, because one would assume we already know about milk, the contents and the nutritional value of milk, but you really get into detail on these topics. Could you maybe expand on that a little bit?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, milk starts out as the first fruit, the only food for all newborn mammals. It replaces the blood supply that was delivered to the fetus through the placenta during pregnancy. So lactation begins just as pregnancy ends, and it continues until the infant, human or infant calf or giraffe or whatever is weaned. At that point, the mother's memory system shuts down milk production. And at some point between weaning and puberty, the offspring's digestive system undergoes a crucial change.
- [07:43]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Now,
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Ann Mendelsohn
well, everything about milk is complicated. So let me introduce a little bit of chemistry. Chemically speaking, any animal's milk is an incredibly complex substance. And just to barely scratch the surface, it's technically Earth suspension with very intricate molecules containing casein floating around, suspended in it. It's also an emulsion with globules of milk fat emulsified in it. And on top of all that, it's also a solution with an incredible number of water soluble substances dissolved in it. And one of these substances is a kind of sugar called lactose. Lactose is important because it supplies a great deal of energy, caloric energy, to the newborn who needs calories. So as long as the baby is nursing, its digestive system secretes an enzyme called lactase that breaks down lactose into two simpler sugars, glucose and galactose. Sooner or later, after weaning, the secretion of the enzyme shuts down. As a result, the little giraffe or human or calf or whatever loses the ability to digest lactose. And by the time the infant reaches adulthood, it would experience a lot of digestive distress, diarrhea, maybe nausea and vomiting, painful cramps by trying to drink fresh milk. So humans are the only mammals that consume other mammals, milk, and what originally enabled them to do that to. I mean, this is very remarkable when you think of it. One species consuming another species, milk would enable them to do this? Probably the trait surface, probably the history came into focus between about 10,000 and 8,000 B.C. in prehistoric Iran, Iraq, Turkey and neighboring regions where people discovered that the milk of herbivores like sheep, goats, cows went sour when exposed to the ambient air. Because these are regions with very warm temperatures, hot temperatures in summer, which is when the milking season was There might be high daytime temperatures of 40 or 45 degrees Celsius. And this was the perfect condition for attracting swarms of bacteria, particular bacteria, lactic acid, bacteria that were drawn by the presence of all of that lactose in the milk. So two important things happened here. First of all, when you draw a bowl or a pail of milk from any animal into the outside world, let's say this morning, you have just milk to go. There's the milk sitting in a bowl by noon, by lunchtime, you have something like yogurt. You have a kind of sour milk that is delicious in its own right, and it is digestible to people who can't digest lactose. And because of the greater acidity that reduced ph, it inhibits a lot of kinds of pathogens from invading it. So on the whole, soured milk in prehistoric times, in fact, until relatively recent times, was a lot safer to consume than fresh milk.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Fascinating indeed. And so you mentioned that the story of dairy farming started almost 10,000 years ago. So how did this process evolve over centuries and also the practices of dairy farming?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, maybe I should jump ahead a bit and introduce another little wrinkle. And researchers are not exactly sure when this happened, maybe between about 5000 BC and 2000 BC. But for some reason, somewhere in prehistoric Europe, a genetic mutation appeared in a group, or were groups of people that knocked out that genetic command to stop secreting lactase. And people who inherited this new genetic condition were able to go on producing lactase and therefore digesting fresh, unsourved milk throughout their lives. I guess we can come back to that later. But meanwhile, going back to how dairy farming originated, first of all, people started domesticating some of the large grass eating animals for meat. Sheep, goats, cattle. And these were regions, these parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, et cetera, regions with tremendous grasslands where the animals would range dozens or hundreds of miles, eating their way from one part to the other of the range. And people learned to sort of track their movements, figure out when you could ambush a herd of goats or whatever. And as they became more accustomed to using the meat of the animals, they also developed a curiosity about the milk nobody has documented. Just when people officially learned to milk, learned the particular way that you have to apply pressure to the tea, mimicking the action of a little kid's or lamb's or calf's mouth. But once they had learned, and once they saw that the milk went sour right away and was delicious them, they began trying to persuade the animals to live sedentary lives along with them. This is not easy because these are just natural wanderers. Left to their own devices, they would just go on leading their way across the, you know, the great steppe of Eurasia or whatever realm of grasslands. So some people, some societies devoted themselves to trying to keep animals penned up and breeding in captivity, which is sort of the definition of domestication. While others learn to follow them on their migrations. They learned once they had domesticated horses, which happened probably three or four thousand years after the other animals. Horses were the ideal instrument for letting people keep up with the migrations of naturally migratory milk animals. And this thorn, well the whole way of life of pastoral non medicine, it was glam strong even 150 years ago. It keeps being wiped out more and more everywhere in those original lands of pastoralism. But on the. One of the most interesting things about these pastoralists, these nomads, is that they are some of the most heavily milk dependent societies anywhere in the world. The milk is always fermented and it is usually the milk of horses, mares, which is kind of
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
the kumas.
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Ann Mendelsohn
Yes, koumath is made from mare's milk. I mean real coolness. True kumas. So mins milk, it has much more lactose. It has a tremendous amount of lactose compared with cows, goats or the others. And it has very little fat, very little protein. You could never make cheese from mare's milk. But it has so much lactose that under the right conditions, hot summer days, it ferments to release both carbon dioxide and alcohol. So it's effervescent and it's somewhat boozy. And in the middle of the 19th century, European scientists began to discover, aha, this is a perfect cure for tuberculosis. I mean preventative for tuberculosis. It's a cure for anything. It is the elixir of life. It tasted a little peculiar and it was impossible to make because the mares refused to give it any place except their own homeland. When it was taken to like St. Petersburg or Moscow, the mayors just said oh no. And entrepreneurs who wanted to market the stuff, they developed this technique of taking cow's milk, modifying it by skimming it and diluting it somewhat so there was less protein and adding a lot of sugar. And this was soulless coolness in Poland, France, most of Europe and the United States. And it arrived in the United States. This was one of the really fascinating historical footnotes I came across. It got there just in time to be administered to United States president James A. Garfield, who was assassinated in 1881 by an assassin with a pistol. So the bullet remained lodged in the poor man, for a couple of months the doctors completely flubbed the business of getting it out and treating him. But at some point they started administering this fake cow's milk based kumas. And the newspapers got hold of President Garfield treated with kumas. And of course it instantly sparked a great market for kumas. Even people like Mark Twain Wayne were getting in on the act. And for a few years there was a great kuma civogue in the US Sort of died down after a while.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
And what about the yogurt?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, the yogurt came on the scene pretty soon after. People were losing interest in kumas. First of all, there were a lot of mulvas, an appreciable number of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, many of them Armenians. And Armenians in the US started were isolating cultures to reproduce, to keep the culture. They were able to keep the culture going from batch to batch efficiently enough to start selling it commercially. And they advertised it with slogans like the Elixir of life and far more palatable than Truma. So shortly after that, along comes Ilya Metchnikov in France. He was originally from Belarus, but he settled in France at the Pasteur Institute and became interested in digestive theories about how to prolong life by kind of policing what was going on in the colon. By this time people knew enough about bacteriology to recognize that there were actual organisms in the human digestive system. So a theory was going around that food putrefies in the colon and it is a terrible evolutionary mistake and we would all be better without it. And Metchnikov was highly interested in this thinking and he decided after he got hold of CERN yogurt produced by a Bulgarian colleague, that one of the particular organisms that had been isolated from yogurt was the key. They now call it Lactobacillus mulgarichus. And when it ferments milk by itself, it produces terribly, terribly sour, almost inedibly sour yogurt. But Metchnikov thought this acidity was perfect for knocking out all the enemy bacteria in the colon. And he allowed a French company start producing what they called Y a H O U R T E T H E in commercial quantities. That spelling, that is phonetic spelling of the Turkish word as pronounced in Turkish. There is no yogurt with a high in Turkish. So yogurt took off in a big, big way in England. In the United States, it took off not because people liked it, but because they thought it might add 50 years to their lifespan. And people were quoted in newspaper squibs of saying Gee, maybe I'd rather be dead. However, it hung on for a few decades until somebody came along with the replacement. By then, it had been discovered that the magical bacillus did not reach the colon when you ate yogurt. It was knocked out of action by the acidity in the stomach. And so yogurt was never going to reform the malefactors in your colon. However, American scientists discovered a replacement called Lactobacillus acidophilus, which also is murderously sour. So acid that you don't know why anybody would really want to eat it, except that it's supposedly preventive. And yogurt fell into obscurity for some decades. Acidophilus yogurt has kind of had its own niche for quite a while. But yogurt had come back during the 1960s when a lot of hippies on communes began raising their own cows or goats and finding that they didn't exactly know what to do with the milk, but realizing that if they got hold of some commercial cultures of yogurt from an outfit like Dannon, and the commercial cultures have more than one organism, they have several acting at once and a kind of feedback with each other which mellows the acidity, which is much closer to what the yogurt would have been like before Metchnikov got hold of it. So yogurt again surfaced and acquired a reputation both as a health food for hippies and eventually a sort of a snack for everybody, as the yogurt companies learned to add more and more sugar to it. And today yogurt is. Well, it's a strange spectacle. I don't know about Switzerland, but in the United States, you go to the dairy aisle in the supermarket, and there is. Maple cream yogurt, there's chocolate yogurt, there is raspberry fluff yogurt. If you look hard, you can find plain yogurt. But even the plain, plain yogurt comes in whole milk, reduced fat, and no fat. Well, no fat yogurt, low fat yogurt is simply not worth.
- [28:12]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
I know what you mean. There is also a huge variety of yogurt products in Switzerland as well. So how did the idea of yogurt drinking milk become popular? Because it's very difficult, actually to keep milk fresh.
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, I think maybe the question should be not how, but where and when. It had to be in a country where everybody, or almost, almost everybody, possessed that mutation I mentioned earlier, the one that enabled people to digest lactose, to digest lactose as adults, instead of ceasing to secrete lactase, that all important enzyme after weaning like all other mammals and like the majority of humans even today, so called lactose tolerance is prevalent in maybe 30%, 35% of the human race and the rest is lactose intolerant. Anyhow, the when is crucial. The where it had to be people with the right mutation when it had to be after about the 17th century in the places where the mutation was prevalent because these places were home to the developing disciplines of science, including medical science. And they were home to the great colonial powers who got to setting agenda for the rest of the world to tell other people what was good for everybody. Well, England was a mighty power to be reckoned with in the 17th winter, 17th and 18th centuries and even more later. There's plenty of evidence that milk drinking had become popular and even fashionable in London when Samuel Pepys was compiling his celebrated diaries in the 1660s. A few generations later, maybe around 1710, a celebrity doctor named George Cheney C H E Y N e got to work inventing a celebrity diet, a wonder diet that was centered on large amounts of fresh milk as a remedy for disordered nerves. Disordered nerves were a very fashionable ailment among the upper classes at that point. So a few decades later, Cheney's theories were picked up by specialists in treating young children.
- [31:21]
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- [32:18]
Ann Mendelsohn
By about the year 1800, it was accepted wisdom that all children should drink cow's milk fresh by the pint liqueur as absolutely the most important food that can be poured into a tender young system. And we're talking about fresh, unsourved cow's milk because another tenet of this new belief was that sour milk was spoiled milk and you had to avoid it at all costs unless you wanted to kill innocent children. So in reality, putting this kind of emphasis on unsound milk put children's lives at risk. The problem was the apostles fresh milk for kids. What they ended up doing was creating a steeply increased demand. Long before there was any way to monitor the quality of the milk supply. The idea that fresh milk was an absolute necessity for all children trickled down from the upper classes to lower classes in urban neighborhoods, poor urban neighborhoods, not only in England, but in North America. Well, this increased market for fresh unsound cow's milk was an absolute bonanza for shady operators who were rushed to set up dairy barns. Barns by courtesy, filthy, filthy sheds next to city distilleries or breweries. And they bought up the waste cheap to feed to the luckless crowds, were unfortunate enough to be stable to the premises. So all too Predictably, in the 19th century, milk became a vector for food borne pathogens in big cities. This was before anybody knew that such a thing as pathogens existed through its soon became obvious that people better find some way to make fresh milk SAFER. And about 1880, researchers began talking about the kind of heat treatments that Louis Pasteur had already applied to the east for wine and beer. The language was a bit muddled at first. People didn't know whether to say sterilization or purific. Finally they decided on pasteurization. But the idea was to heat the milk to a certain temperature under the boiling point that would knock out particular pathogens before chilling and bottling it under strict sanitary precautions. This was what enabled such a thing as a milk industry, a true milk industry, to take shape.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
And so how did the dairy industry and technologies respond to this demand for drinking milk?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Well, by getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Because between about 1910, 1915, there was an absolute pest gain. Discoveries by nutritionists about the wonderful nutrients that were contained in milk. Calcium. Just more calcium than any other common food. Lots and lots of protein, mostly in the form of casein vitamins, vitamin A, some of the B vitamins. And as a result, public health authorities started talking as if it was the absolute duty of every parent to pour target amounts of milk into every child, because otherwise the child was in danger of being insufficiently nourished with vitamin A or not enough protein, not enough calcium, kid would get rickets. And the propaganda was so successful that generations of parents, from then until now, over the last hundred Years at least, have thought that their child is going to be in terrible danger if a pint or a quart, preferably a quart of fresh milk, is poured into it every day. This reputation of fresh milk, as opposed to sour milk or cheese, this reputation has never been damaged. Somehow milk has retained the reputation of a superfood, as mentioned in the subtitle of my book. And there is no other form of dairy product that is as culturally central to the United States, certainly, and to a lesser extent, other Western European nations that is as culturally central and normative as drinking milk. Its position is, to say the least, exalted.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
So in spoiled, you also talk about the formation of mega dairy farms and the selection for high performing cows. Could you expand on that as well?
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Ann Mendelsohn
Yeah, there was just this push to expand, expand, expand more and more and more. And there could be no such thing as too much milk. The big danger was not enough milk. Well, it looked like a bonanza for dairy farmers at first. This was a sure fire, get rich, quick product. Except there are things about milk that make it very difficult to make a reliable living from it. That is fresh, unfoured milk. It's always going to be a buyer's market, it's never going to be a seller's market because the product is so perishable, it is so bulky, it is so hard to handle, so subject to bacterial invasion and other dangers that you have to spend an awful lot of money to produce it safely. The farmers kept being told, well, just expand your herd. You have a larger herd, you'll have a larger income. You'll be able to invest in things like a milking machine, which is more sanitary than hand milking. You'll be able to invest in a tank for chilling the milk, refrigerating it until the dairy company comes and picks it up. Every time the farmers decided to take the experts advice and expand production, they found that they were not keeping up with production costs. It was a race or a game in which they were almost bound to be defeated. So the economies of scale that kept being urged on the dairy farmers ended up by almost transforming cows out of anything you would recognize as a cow. The sole purpose of a cow was to give as much milk as you can possibly squeeze out of her and the amounts that you can get out of the cow kept growing and growing and growing by new technologies. Feed the cow not grass, not hay, but rations with a lot of slam beans or corn, more high energy, high calorie feed. That sure does increase production, but it also, it's very difficult for an animal with a ruminant stomach like a cow to digest this kind of feed. And it's a stress over a certain point, it's a stress on the cow's body. Farmers learn to do balancing acts to keep cows just on the threshold of maybe ruminal acidosis, because the new feeds were new feeds encouraged different bacteria to propagate in the rumen. These bacteria produced more acidity, lowered physical to the point, whereas the regular bacteria couldn't compete. The cows who were the new improved cows. And cows kept getting newer and more improved. They were less likely to live past their fifth birthday. Healthy cow well treated and couldn't live to 20. No improved cows often had difficulty calving. They were subject to mastitis. Inflammation is the udder. When a cow has mastitis, you have to separate the milk from the rest of the herd's milk and dump it until you have treated the mastitis with antibiotics and all the antibiotics are out of the system. And then you can go back to feeding the cow the way you were feeding her and having the same problem two months later. And this became very, very wearisome to dairy farmers. They have dropped out by the hundreds in the 1920s, since the recent 40s, by the thousands. After the 1950s, there's only a comparative handful of real dairy farmers left in the country. And those that survive are megadairies, which have economies of scale so weird, so crazy that it boggles mind. A 5,000 cow farm is not a tremendously big farm. Nowadays there are many 10,000 cow farms. The animals, of course, hardly ever see such a thing as a blade of grass. They live in confined operations. 10,000, 15,000, 25,000. The sky's the limit. The industry keeps talking about even larger and larger megadaires. The result for if you happen to be a neighbor of the megadary, if you happen to live in a nearby town, you are seeing local water polluted, you're seeing local aquifers just depleted, just run dry. You are seeing methane pollution of the air to where you hardly want to let your children out of the house. There's just innumerable environmental consequences that go with these megaderian operations.
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Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Indeed, it's as they did in megadairry farms and the consequences, indeed, and their environmental impact. It is a very important topic. In spoiled. You also discussed the idea of raw milk. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about this and its pros and cons?
- [46:04]
Ann Mendelsohn
Well, raw milk just means milk that has not been pasteurized, it hasn't been subjected to Heat treatment to eliminate pathogens, the most common methods used today. They also eliminate a lot of other bacteria. The milk isn't technically sterilized, sterilized, meaning removed of all bacteria unless it's heated to a much, much higher temperature, well above the boiling point of water. So the big push for pasteurization took shape when people were getting very worried about the consequences of these horrible dairies that had cows stabled in horrible premises next to distilleries or the breweries. The cows being fed on the waste became sick. Children being fed on the milk became sick. And how to make the milk safe was a great priority. Along came the idea of pasteurization after the 1880s. And by the 1890s, there were debates going on about whether it was a better idea to pasteurize milk to get rid of the pathogens, or whether it was a better idea to produce raw milk under very strict sanitary precautions so that the pathogens never had a chance to get in in the first place. People who espoused this second idea worked out a method of certifying raw milk, keeping track of everything that the farmer did. The farmer was contractually obligated to abide by every precaution that was mentioned in the contract, and the milk was going to be clean and safe for infants or children or grownups. The only hitch was that incorporating all these precautions and protocols into the milking process was expensive. It was so expensive that by about 1910, 1915, everybody could see that certified raw milk was being priced out of the market. The certified proponents kept arguing, our milk is really clean. Pasteurization causes chemical changes in the milk. Pasteurization is just an excuse for covering up sloppy milk because everything comes out in the wash. The certified proponents really retreated into obscurity for decades. But after about the 1980s, 90s, the raw milk movement came back to life. It came roaring back to life with a vengeance. And the argument that pasteurized milk is somehow interfered with. It's lost its purity. It is Sodom milk. Most people call it dead milk. This argument is not as far as I'm concerned. I would not say it has a great deal of scientific validity, but it has a lot of emotional appeal. And it was attractive to people who had inherited a distrust of authority from the hippie and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, sort of automatic distrust of authority institutions, which is a trend that has gone on and on and on and keeps being magnified in the US and raw milk is a good example. One of the really attractive arguments about raw milk Is that Americans are really devoted to the idea of individual rights. Nobody gets to push me around. Nobody gets to tell me what I can put in my mouth. And I have a right to do my own medical research and act on my own conclusions. That argument is being made in dozens of state legislatures around the country, and it's being heard in Congress. And I believe it's a stupid and dangerous attitude. But the response of the public health authorities has to be almost equally stupid and harmful. It's shut up and let us tell you what to do. All right? The result is criminalizing the production of raw milk and the distribution. And I accept the argument that pasteurization makes milk safer. But I also see that there's a fine argument for milk being produced, raw milk being produced with very stringent precautions and government inspection, stringent, constant inspection and supervision. And this could reduce the danger of raw milk to almost nothing. But almost nothing is not enough for the authorities. They want 100% guarantees that there will be no pathogens at all in your raw milk. Sort of ignoring the fact that there have been some embarrassing epidemics of pasteurized milk spreading disease because there was some hitch in the pasteurization or the post pasteurization handling. Just because milk is pasteurized, you can have a fair amount of trust in it, in its safety, but not necessarily 100%. And I must say that unhomogenized milk, unpasteurized milk, tastes more like milk. The way milk is produced, commercially produced, is the way it appears in supermarkets. It has been manhandled so much that it's lost a great deal of the appeal of milk. The raw milk guys also, they are among the few voices speaking up about the treatment of dairy animals and the environmental pollution, environmental degradation caused by the mainstream industry. So I think they have a certain amount to be said on their side. And I wish instead of yelling at each other in unproductive harangues, the proponents and opponents could have rational conversations. I agree.
- [54:31]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
And I think. I don't remember the taste of unhomogenized and unpasteurized milk. It's quite interesting to speak.
- [54:42]
Ann Mendelsohn
Well, milk is. Earlier I was saying that milk is. We get it in the US Supermarkets. It's been chemically. Well, it's been industrially processed to an extent. Verdict. It doesn't really resemble the milk that comes out of a cow. First of all, the milk truck comes to the farm and picks up the milk and takes it to the processing plant. Well, there the first thing they do is to separate the cream from the skim milk through Centrifuge. Then they recombine the cream and the milk in arbitrary percentages by homogenization. That is, they force the milk and cream through tiny apertures under pressure that break down the large milk fat globules of the milk into many globules are too small to be affected by gravity and float to the surface of the milk in a cream layer. So most people in this country have never seen milk with a cream layer. It would be a great surprise anyhow, the way milk comes out of a cow. And there are differences between breeds of cow. But still, no matter what, no matter what the breed is, there is going to be somewhere between maybe 4 to 8% milk fat in the milk and about 9% what they call SNF solids non fat, meaning everything else besides the milk fat that isn't water, all the soluble things in the proteins. So that can easily be 9% in normal cow's milk. So think about that. 4, 7 or 8% milk fat, 9% solids non fat, what they call whole milk, but it's officially allowed to be sold as whole milk in this country, has 3.25% milk fat. It has 8.25% solids non fat SNF. This is just amazing. This is not like this stuff does not taste like milk. It doesn't look like milk because of the cream lamb. And it's a poor substitute for real whole milk. But because the milk is homogenized, you can't see any fresh usual cardboard tartans. You can't see what's inside. People have got used to just pouring some anonymous white substance out of the carton into a milk glass and drinking it and not wondering about what has been done to it in the meantime. It's really been technologically manhandled.
- [58:29]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
So where do you see, how do you see the future of dairy farming and milk consumption? Do you think that raw milk could be accessible for many or would it be allowed to be purchased? What's your opinion?
- [58:48]
Ann Mendelsohn
No. Raw milk is always going to be a kind of a niche endeavor because it has to be done on a tiny, tiny scale or we're not going to have any 30,000 cow raw milk dairies ever. No megadonis. In fact, that's one of the great things about the raw milk movement. It has brought back all the contact between the producer and the consumer. On small farms where there may be only like 25, 50 cows, that's a lot for a small family to cope with producing 25 or 50 cows, that's a lot of work. Milking, even though the milking is done by machines, just feeding and managing the animals non stop work, if your heart is in it, it's worth it. I mean, so raw milk dairies cannot expand to a size where they can compete with commercial dairies. But they have inspired a lot of other people who are not necessarily up to the challenges of raw milk, but would like to produce better milk pasteurized. There's a lot of little independent dairies that have left the mainstream market and are just selling to interested consumers, possibly distributing through gourmet stores or selling at farmers markets. And there's a very bright future, I should think, for them. But still, they're going to be small, they're not going to account for a large share of the whole market. They're just not going to be in the running. And as for the mainstream market, I'm just not optimistic. This is an enormous, gigantic industry that is, I think it would be kind to say it's approaching unsustainability. Might be more truthful to say that it's got there already in the context of soil and air and water degradation and the logistics of getting every cow to produce still more milk, even if it kills her. To me, it seems as if the industry will have to downsize at some point in the future, but there's going to be a lot of collateral damage to farmers. Meanwhile, the American public is less and less interested in drinking milk. The peak of drinking milk consumption was in 1945. It's been going downhill ever since. But what scares me most about the future, why I'm pessimistic. Let's say it's how eagerly the Western industrial model of milk production and distribution is being welcomed by other nations, developing nations in the Far East, South Asia, Africa, South America. China is already home to some of the world's biggest, most polluting mega farms. And the government has persuaded citizens that consuming a lot of drinking milk, whether they can digest it or not, Is going to contribute to Chinese national power. In Eastern Africa, there are breeds of cattles that were developed by generations over the centuries of pastoral nomads that are adapted to the local climatic conditions. And there are ministries of agriculture who are eager to get Holstein cow genes going in support of industrialized dairying. So I'm afraid that even if America comes to its senses about the absurdities of the modern drinking milk industry, the damage is going to continue elsewhere. It's going to continue in countries where people have no tradition of producing and consuming milk, and often where they have no genetic ability to digest lactose.
- [63:53]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
I guess sooner or later we will have to deal with the question of how much we can keep on with the level of consumption that we have at the moment and how that could be sustainable or not. This has been a really fascinating discussion and thank you so much and I learned so much about milk and dairy farming thanks to your book. What are you currently working on? What's your next project?
- [64:24]
Ann Mendelsohn
Well, this is completely different. I'm trying to help a friend who was born in Georgia to the Republic of Georgia and lives in the United States. She's writing a cookbook about Georgian cuisine for English speaking audience in America and this is a pretty daunting project because of the amount of recipe testing, accommodating terminology from the Georgian language into English. But it's fascinating and I love Georgian food and this is a kind of project that I haven't done for a while. Wow.
- [65:18]
Dr. Melek Fra Talthai
Looking forward to it as well. Thank you very much for joining me today.
- [65:23]
Ann Mendelsohn
You're very welcome. Thank you.