Another moo-ving dilemma

Ain’t nothing simple anymore.

Heck, we can’t even agree on where milk comes from any more.

And by golly we’ve got lawsuits to prove it.

Now I’m not going to claim to have been born smarter than a Harvard lawyer, but from my earliest memory I knew where milk came from.

It came from the barn where Dad kept the cows.

Every couple of days at chore time  he’d take a little aluminum pail with a tight fitting lid with him down to the barn and bring it back full of milk. Mom ran it through the pasteurizer on the pantry counter, put it in the fridge and when it was gone, sent that pail with Dad back to the barn.

When we moved to town it didn’t get much more confusing than that. Every morning trucks from two or three local dairies prowled the streets of Caledonia dropping off glass bottles of milk by the front steps or on the front port of houses as they passed. That milk was pretty much run of the cow – let it stand a while and the cream would rise to the top – they even provided a little umbrella shaped gadget to scoop it out so Mom could whip it up to top pumpkin pie, or Dad would shake, shake, shake the jug to get it mixed back in before we poured it over our corn flakes and Cheerios.

It wasn’t long before they started messing with milk a little bit, homogenizing it so the cream stayed put and if you wanted topping for your pie Mom had to by a separate carton of cream or some fluffy sweet tasting mix of chemicals labeled “whipped topping.”

It was the shape of things to come.

It wasn’t long after that skim mike –blue milk, Dad called it – started showing up on store shelves. Back then, pretty much it was bought only by the women who nibbled Ayds candy, joined TOPS club and otherwise followed the latest diet fad touted on the cover of Women’s Day magazine. For the rest of us, milk was still milk, It came in white and chocolate and twice a day, at  milk break and lunch time, was free for kids at school.

Then, about the time people started drinking bottled water and wearing bicycle helmets, things started getting complicated.

It started with the percentages, like alcohol in beer and wine, you could buy milk with a specified amount of fat in every glass – something that was suddenly important to some people. Then folks started touting milk as organic, BGH free, raw and ultimately derived from almonds, soy beans and other things hard to imagine fitted with a milking machine, but all supposedly worthy of higher prices and indicative of a higher state of environmental awareness. Going green was the buzzword of the day, a bit disconcerting for those of us who grew up when the only green folks we were aware of were giants selling frozen peas or college freshmen recovering from their first frat party.

But the greener-than-thou movement was upon us, and everything we once had eaten was wrong…

Of course, as Isaac Newton observed, to every action there’s a reaction. The folks that brought us milk mustache ads and Elsie the Cow struck back. Nowadays, what a three-year-old in Mom’s kitchen had all figured out takes a score of bureaucrats and a government rule book to put in place. According to the federal definition, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrums, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.

The executive director of the Minnesota Milk Producers Association generously allows other animals may also produce milk, “We have no problem with goats.”  Presumably we may add gnu, guinea pigs, gerbils and the girl-next-door to that list.

But the line is drawn at almonds. And they’re ready to tell that to a judge.

After all, not almonds, nor any of their other plant-based kin,  produce lacteal secretions.

Therefore, there is no such thing as “almond milk.”

But if you put it on your Cheerios, can you still call it breakfast?