at Fri, 10 Oct 2003 23:13:19 GMT in
, (DRB)
wrote :

(Alex Rast) wrote in message
. ..
at Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:53:12 GMT in de56271e.0310091253.a8aef61
@posting.google.com, (Akilesh Ayyar) wrote :

I bought some organic skim milk recently, supposed to expire November
7. I sampled a little bit and it tasted funny.

I can't describe it any better than to say it had a kind of
"high-pitched sweetness,"...

November 7 = Ultra-Pasteurized....

UP and UHT are two different things. When I get home, I'll pull up
the reference from pubmed.

I agree. UHT is even worse. But UP is already bad, and still subjected to
very high temperatures, over 200F. UHT is the stuff that's so sterile you
can store it at room temperature.


I find it bordering on unethical that dairies adopted these practices
without informing the consumers.

Just to clarify, it's the bottlers/processors--not the dairies
themselves.

Also agreed, I was using "dairy" as a generalized term for the bottlers,
because that's what the individual consumers actually see. If I wanted to
refer to the farms proper, I'd call them the "dairy farms", because they're
quite invisible to most consumers and not what a consumer would associate
with the "dairy" they're familiar with.


I also find it distressing that so few
consumers appear to notice, much less care. There seems to be an
assumption that sets in that "milk is milk" - a commodifying attitude
that lets the producers

Again, lets distinguish the dairyman from the processor. Most
cases,not the same man (or woman). I think of the dairymen as the
producers.

For the consumer, this is an arbitrary distinction, in the sense that from
their POV, the processor is the producer. Furthermore, from an economic
POV, the processor is also a producer because they're not the end user of
the product.


... In Kentucky, I was astonished to
discover that what was passing for "whole" milk back there had a
milkfat content of 3.2% !

And your point is? The average milk fat percentage of holstein milk
is 3.3%. Since greater than 90% of the cattle in the United States
are holsteins, 3.2% sounds pretty whole to me.

And therein lies an enormous part of the problem. Holsteins are a breed
specifically bred for maximum milk volume, with minimal attention paid to
taste or possibly even nutrition. That may be acceptable for industrial
milk users, i.e. companies who use milk as an ingredient in other products,
or who turn it into powdered milk, etc., but IMHO it's not a good standard
for milk that's actually going to hit store shelves. I don't deny that the
milk being supplied probably didn't have fat skimmed off, I'm saying that
when the focus, in milk production, brings us to breeding and feeding
programs that eventually produce milk of such low milkfat content, the
priorities of the system are very poor.

....

Given that it was ultra-
pasteurized as well, why not just add white dye to water and sell it
as milk?

... A good, unhomogenized, raw, whole (5% milkfat) milk is a
sensuous thing - smooth, rich, with an almost candy-like sweetness
(no, not an artificial/chemical flavour), and nuances of the fields
the cows grazed in.

Raw unpasteurized milk is not what I want to drink.

I'm not saying that everyone should be *forced* to drink raw milk, I'm just
saying that it should be made available as an allowable *option* for those
who wish it. Then they can choose the risks they take.

My grandparents
also farmed, and my dad and uncle had an incredibly number of sore
throats and other illnesses until my grandmother bought a pasteurizer
when my dad was about 9. Immediately, they stopped being so sick.

While it's inarguable that drinking raw milk increases the risk of illness
substantially, I must say that many of the risks associated with it are the
result of the poor sanitary practices often in place. If one were to make
raw milk available, it would have to be milked in carefully sanitized
conditions, within clean facilities, stored at appropriately low
temperatures, and delivered to the stores quickly. This would make such
milk carry a high price premium. Not everybody would want to spend that
kind of money, but I would be, for one, and I think it's dangerous for the
industry to assume such a cost-driven attitude that only the cheapest
possible products are available to the consumer.

My uncle and dad also still tell how they hated the unhomogenized
stuff. the way my uncle--now a 49 year old man--and my dad--now 51--
tell the story, it had to have been pretty nasty.

Different tastes. Also possibly different priorities. A lot of people find
the need to shake or stir unhomogenized milk an excessively irritating
inconvenience. Others probably find the very rich mouthfeel over-the-top -
too coating. But to make it unavailable, or virtually unavailable, to those
who might want it is too restrictive. My main point was, though, that the
worst of it is that in its very unavailability, most people don't even have
the opportunity to try it even to know whether they like it more or not.
The industry might say there were a lack of demand, but a large part of
this lack of demand, is, I think, the result of lack of exposure. People
who've never tried something have no way to know what they're missing.


, but could they not at least use LTLT (low-temperature, long-
time) pasteurization? In this technique, the milk is only subjected to
relatively mild heating (140-160F) for a rather longer time. The
gentler process minimizes the change in flavour.

I think a lot of bottlers still actually use this process.... I know
UHT milk as to be labled,and I think the UP milk as to be labled too
(but not sure on the UP milk).

Usually they must label. But the label is invariably inconspicuous and
usually the containers have no other exterior markings (such as a different
colour or shape) that would give the consumer the knowledge of what they're
buying. If you take all the cartons of pasteurized milk off the shelf and
replace them with ones that to all external appearances look exactly the
same, with the lone exception that, somewhere on the label, there is in
small type an additional "ultra-" appended onto the "pasteurized" label the
consumer has seen before, virtually no one is going to notice, even if they
know the difference between pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized, which is
already unlikely. They might notice that all of a sudden the milk tastes
different than it used to do, but very few of them will make the connection
between the altered flavour and the change in processing.


As you can tell, you've stumbled upon one of my pet peeves...

In this day and age... It's just not feasible to do things like they
did a long time ago.

I disagree. Modern times don't require abandoning older methods. It's a
case of rational use. You have to look at when a new method actually makes
sense and adds value, and when it's actually reducing the value, adding
extra effort, introducing irrational processes, etc. And I couldn't be
further from a Luddite. Not only do I find new technology exciting and
fascinating, as well as useful, I work in an industry and profession
specifically associated with advancing the technological state of the art.
But I'm as violently opposed to the blind embracing of the new and modern,
as if newer were automatically better, as to the anachronistic holding on
to the past, as if everything were going downhill.


--
Alex Rast

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