Thoughts on Food

A few weeks ago when friends from Texas visited, I introduced them to the concept of eating local. Being total urbanites from Houston, they were skeptical but willing to hear me out. We visited a couple of farms, talked about the virtues of grass-fed, local organic foods, and all of the other foodie things I'm into. We ate very well and I received many compliments on the quality and taste of my cooking. But the coolest thing, for me at least, was testing something I had read about many times but never had the opportunity to see for myself. One of my guests was lactose intolerant. According to the literature, lactose intolerant folks are usually able to digest raw milk without issue. This seems to be due to the fact that scorching the hell out of milk and then subjecting it to thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch tends to turn it into a milk-like product that is only a shadow of its formers self, lacking most of the nutrients and enzymes it once contained and instead containing some strange new properties that tend to clog arteries and cause other issues, which raw whole milk does not do.

My guest, fond of milk but unable to enjoy it in any but the smallest of quantities, listened to my spiel and then downed a tall glass of whole, raw, delicious milk just hours out of the cow. (She also tended to drink only skim, not realizing that the nutrition is in the cream, that whole real milk can actually help keep you lean, and that the slimy film left in one's mouth after drinking typical grocery store whole milk is actually a result of the homogenization process and does not occur with raw milk.)

Her immediate reaction was, "Wow, my mouth isn't slimy. This has a much creamier but not a 'fat' taste like the whole milk I'm used to." Her next reaction, later in the day, was something like, "You know I haven't had any issues at all from that milk this morning. I'm really surprised." And so she had several more glasses over the course of her visit and never had any issues as a result. I now hear she's trying to find a raw milk supplier in the Houston area.