UDDERLY HEAVENLY
It’s a taste our grandparents knew well and despite it being illegal, raw milk is making a comeback. Well, it is...
Ihave just arrived in Ireland. The key turns softly in the cottage door. all is neat and in order. I duly unpack and then, in hope – though braced for disappointment – I open the fridge and there, indeed, and as was negotiated in low tones the other night, is the unlawful bottle.
I grab it, shake it, pick up a glass, pour myself a manly measure and step outside, to perch on the windowsill as the swallows flit in the meadow and evening sun be molten gold on the Leitrim hills, and then I take my first swallow of the hard stuff for many years…
No, not of poitín, the infamous illicit hooch of the emerald Isle, but raw, untreated, unpasteurised milk. It is lawful in Ireland, england and Wales, if not easy to find – but its sale has been illegal here in Scotland since 1983.
It looks different from the mass-produced shop stuff you see stacked by the two-litre carton under bleak supermarket striplighting. Untreated milk is faintly yellow, not chalky white.
and it tastes amazing – silky, creamy, almost sweet, and with the aroma of summer flowers. It hauls me in an instant back over four decades to my early boyhood, to summer holidays on Lewis, to my grandparents’ ill-tempered cow.
When milk really tasted of something, when bottles of it were left at the door or the top of the croft still warm from the beast, when my grandmother could leave it overnight in a great basin and skim off the cream the following day.
Raw milk generally, beyond the clammy bureaucracy of Scotland, is having rather a boom. advocates talk of four-year-olds who, accustomed to it, cry if made to drink the processed stuff. They insist such children are much less likely to develop eczema, asthma and allergies.
AfRIeNd whose Gordonstoun classmates included Zara Phillips once went on a far east jolly with her and others. every other day one of them would double up with a gippy tummy or a touch of the collywobbles – but never the Princess Royal’s daughter, who laughingly explained that she had been raised on untreated milk and had a storming immune system.
Raw milk has more vitamins, good bacteria, healthy enzymes, is more nutritious and (unexpectedly) easier to digest than its treated cousin.
The vast bulk of British milk, of course, is rushed to a dairy, pasteurised – by heating to 72 degrees for 15 to 20 seconds; homogenised (mechanically) and, of course, mixed with loads of milk from other farms and many other cows, emerging finally as the bland and standard gloop that tastes the same wherever you live and whatever the season of the year.
The untreated stuff remains difficult to sell; there are thought to be only around 200 producers in england and Wales. It cannot be sold through shops and supermarkets but directly to the consumer, so most producers take advantage of farmers’ markets.
The bottle must carry a clear health warning and local environmental health officers take the keenest interest in the conditions in which it is produced.
and rightly so: nostalgia for the good old days, and a growing tendency to rebel against the finger-wagging bossiness of the nanny state, should not blind us to the truth that pasteurisation is the norm for a reason.
around 1900, before pasteurisation became widespread and in time universal, one in four food illnesses in the UK were borne by milk. Many of these – most notoriously, tuberculosis – were lethal.
Pasteurisation kills off such bugs as listeria, salmonella, campylobacter and e.coli, which can be found even in the guts of healthy cows, and those who choose to skip it must be extraordinarily cautious.
The cows must be scrupulously cleaned, the milking duly done (by appropriate machinery) without exposure to air and cooled to 4C in super-chilled cisterns.
Big producers, such as Organic Pastures in California – Martin Sheen and Gwyneth Paltrow are among many famous fans of milk au naturel – also hold it for 24 hours while the batch is tested for any unwelcome bacteria.
experts in public health remain queasy. In 2009, Michele JayRussell, a microbiologist at the University of California, set up the Real Raw Milk facts website to counter what she describes as a ‘very sophisticated misinformation campaign’ by the wilder advocates of untreated milk.
dr Jay-Russell does not want raw milk banned, she just wants folk to be careful. ‘for an adult it’s not really worse than eating raw oysters or sprouts,’ she murmurs. ‘But I would say it’s one of the most risky foods you could give a child under five.’
Last december, around 60 people did indeed fall ill after drinking untreated milk – sold by vending machine – from a farm in Cumbria.
None, happily, required hospital treatment, but the food Standards agency lost no time in reiterating its position: older people, infants, children, pregnant women and anyone with a compromised immune system should not consume unpasteurised milk or related products.
SUCh incidents in Scotland led to a Sunday newspaper campaign and the eventual ban of raw milk, this side of the Border, 34 years ago. It has not stopped many of us ordering it online from farms in england as officialdom clucks disapprovingly.
Ireland, though, has gone in the other direction, in 2015 overturning a prohibition in place since 1996 – honoured more in the breach than in the observance – and instead laying down sensible rules about the production and sale of unpasteurised milk.
Which is why, quite lawfully – at least in the serenity of the Republic – I am supping a glass of it with a smile, remembering flavour and mouthfeel long forgotten.
Sales of raw milk are growing because it really does taste good – and because, in the growing crisis for dairy farmers in the British Isles since the abolition of the Milk Marketing Board by the Major administration, some have found a profitable sideline in going organic and selling unpasteurised milk, cheese and butter directly to happy consumers.
But demand is growing too, perhaps, because – as Michael Gove famously put it last year – people in this country have had quite enough of experts.
You can never entirely eliminate risk and there is a moral chasm between warning the public to be careful about a given product and, by full force of law, banning its sale. Campylobacter is the most common form of food poisoning in the UK – it kills around 100 people a year – and four out of five infections are from raw or carelessly cooked chicken.
Yet no one suggests prohibiting the sale of chicken – or cigarettes, or strong drink, or sugary pop or artery-clogging cakes and biscuits – and it seems daft to place untreated from-moo-to-you milk in unique excommunication from the fridges of Scotland.
Which is why, this Irish evening, I am especially enjoying my tipple of the stuff. Yes, it takes me back and, yes, it tastes grand – but there is also that delicious frisson in doing something subversive.