Hey friends,

​Last week I wrote about milk and guesstimated a little bit about why it fell off and why it’s back. This week I am talking about it’s rich and creamy lore.

AmERICAN DAIRY LORE

The truth is that drinking milk is a relatively new idea to the human gut.

It all began (maybe) like a few thousand years ago in parts of Europe where folks would consume milk past childhood. This tummy-ache filled dietary change began the evolution of our adult gut microbiome as we know it today. Because of them, American tummies are more likely to contain an enzyme called lactase, (which typically disappears after infancy) that helps us break down lactose (a key milk enzyme.

Don’t go to sleep yet, it’s about to get interesting.

Okay so in the 1920s they started regulating milk to make it safer to drink using pasteurization. But before it was safe to drink (thanks to pasteurization) the United States government started pushing studies out that showed that rats who drank milk grew to be bigger, therefore kids should drink more milk to be healthier. Because kids are famously just like rats. (Also by the way this turned out to not be true)

The US was also sending our milk overseas to help with (checks notes) the war. Because of course we were.

Then when WWI ended we had a big ass surplus of milk, because we weren’t sending milk to soldiers anymore. So of course we started another wa- I MEAN - started a program where we bought milk from dairy farmers and started giving kids milk in schools to help them reach their nutritional goals. and also sent milk to third world countries, and also… store milk in caves?

Fast forward to a few years after spending 2 billion dollars propping up big milk, and you guessed it, the cave cheese was starting to go bad. Never fear tho, Ronald Reagan was here. So he started giving out the nearly expired cave cheese as part of welfare programs and thus coined the phrase government cheese.

As you can imagine, we stopped buying so much cheese after that, and the dairy industry started to decline again, so we (by we i mean the us department of agriculture) hired a marketing agency to create milk campaigns. So yes, they started putting milk mustaches on celebrities, sensationalizing the health benefits (again), and also putting missing children posters on the side of cartons (i can’t remember why this was connected, but just know that it was connected to the USDA propping up Big Dairy).

This is right around the time where things started getting really dark and sinister, and that’s where I will return to next week. But I will leave you with this hint: Stuffed Crust Pizza

Whole-ly Yours,
Clebbie Debbie