When I was little, I would suffer from terrible stomachaches in school. They were so bad that I would have to go to the nurse’s office at times and even be sent home. It turns out I was lactose intolerant—that coupled with having high anxiety did not mix very well.
Milk. It was the beverage of choice growing up as a child in our house. Never skim, sometimes raw, and with any meal of the day. In fact, cow milk is the beverage of choice in most American households.
Food, Genes, and Culture, by enthnobiologist and agrarian activist Gary Paul Nabhan, is everything you wouldn’t expect in a so-called “diet” book.
What I thought was lactose intolerance turned out to be intolerance to pasteurized milk…
Louis Pasteur may have started out on the right track in his bid to make raw milk a safe and microbe-free drink that people could enjoy, without the fear of food poisoning, or worse, bovine-borne diseases. Enter pasteurization – a technique that kills all the harmful bacteria that is passed from the bovine to the milk. But is pasteurization really making the milk better? Or is it throwing the baby out with the bathwater by killing all the goodness of milk too? Case in question: me.