A Dietary Reevaluation
Most people who know me here at Adamah know that I do not eat dairy. I haven’t eaten it for over four years. Soon after deciding to abstain from milk products I found myself to be somewhat of an anti-dairy activist, always questioning friends’ dietary decisions and scoffing at cheese lovers.
I stopped eating dairy initially because I believed that it was unhealthy and bizarre to eat, and because I had trouble digesting it. I subsequently chose to cut the food group from my diet and have taken it to the extreme. I don’t eat baked goods made with dairy, I don’t eat pizza, and I don’t eat cheesecake. I further vilified the food group and its producers in conversations with friends and family to legitimate and validate my decision.
Here’s the problem. I’ve been eating plenty of non-healthy foodstuffs that are non-dairy. I found that I have mainly replaced dairy with processed soy products which I believe are far less healthy than dairy and worse for the environment (soy is produced as a monoculture in this country and is water and land intensive).
Here at Adamah I’ve begun to question my anti-dairy decision. We have goats here and I spend a significant amount of time milking them. They are local, they eat our food scraps and they get treated with love. Friends of mine are learning to make all sorts of cheeses and yogurts all the time. Plus, goat dairy is significantly healthier than cow dairy. Furthermore, I am literally awash in abundance of goat dairy products to the point that much gets thrown away. All the milk here is raw which means that it retains all the good enzymes that pasteurization wipes out. I’d hate to miss out on this incredible opportunity to eat expensive fetas for free and to drink my cereal with a beverage produced just half a mile down from my kitchen, from goats that I know and have milked. Goat dairy here makes sense and for this reason I have wondered if I should eat it.
After weeks of deliberation I sat down with Aitan (the goat herder here at Adamah) and Abby (an Adamahnik) and decided to taste Aitan’s feta. Before I did I wanted to make a ritual of it. So, we went to his barn, sat and watched the view and I regaled them with the stories of certain foods and drinks that I had at once avoided and how I came to reintroduce them to my diet. Then I ate a piece of feta with tomatoes and basil from our field. As we all ate we spoke about the merits of reevaluation in one’s life; how important it is to look back at decisions one has made and ask why they were made and whether or not that decision is still relevant in one’s life. The example I spoke of was how I never drank alcohol up until I was 21. I abstained for a variety of social reasons. I didn’t like the culture of drink in high school or my first few years of college. However, once I began my junior year and most of my friends were legally able to drink and did so more responsibly, I had less objections to the practice and reevaluated my decision. Now I drink alcohol (though not excessively).
Having reevaluated my relationship to dairy, I have decided to ease up on my personal restrictions. Breads and baked goods with dairy I will eat. I don’t see why not because they hardly affect my stomach. Aitan’s feta tasted really good but my stomach didn’t like it all that much. Therefore I decided to only eat goat cheeses here sparingly, and to avoid the milk because I doubt I can handle it. However, being able to embrace change and at least attempt to engage with the abundance of local food around me (rather than simply drinking rice milk from California without question) has been an important step for me in my life. It’s also nice to know that no decision I make is necessarily final.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Print This Post
Email This Post
7 Responses to “A Dietary Reevaluation”
-
Emily Says:
August 20th, 2007 at 9:07 amThanks for this essay, Jeffrey. Can you point me to some data regarding the relative healthfulness of goat vs. cow dairy?
-
curdnerd Says:
August 20th, 2007 at 11:31 amI’m curious as to how you got past your feelings that dairy is “unhealthy and bizarre to eat.”
-
Jackie Topol Says:
August 21st, 2007 at 5:02 amHey Jeff- This is a really interesting piece. I am wondering how you are going to handle dairy after Adamah… Are you going to seek out dairy that is local and comes from a farm where you know the animals are treated with love and respect? This may be hard to find. . . What are your thoughts on this? (also you mentioned that soy is water and land intensive– so is animal grazing… just thought I’d point that out)
-
Jeff Yoskowitz Says:
August 21st, 2007 at 6:26 amSorry for taking a day to respond. Gotta love farm life!
As for the healthfulness of goat dairy vs. cow dairy, Emily, I’d check out: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....100229.htm
ScienceDaily: Goats’ Milk Is More Beneficial To Health Than Cows’ Milk, Study SuggestsThat’s just one article of many on the subject. However, the dairy here is mostly raw which is also what I was referring to about the healthfulness of the Adamah goat’s milk. Simply speaking, when you pasteurize raw milk you burn off many important enzymes and healthy bacteria. In fact, lactase, the enzyme that helps one digest milk, is present in raw milk, thus making it easier to digest.
-
Jeff Yoskowitz Says:
August 21st, 2007 at 6:38 amI haven’t fully gotten over my feelings that dairy is “bizarre to eat” and I’m not fully convinced that it’s rightly “healthy” for me and my body. I no longer think that dairy is universally unhealthy for all and that was part of my reevaluation, and I also realized that small amounts of raw local goat dairy are not bad for me despite the fact that it may not be the easiest digestive experience. I still think milk as a concept is more bizarre than eating veggies, but I realized that I also think meat is strange(and thought that as I butchered a goat a month ago). I also think that eating food bars in wrappers and kiwis in New Englad is strange, so basically dairy no longer phases me as much–plus it’s been around much longer.
And Jackie, you ask an interesting question. I’m not yet sure how I will approach dairy. Adamah dairy is a gift and I strongly believe in local and organic dairy production on a small scale (which does not qualify as water instensive, nor as land intensive, mostly because goats graze on land that can’t be used for farming or anything else–very different than industrial soy). I’ll be in Israel next year so things may be different there. I may just eat a slice of pizza once in a while, or perhaps I’ll seek out small goat dairy farms, but I don’t plan on eating too much dairy because my system can only hold so much. I’ll keep you posted.
-
Emily Says:
August 21st, 2007 at 10:35 amThanks, Jeff. That article is interesting but I still wonder about saturated fat in goat’s vs. cow’s milk. I’ll look into that a little more.
Re. raw milk and enzymes - a common argument put forth by raw food proponents is that raw foods supplement enzymes that we don’t get from cooked or pasteurized foods. However, enzymes and other proteins are extremely delicate, chemically speaking, and are deactivated as soon as they hit the highly acidic environment of the stomach, so you really can’t benefit from them at all. Enzyme supplements such as Lactaid are designed to pass safely through the stomach and into the gut where they can go to work. The bacteria in raw milk may get through, but some of them are quite dangerous (and again, you can get beneficial bacteria from supplements, and from yogurt). I’d be really careful to make sure my milk is at least tested for pathogenic bacteria before consuming it.
-
Jeff Says:
August 21st, 2007 at 2:02 pmThe goat herder here at Adamah recommended this website: http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/rawmilk.htm. He admits it’s a bit biased, but it has great info. on goat dairy and raw milk.
You raise a good point, however. Raw milk is hotly contested. From conversations with cow and goat dairy owners here in NW Connecticut, raw milk on a mass scale can be dangerous. Though, raw milk when done on a small scale with the proper precautions is really high quality milk.
