I bought a pint of cream stamped “Contains no rBST,” which was mildly alarming, in that it made me feel like I just narrowly escaped a great danger that I wasn’t even aware of. Like when you hear the WHAM of the Acme Safe falling right behind you. Who needs retroactive anxiety?
And I don’t even know if it’s a real thing. I’ve become used to seeing things like turnips being advertised as gluten-free. So I looked it up.
rBST is a man-made bovine growth hormone. It’s supposed to Increase Milk Production which sounds all well and good until you recognize it’s all going through a real cow, and I’ve seen udders that the cow would have to pay extra for on a Delta flight. It doesn’t look at all comfortable. I say that as woman who took birth control pills back in 1970 when they contained enough hormones to top up an entire women’s gymnastics team. That might have enhanced my secondary sexual characteristics from a male standpoint but I sure didn’t want anyone touching them.
Anyway, poor cows. Evidently the bloated jobs get infections, and then antibiotics, and that’s a whole thing. And no one’s sure humans are supposed to be consuming the stuff either.
My Uncle Clifford’s cows did not have rBST. I mean, he didn’t have an indoor toilet for a long time so he wasn’t one for excess frippery. In fact he was able to retire in the black, which is unusual in the farming business. I remember what a big deal it was when we visited to get that fresh milk in the morning. Mom and Dad rhapsodized about that nasty bucket that Uncle Clifford hauled into the kitchen. It was full of cow-body-temperature milk and had cream floating on top that Daddy planned to skim off and there were little specks of grass in it and I knew perfectly well milk is supposed to be cold and not look like something that just got pulled out of an animal. It was gross. You could not fool me: I was six and I saw where that came from. I can still smell the poop ditch behind the lined-up cows and I can still see the barn cats at attention so Uncle Cliff could toss them the skin off the milk bucket.
I lived in the Washington, D.C. area. I don’t know where our water came from but it was probably sucked up through ten feet of swamp and fish jizz and Democrats’ tears and you didn’t want to drink it unless it was so cold all the taste molecules died. I felt the same way about milk.
I’m fine with fresh vegetables but I want my animal-based products to either be or look like they are as far away from the original source as possible. Keep that meat pre-chopped and wrapped up and don’t let me see any butt feathers on my eggs. Grandma’s farm was a regular nightmare in that department, with Grandma ripping feathers off the chicken while the dog kept digging up its head. But they were super nice people and they always had ice cream on hand.
Which is the proper degree of separation from the cow.
I normally don’t mention my diet, but hubby (the cook) has been vegan since 2017, making me a peripheral vegan of convenience. For myself I buy mozzarella sticks to snack on, but I guess I’ll be having second thoughts about those now!
This post is seven paragraphs of “YIKES!!”
If you have a place like Whole Foods around you, you can buy all sorts of dairy and cheeses without rBST or anything else that messes with your body. I buy dairy all the time, but I always check the labels.
I DO have a place nearby remarkably like Whole Foods, even down to the name! Shopping there would also mean I was paying part of my sister’s paycheck, so that’s a plus.
The minus is shopping in general, compounded by entering a new store and spending all my energy just navigating the place. The first time I entered a CostCo (shopping for my parents) it took ALL my willpower not to collapse in a puddle of tears after 10 minutes.
I HATE big box stores! One needs a taxi to get from one end to another. There are never any sales associates to guide one. And if there are, one has to stand waiting on the sidelines until they’re done with the customer who managed to find them first. I don’t like Amazon, but I will do that over going to a big box store in person.
Trader Joe’s dairy products are rBST-free too.
Thank you! Good to know!
No wait! There’s ice cream!
‘nother g00d one, Murr.
T h a n k s❗️A visit at age 5 to my North Carolina grandparents contained all the ingredients you covered in this essay. None forgotten.
I had forgotten the ice cream portion of my diet. It’s sporadic, depending on whether I have a package to mail and if Mom is awake when I enter her facility. If yes on both counts, we go together to the Post Office then hit the nearby Dairy Queen for mini blizzards for the ride back home. That’s the only ice cream I eat these days, and I really don’t want to know what’s in their “cream”!
Weirdly enough, I once looked into what was in their ice cream, and it wasn’t that bad. Not the puréed plastic I’d imagined. I forget now, though.
Dairy Queen ice cream ingredients: Artificially Flavored Vanilla Reduced Fat Ice Cream: Milkfat And Nonfat Milk, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Whey, Mono And Diglycerides, Artificial Flavor, Guar Gum, Polysorbate 80, Carrageenan, Vitamin A Palmitate, Milk, 2% fat, Vanilla Syrup: High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Natural Flavors, Sodium Benzoate (Preservative),
Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard Treat:
Artificially Flavored Vanilla Reduced Fat Ice Cream: Milkfat And Nonfat Milk, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Whey, Mono And Diglycerides, Artificial Flavor, Guar Gum, Polysorbate 80, Carrageenan, Vitamin A Palmitate, Butterfinger Candy Pieces: Corn Syrup, Sugar, Peanuts, Vegetable Oil (Palm Kernel Oil And Palm Oil), Peanut Flour, Nonfat Milk, And Less Than 2% Of cocoa, Milk, Salt, Yellow Corn Flour, Soy Lecithin, Natural Flavor, Annatto Color.
Other ingredient lists easily accessible on Google.
heh–Butterfinger is the kind we get! It’s the Annatto Color that makes all the difference.
I love the stories from the farm. I’m glad you have the memories of our visits to North Dakota. Mine are scattered but some burned into my brain, like getting kicked off the stool the first time I milked a cow. Your stories bring it all back!
My cousin, everybody! Right? I never did milk a cow. I was plenty afraid of those big things. And I know just where you would’ve gotten kicked into, and I wasn’t interested in that either. Although I DID fall into the manure pit early on.
I took birth control pills back in the 70s also. 1974, to be exact, shortly after high school graduation. They did NOTHING to augment my boobs. I was flat-chested until peri-menopause. Only THEN, did they achieve mass. The pill, DID, however, make me break out with really bad acne, which continued long after I stopped taking them. I STILL get pimples occasionally, and I’m 68! Will puberty NEVER end?! Also, they made me very emotional, to the point where I would cry if someone just looked at me funny. Now I seldom cry, unless it’s something happening to a fictional character. In real life… not so much. Probably because I discovered sarcasm, and found it much more rewarding to hurl a bon mot at someone instead of turning on the waterworks.
Oh yes, the mood things. Mine took the form of everyone, and I mean everyone, around me becoming very irritating. This was so far off the normal temperamental template for me you’d think I could’ve gotten a clue, but no. Only in retrospect.
Even though they no longer farmed, themselves, my grandparents bought a pig every year, had its meat cut and hung hams, etc., in a designated smoke house. Chickens were killed and plucked on the property – willies! Milk was delivered freshly bottled with cream on top or skimmed. Most people had grapevines, strawberries, and a fruit tree of one kind or another, and fruits were canned in syrup or as preserves or jelly to be shared and exchanged. Everyone had a vegetable patch, and everyone had too much of something. Beans were snapped and peas shelled on the front porch after supper in summer. But things were changing fast due to the war, and food has never been as good since. We went from fresh greens to canned spinach; from inherited recipes to boxed chicken chow mein meals; from Aunt Grace’s Pound Cake to Twinkies. Progress. Don’t I sound just like an old curmudgeon?
Yeah, that was a bad couple of decades to grow up in, food-wise, and I remember my parents complaining about it. But it’s all come back around again. Now when I shop for vegetable starts there are sixteen varieties of broccoli. Broccoli! Thirty tomato varieties, a similar number of blueberries. And apples.
I’m not at all fussed about where milk or eggs or meat comes from. One year I even helped with the chicken plucking after mum chopped off the heads and a step-sibling took care of removing the guts. When all were done the chooks were packaged (and some were frozen) ready for Christmas deliveries. Milk was delivered daily into a billycan hung on the fencepost and augmented with the goat milk the step-siblings got from the nanny goat. All the veg scraps and the chicken guts went to the pigs who were butchered for hams and bacon. Fast forward to my four year old grand daughter eating home made burgers, “we’re eating Daisy aren’t we?” Yes they were.
You reminded me what the hogs were for. Other than the obvious. They would eat ALL that stuff.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I lived out in the country in a small “development” along a state highway. There were farms all around and I spent a lot of time at the two closest ones. My memory of farm milk was two fold. Watching it come through clear pipes to the stainless steel cooler in the milk room, a separate clean room in the barn that looked more like a dentist’s waiting room (minus the magazines and Highlights) than something where the cows got milked and barn cats lived. And the other memory a large stainless steel container in the friend’s refrigerator that contained some of that wonderful milk from the cows. You had to stir it to get the cream to mix in with the milk. But I remember it was the best taste imaginable. Wasn’t any grass in it or feathers. Or dirt. Of course I remember the muck and shit behind the cows as they were getting milked, all hooked up to their fancy electric milkers. Pretty modern for the early 1960’s. I loved going to my friends’ farms and doing all the farm stuff. Collecting eggs, going into the brooding sheds with baby chicks carpeting the floor, warmed from heat lamps hung from the ceiling. I can still smell that slightly humid grain aroma and hear the peeping the the chicks. It was just magical to me, muck included.
I love getting stuff directly from the farm. Fortunately, I am close to the PA state line, so I can buy raw milk (which is so much better than that shit in the stores here.) Also, I have a nearby farm market, where they have chickens, which are treated really well, and fed scraps of real food instead of “chicken feed.” The yolks on their eggs are a deep gold color. Their produce is also free of pesticides and herbicides. Yes, it costs more than the supermarket. But it’s worth it to know that I am helping a local farm stay afloat, and also eating healthier.
Uncle Cliff did get an automatic milker at some point, probably early ‘Sixties. I can’t remember how he felt about it, but it was all still in the barn, no clean room. I do remember asking him if he missed his cows, when he finally got rid of them. Never heard him answer anything so fast and so vehemently. No, he did not.
We used to buy raw milk from People’s COOP in the late 70’s and it was the first time I could detect a little grassiness in the flavor. Yum, yum and yum. I was sadly raised on skim milk which I now refer to as blue water.
At home, we got our milk in bottles delivered to the back porch from someone who came by every week (with eggs too) from somewhere in the Blue Ridge.
In the very early 60’s, we got our milk from a local dairy that delivered it in two gallon glass jugs, and it was sometimes my job to skim off enough of the cream for my sister to use cooking and whatever. We drank a lot of milk, with every meal were glasses of milk for kids and adults. I still like a glass of cold milk occasionally.
When I got back from the military, my youngest nephew had a pig he was raising for 4H, ‘Elmer’…he entered it into the state fair and got a prize. I visited a couple months after the fair and asked the kid where Elmer was. He led me to the chest freezer and there were wrapped packages…’Elmer’s roast’..’Elmer’s bacon’..etc.
My aunt and uncle had a dairy farm when I was a child. It’s a highway now. I don’t remember if I ever tried milking a cow, and then they got milking machines. My most vivid memory was me running and screaming because a huge hog was chasing me. My aunt came out of the house with a broom and chased him off. I have recently told by a woman who has a farm populated by rescued animals (including hogs) that if the hog had gotten to me and I had fallen down, it would have starting eating me. Seems impossible to me to think it would have eaten a screaming, LIVING little kid, but I’m glad not have found out.