In honor of Earth Day we are giving away a pack of “Earth Dinner” cards produced by Organic Valley along with coupons for free Organic Valley dairy products (they produce a fantastic pastured butter). These creative cards were designed to spark stories and inspiration at your Earth Day dinner party. The cards also come with a beautiful little red booklet offering ideas about how to use the cards and a whole bunch of quotes from beloved food gurus.  Hooray.  Cookus Interruptus is proud to offer this free gift.

Our muse for this contest was a recent news story: “Cows with Names Give More Milk” Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom have won a veterinary medicine prize for showing that giving dairy cows names and calling them by their correct name increased milk production yield by an average of 258 liters a year. The researchers said cows are very responsive to friendly milkers with a positive attitude.
Kenneth King, who runs a Joel Salatin-like farm (Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc.) in Hutchinson Kansas, reported this story in his weekly Farm Fresh Weekly newsletter.  I visited the farm in 2008 and bought some heavenly butter and eggs from their (as Kenneth put it)  “stress-free animals”.  Indeed, they were.

So the contest for the sweet Organic Valley Earth Day prize package (cards, coupons, booklet) is:
If you had a dairy cow, what would you name her?  I’d call her Buttercup. How about you?

Leave a comment to enter.  We’ll draw a winner 4/20.

A couple of our viewers have emailed me about the cream thing.  How do I justify using heavy cream in a dish?  Won’t that raise cholesterol and cause weight gain?

In my mind eating small amounts of full fat dairy seems like a better choice than consuming multiple servings of  fat-reduced products.  Tastes better too.  Fat-reduced dairy is not a whole food.  One of the  naturally-occurring nutrients has been discarded.  My first food teacher, the very wise Annemarie Colbin, taught me that when you eat a food that is not whole, you will crave the missing parts.  In my 25 years of working with food, nutrition and people, I continually find this to be accurate.  When you drink skim milk, your body will likely go looking for the missing nutrients.  And that doesn’t just mean the fat.  Fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K have no way to shimmy into the system without the fat buddies.  But there’s more.

A recent article called “Skimming the Truth: why low-fat dairy may be overrated and why full-fat dairy could have more going for it assuming you can tolerate dairy in the first place” by Courtney Helgoe summarized the issue in a very balanced way (thank you Ms. Helgoe).  I have always known that the link between high blood cholesterol and dietary cholesterol was shaky at best.  Helgoe points out that in 2003 the Dairy Council added to the confusion by insisting that drinking 3 glasses of low-fat milk a day would not only help prevent heart disease but aid you in losing weight.  Turns out facts supporting that are shaky too; or more accurately “biased” as the research used to make the claim were funded by the Dairy Council.

There are other disconnects between low-fat and better health.  In the article Helgoe notes that “During the  period that the consumption of low-fat fare rose in the United States, our rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease multiplied exponentially — a fact that many health experts attribute to our replacing natural whole foods rich in nutrients (including naturally occurring fats) with nutrient-poor, processed foods dense in sugar, refined carbs and commercial oils.”

Helgoe also points out the reasons we are more likely to eat more low-fat foods than full-fat foods resulting ultimately in higher calorie intake.  Satiety is difficult to reach with low-fat foods.  That lack of satisfaction is  coupled with a destabilized blood sugar, bringing on cravings.

Middle ground is not sexy.  The folks reaching dizzying heights of nutrition fame, selling zillions of diet books, tend to preach extremes.  Last year at Bastyr we had T. Colin Campbell (The China Study) and Nina Planck (Real Food) speak to our students.  The former insisting that veganism was the way the truth and the light, while Nina  had data to back up the healthiness of eating ample amounts of raw milk, pastured eggs and grass-fed meat.  Students tended to side with one or the other.

I choose neither camp.  Fame be damned.  Small amounts of full fat dairy in the diet seems fair.  Using the best quality higher fat, higher protein foods as condiments or side dishes feels reasonable for the pocketbook and the waistline.  Clearly milk from grass-fed animals is superior.  Raw milk may also have advantages - just know your farmer and the cow very well.  For those that have trouble digesting dairy, try limiting yourself to cultured and fermented dairy where the pesky lactose and casein have been broken down.  If dairy is still a no-go,  belly up to plates of greens, nuts  and olive oil to get your minerals and fats rather than mimicking cow milk with glasses of substitute milk.  And if you holler about what to put on your dry cereal - read Sweetened Kibble and stop going cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

Thoughts? Reactions? Rebuttals?

The American Dairy Association (ADA) has had its udders rooted in the USDA’s dietary recommendations for many decades.  A week ago I was going over the history of the USDA’s colorful charts depicting what Americans are supposed to eat.  One of my favorites, penned in 1943, gives us the Seven Food Groups.  Milk has its own group, so does Butter.  But dairy finds its way into the Meat Cheese Fish Poultry group and surprisingly shows up in the Cereal and Bread group too where the claim is that “Added milk improves nutritional values”.  Wow.  Four out of seven.  Impressive.  If you believe that is an accident, or meant to improve health, think again.  Politics abound as nutrition maven Marion Nestle is quick to write a tome on (Food Politics).  All this to remind you of the powerful, government-backed organization  dairy farmers have profited from for many many moons.

This week the ADA announced its “Raise Your Hands for Chocolate Milk” campaign in an effort to promote school sales of sugary flavored milks.  They claim that if kids skip chocolate milk, they will choose fruit juice or soda and miss out on all those important nutrients that they are not getting in their macaroni and cheese, cheese pizza, ice cream, smoothies and yo-yo yogurt cups.  How much dairy does a child need? Or more precisely – how much calcium?

Cow’s milk is designed to quadruple a calf’s bone structure in six months.  At no point in a human’s life do we lay down that much bone.  Yet recommendations from the nutrition party line would have us believe that we can never eat enough.  The United States has one of the highest intakes of calcium in the world and simultaneously one of the highest rates of osteoporosis.  What gives?

I’m not anti-milk, not at all anti-dairy but I’m strongly in the court of “more is not better.”  Dairy foods can be difficult for a lot of people to digest.  Many kids have dairy allergies or dairy sensitivities.  Traditional wisdom teaches us that culturing dairy (adding probiotics or allowing it to sour) breaks down the pesky lactose and casein that many people to have trouble digesting past the age of weaning.  Shouldn’t we make sure that each child is sporting a healthy digestive system by getting enough fiber, vitamins, minerals and probiotics before we coerce them to raise their hands for chocolate milk?

Being pro or con chocolate milk once again loses sight of the common sense big picture.  Why fill kids up on sugar and milk and leave no room for the nutrients they are NOT getting enough of on their school lunch tray?

Have an intention of putting one dish on your Thanksgiving table that is made of ingredients you bought directly from a local farmer. Maybe some goat cheese used as a spread or in the salad or pastured eggs used in the pumpkin pie. When you are ready to give thanks for the meal, you will have a direct connection to where the food came from. If you saw the goat, met the farmer and put the money for his product in his hand, there is a relationship. One that can extend to the sun, rain and soil that fed the goat that made the cheese. Or all of the above. Food that evokes these images, these feelings of gratitude, this knowledge of the source is truly worth a blessing.  Not sure where your local farmers reside?  Two excellent web sites for finding local food are Local Harvest and Eat Wild.