Milk to homogenize or not to homogenize

 

(Picture courtesy of Daily mail)

When I was a kid living in the outer-suburbs of Melbourne, we used to get out Milk delivered every morning by the milk man. Every morning he brought 6 glass bottles of creamy fresh milk and left them at the gate. he never came to the door but and always came very early in the morning, about 5.00am. During winter sometimes there would be ice in the milk because it was so cold. You had to shake the bottle if you wanted to mix the thick cream in with the milk, or if you wanted the beautiful rich cream just as it was you opened the bottle and the cream would be sitting on the top.  If  ever cream was needed and there was none  in the fridge, we'd open another bottle of milk.

Now i realise that some readers from the US are thinking this woman must be quite old if she has memories of unhomogenized milk...but here in Australia we didnt get all our milk homogenised until the late 1970's ish. Prior to that milk was just pasteurised. Now there are so many types of milk it's just confusing!

Recently I realised that my son had never tasted real unhomogenized milk, I also have been wanting to try out some cheese making and you cant use homogenized milk for that. So Off I went in search of plain pasteurized milk.......

Not so easy to find, but it was there along with the goats milk and others. So i bought some home and we drank some plain milk and it was delicious ,flavoursome and delightful. Sam liked it and it brought back fond memories for me.  However it begs the question, why is our  milk homogenized, when un-homogenized is so much more useful and tastes better. The fat content is the same in whole milk whether its homogenized or not,  so is homogenized milk any better for us, well I personally think not. I believe maybe it just stores better.

The thing is, butter, cheese, yogurt, cream are all milk products and on reading about the process of homogenization one wonders what forcing milk through a small opening under high pressure does to the quality and the goodness of the product. It just makes me think, maybe there is a reason why so many of our kids have food allergies, and low vitamin c levels.  Kids brought up drinking organic dairy food are far more likely to be resilient to allergies of all sorts than those raised on less organic produce.

So I've decided to stop buying homogenized milk, for a spell and use pasteurized instead.  if you have any thoughts please feel free to share.