September 10th, Day 2

Fucking white Russians...

I was flawless today until, after a particularly hairy evening on the line, I got to enjoy the company of a Caucasian. And then, for the second night in a row, I realized that the milk I was drinking was, well, corn-based. Maybe there's a little pattern starting to develop here...I consume so many dairy products on a regular basis that I don't ever register it.

The question was posed to me a number of times today why the hell I care about dairy products. I mean, really, why is corn even part of the discussion with milk, cheese and yogurt? There aren't 'ingredients' in milk. It's just milk.

You know the saying that 'you are what you eat'? Well, it holds a fair bit of truth. You have to understand milk if you want to understand why the cow's diet is so important. Most milk in the United States comes from either the Jersey cow, whose milk is at about 5% fat, or the Holstein cow, whose milk is at about 3.5%. Roughly 30% of that total fat content is in the form of unsaturated fat, known to most of us as essential fatty acids (EFAs). Our bodies need these fatty acids for a number of processes but cannot produce them. A healthy, varied diet should have about equal parts omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids. A cow raised mostly off grasses will have a mostly even proportion of the two (about 16 mg each per gram of total fat), however a cow raised mostly off grain (and that means corn, which itself is very high in omega-6s) will have about 5 times more omega-6s per gram of fat (about 42 mg) than omega-3s (about 8 mg). This necessarily creates a dietary imbalance, an imbalance that has been positively linked to some of the so-called 'diseases of civilization' (type 2 diabetes and obesity being two such diseases commonly associated with a high level of 6s versus 3s). I'm not going to bore you with the details, but I urge you to brush up on your chemistry and read about it yourself.

What it all boils down to is that your milk reflects the diet of its origin cow. A cow's milk is not so different from a human mother's milk. A nursing mom is told not to consume alcohol, to avoid passing it on, through her milk, to her infant. This same logic explains why, yes, a cow's diet is very important in the milk it produces.

More importantly than all this milk stuff is that I found eggs! I've got a dozen eggs from Jericho Settler's Farm - their laying hens are all pastured. They dozen cost $4.50, so I'm definitely paying a premium for those eggs. I guess I'm just going to vary the foods I eat, and make those damn dozen eggs last.