me + milk and cheese + Richard Armitage + fandom identity battles, part 1

This part is mostly about me + milk + cheese + identity. I define the term “identity battle,” which is necessary for understanding part 2. If these topics don’t interest you, skip right ahead.
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Source: RASnarktastic

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[Left: Cheesehead hat. Not Richard Armitage]

When you grow up in America’s Dairyland, certain things may not be said. Dislike of anything to do with milk, for example. MILK IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE. In a state where people regularly are seen in public with rubber foam hats made in the shape of a triangle of cheese, it’s the law.

The Ladies’ Aid (or Today’s Women in Christ, as they call themselves these days) provided huge cheese plates for mom’s funeral. My best friend from school, whom I hadn’t seen since the fall of 1998, showed up out of the blue, and while I was sitting next to her, I passed her a cheese plate and said, “Have some, it looks yummy,” and she looked both ways (her parents were sitting next to her on the other side) and then she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I’ve never really liked cheese.” This is someone I had classes with every single day for thirteen years of school and at whose house I slept over at all the time and played in band with and I don’t know what all and we’re 44 and now she’s admitting to me that she doesn’t like cheese? You just can’t say it.

[Remember these? At some point images of missing children started appearing on them.]

This state of affairs is overdetermined — we were raised not to waste food, and it was a farming community and so we had a lot of dairy available. Especially milk. In the elementary grades, we got a half-pint of milk to drink in the morning and a half-pint in the afternoon and a half-pint of chocolate milk on Fridays and we were not allowed to refuse it or pour it out. Woe to the little girl who hid her opened pint in the box of empty pints and got noticed. The smell of sour milk from those boxes will accompany me till the day I die. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration paid price supports to milk producers, so a lot of surplus cheese was floating around; they gave it not just to welfare recipients but also to elderly people at nutrition sites. My school had federally subsidized hot lunches and so we got three generous slices of that processed cheese on our lunch trays every day. It had to be eaten; if you gave your tray back to a lunch lady with food still on it you got a talking to. Everyone from my school (there’s a “you know you’re from [town] if” page on facebook where this comes up regularly) remembers thirty years of being given “cheese buns” by Mrs. Seefeldt on Fridays. We liked Mrs. Seefeldt and we liked cheese buns — generous white dinner rolls filled with cheese slices and buttered on top and briefly broiled in a big industrial oven so they were warm, crisply and melty. Where it got tiring was when we got the three slices of cheese with the cheese buns. I like cheese; my problems came with the vegetables. My mom froze hers fresh from the garden, and putting canned peas in my mouth and even worse, swallowing them, cost me a lot of effort. Still does. It’s the texture of the peas, I think.

[Left: milk can, where you used to collect your milk before putting it in the bulk tank, from which it was pumped to go to the dairy.]

So here’s my unspeakable secret: I didn’t especially like milk and I still don’t. I finally got myself to drink it as an adult by all but killing the taste of the milk with generous infusions of coffee. I was the kid who constantly snuck her unwanted, undrunk milk into the box of empty pints and getting yelled at. I figured out in fifth grade, when the world opened up a bit more and they began to offer a choice, that I liked 2 percent better than whole and skim better than 2 percent. It must have had something to do with the taste of the milk fat. But I’m getting the story out of order.

Because the real kind of milk I couldn’t stand as a kid?

Raw milk.

[Right: the terror drink of my childhood: raw milk, unpasteurized, unhomogenized. You can tell because it’s yellowish and the cream is starting to separate.]

To understand the significance of that, you should know that all, all, all, of my ancestors I’ve been able to trace up until my parents’ generation, farmed. Peasants got off the boat from Europe in the 1850s, took the train to Wisconsin, found themselves some pasture and some animals, and got right down to business. All of my grandparents still had working dairy farms when I was a kid.

My ancestors grew up drinking unpasteurized milk and my parents certainly drank it. They relished it. They liked the fresh cream skimmed off the top of the milk can and buttermilk (the liquid left after you churn the butter out of the cream) and probably some other stuff I don’t even remember anymore. But it has a really strong smell, a smell of cow and barnyard, and it was always offered to me as fresh from the cow as possible because, according to the adults in my life, that was the way it tasted best. I couldn’t even drink it if I pinched my nose shut while I tried.

I spent a lot of weekends with my grandparents and milk had to be bought from the store for when I was there. My refusal to drink raw milk turned into a thing, a severe moral failing that probably stemmed, my maternal grandmother thought, from my parents’ avowed desire not to farm. I might be growing up in the country but I was just as spoiled as a city kid. Or maybe it was a sign — my father’s mother thought — that I was being parented badly. I was allowed to do a lot of other things that were either unnecessary or questionable and refusing raw milk was just another one on the list.

[Left: Lactococcus lactis, the bacteria naturally occurring in milk and the state microbe of Wisconsin. I’m not kidding. If there were any more room on the flag, we’d put it there.]

Because it was a bone of contention, of course, my grandparents pushed it. Every time I was there it was offered to me and various sorts of coercion brought to bear from yelling to cajoling to rewards to … I don’t even know anymore. I loved my grandparents but it was a struggle at times.

“Just try it,” my mother urged me at every meal. She was probably eager not to be accused of either spoiling me or bad parenting. My deal with her at home that I had to drink an 8 oz. cup of milk at every meal I ate at home, and a pint of it at lunch time, because that was enough calcium for the day. (If the teachers ever hassled her about my milk waste at school, she never told me about it.)

“I can’t,” I would say — angrily, or miserably, or defiantly — and someone would sigh heavily and get up and pour a glass of pasteurized milk from the refrigerator which I didn’t like either but I would drink, at least. It didn’t help affairs that my brother had no problem with raw milk and swallowed it right down while smiling at me over the rim of the glass.

[Right: Chemical structure of lactose]

So, yeah. Milk = identity in a Wisconsin farming community. Can you imagine admitting to lactose intolerance in this setting? How that would play? It’s probably a little different now, but back then, I didn’t meet a lactose intolerant adult until I was twenty, I am sure, and even then, despite my emotional raw milk “trauma,” I was skeptical. Really? You can’t drink milk or dairy products? Ever? It makes you nauseated, sick, even violently ill? Can’t be. There’s no such thing. What do you mean? Your digestion won’t break down milk sugar? You really can’t drink milk?

My grandparents would have been lactose-intolerance intolerant, if that makes any sense. Milk is good for you. We produce milk. We’ve always produced milk. If you reject our milk, you reject us. You don’t love us. Spoiled, ungrateful. Growing up away from a farm. We love you and you’re not doing enough chores and I need to make sure you know how to render your own lard because sure as shootin’ your mother will never teach you. Most of all, I’d say from my perspective these days — rejecting their milk was read as a rejection of their identity. I was a bookish little girl who didn’t fit in and this was one front on which they could fight their battle to force me to do it.

My mom didn’t care about the milk so much although she loved raw milk and it was a major blow when something about chemo made it taste bad to her. She’d always ask me, when I talked to her, whether I was drinking enough milk. For her it was about nutrition and “building healthy bones and teeth.” The USDA at the time recommended two portions of meat or poultry, three of dairy, four of carbohydrates and four of fruits and vegetables daily. (Does anyone else remember those colorful posters in schools that said, “Eat the 2 – 3 – 4 – 4 way!”)? Someone told me recently that the U.S. government no longer considers animal protein necessary to a health diet and that they’re dithering over whether to continue to recommend three portions of dairy products a day as well. People are worried that the dairy lobby is forcing the government to make recommendations that are not healthy. I have no idea; I don’t follow it all that closely. Large sections of the world are lactose intolerant — most of China and Africa, apparently. So it can’t be healthy for everyone. But the allegiance to health was also a statement about identity — I am your mother, I want you to be healthy, drink your milk.

[Right: How I drink my milk now.]

Me? I try to get a lot of calcium against osteoporosis, but I get most of it via cheese and the milk disguised undetectably in my favorite coffee drinks. I never touch raw milk. I haven’t tried to in thirty years. I have tried yogurt made from unpasteurized milk and I can get it down if it’s flavored. That’s the limit. My brother and sister-in-law make my nieces drink milk and they don’t really resist, but they also know that if they’re eating with me, they get water or juice if they don’t want milk.

Was I gonna die if I didn’t drink raw milk, or even pasteurized milk? Nah. I read a lot of blogs that say unpasteurized is the only way to go but I don’t think I can go there. Lots of ways to get calcium if that’s what you’re worried about. For my grandparents, my drinking milk was about belonging. They couldn’t live with a grandchild who didn’t belong. For my teachers, it was about good pedagogy and obedience. For my mother, it was about her concern for my health, which was very much tied up in her own picture of herself as a good, attentive mother.

For my nieces’ parents, I think it has something to do with teaching their daughters Wisconsin manners — also an identity issue. My sister-in-law milks part-time in a milking parlor, but they do not have a cow at home. They do drink milk with rBST (BGH) in it, which is the current identity battle going on around milk in Wisconsin. It’s an identity battle because it gets to the picture of self that one has as a producer and consumer of milk. That is: the basic idea of my grandparents’ generation still stands: dairy farmers produce wholesome healthy food for America. It’s a basic tenet of their identity then and now. If Wisconsin’s dairy farmers use hormone additives to aid that process and make their production break even, is what they produce still wholesome?

Note that I’m not talking here about whether rBST in the amounts it appears in in milk is safe for human consumption (jury still out as far as I know), or whether its use to increase production is hard on cows (definitely). Rather, I’m talking about the picture of him or herself that a Wisconsin dairy farmer has as a user or non-user of BGH in his/her herd. It’s an identity battle because the choice in either direction is seen by the farmer and those around him or her as a reflection of who he or she is. Is a farmer who uses BGH a sellout to the big industrial farms and Big Food? Is one who doesn’t more truly faithful to the notion of the farmer as the necessary and benevolent, hard-working provider of wholesome food? Or does it matter at all? The answers to these questions are the terrain of identity battles.

to Part 2.

~ by Servetus on November 13, 2013.