modern milk

How do you picture milk?    That is, what is it?    When you read of a milkmaid delivering milk through the streets in the 1750s, say, what exactly are you picturing?    What about the milk delivered by a milkman in the 1950s?

It's likely that you picture a white substance like the milk in your refrigerator except in a pail or a jar or bottle.    If that's what you picture, you have the wrong picture.

Our milk, a refrigerated solid-white substance of some slightly watery creaminess —– available as whole milk, or 2% or 1% or skim —– imbibed as a delicious drink or measured into coffee or tea or recipes, is a rather new development.    By new, I mean something that happened in the lifetime of many living people.    Just about anyone you know who's 65ish or older remembers a very different milk experience.    For them, milk was a two-part substance, very watery with a thick head on the top.    That's the way cows' milk actually happens.    It wasn't something stirred and heated and filtered by machines to be homogenized —– that is, given a single makeup, with standard levels of cream —– before being sold.    It was delivered in its two-part form, watery milk topped with thick cream, and then you decided what to do with the cream and how much of it to stir in at the moment of consumption.

So, we in the twenty-first century have no experience of family squabbles that start when the little kid gets into the milk jar and stirs in all the cream so the milk is deliciously thick and creamy, thus ruining it all for the rest of the family, who might have preferred if the mama had gotten hold of it first and scooped a good bit of cream off the top to spread on bread or to put into coffee or to use in that evening's dinner recipe.    We wonder why there's such a huge gap between 1 and 2 percent and whole, without realizing till someone tells us that "whole" means 3.25 percent.    We don't flinch at the idea of children drinking prodigious amounts of "whole" milk in the early 21st century, when their skinny counterparts a century before probably drank something much closer to skim (at least the common ones).

Interesting, isn't it, how major changes in society are so invisible.