It had been a long day. I had been in Cleveland since morning – music classes, a rehearsal, and a concert. The tired body thanked me when I accepted my friend Krishna’s invitation to crash at his place for the night. We decided that we’d spend the night singing and playing music. It was decided that we would fuel ourselves with some good ol’ Bru and milk. So, on the way to the crash pad, we stopped at a grocery store to buy milk. Krishna refused to purchase the lacteous at a gas station because “they don’t sell organic milk”. At that moment, I laughed at him. My brain refused to understand what he was trying to say when he mentioned something about hormones and antibiotics in regular milk, but it came back to me today when I heard a woman say that she thought organic milk tasted better than regular milk. This led me to research a little more about this and that is what this post is about.
Every time I shop in my dairy section, I see organic milk advertised at twice the price of my favorite 2% milk, and I always ask myself, is organic milk worth that extra money? However, if you were to look at the actual cost that goes into producing organic milk, the price would make sense, but the real question is - does it make a difference?
Before we go into that, we must understand what organic milk really is. Essentially, it has to do with the way the cows are treated. Let us see how organic milk is defined. In order for milk to be “USDA Organic”, it has to be produced by cows that meet four criteria specified by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
1. Feed your cows the “good” stuff. Don’t let them eat stuff treated with harmful pesticides or fertilizers that are not organic.
2. Let your cows grow and lactate the way they would naturally do. Don’t inject them with bovine growth hormones (BGH) that artificially increase milk production. Don’t subject them to genetic mutation or irradiation.
3. If one of your cows falls sick and needs to be treated with antibiotics, separate her from her friends for a while. Let her not return to the herd for a year to make sure the antibiotics are out of her system.
4. Provide your cows with pasture access. Let them freely graze the way they would naturally like to do.
So now you know why organic milk is so expensive. Also, you would have noticed from the expiration dates, organic milk stays fresh a lot longer than regular milk. The reason is that organic milk is pasteurized using a different process. Regular milk is pasteurized by what is known as “High Temperature Short Time (HTST) pasteurization” where the milk is exposed to 161 degrees F for 15-20 sec. Organic milk is pasteurized by what is known as “Ultra High Temperature (UHT) pasteurization” where the milk is exposed to 280 degrees F for 1-2 sec and then is then subjected to Extended Shelf Life (ESL) treatment that involves microbial filtering. UHT pasteurization can cause Maillard browning of the milk, changing its taste and color (probably explaining why it tastes slightly different), but the flip side is that it kills the spores in the milk, allowing it to stay fresh for a relatively longer time even without refrigeration while not destroying other useful nutrients in the milk.
Now, all this starts a new line of thought – if you think of it, organic milk is not just about healthy milk. Consider this. Your cows must no longer eat toxic food. So they now no longer eat food made from animal byproducts, so the chances of illnesses transmitted through food are lower. They no longer receive bovine growth hormones (BGH) so they are less like to develop complications like mastitis (an udder infection). They no longer go through the vicious cycle of antibiotic treatments to cure these types of complications either. So your cows stay healthier in general. Milk production might actually increase and perhaps become enough to even out with the milk produced by the sicker cows that receive BGH. But it’s not just the cows that are healthier now. You start using organic herbicides and fertilizers. So there is at least one less person (you) that is contaminating water. You and your workers stay healthier yourselves. Mother Earth is happier. Another thought, albeit farfetched, might make Mother Earth happy is that UHT milk need not be refrigerated. This reduces the use of refrigerants, thus cutting down greenhouse gasses (I warned you that this thought would be farfetched!).
In any case, organic milk is advertized to be much healthier than regular milk, so let us analyze this aspect. As is obvious, organic milk is truly free of hormones and antibiotics. So now let us look at regular milk. Recombinant bovine somatotropin, commonly known as BGH, to which these “non-organic cows” are treated, promotes the secretion of an insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) in their milk. IGF-1 survives the pasteurization process is passed on to those who drink this milk. However, BGH is a protein hormone. This means that if any BGH appears in milk, the human digestive tract has enzymes and acid to destroy it. In fact, studies have shown that the traces of IGF-1 found in milk actually amount to only a tiny fraction of the IGF we all produce each day, and that one would have to drink 95 quarts of milk to equal the IGF-1 one normally secretes daily in saliva and other digestive juices. As far as antibiotics are concerned, it is illegal to treat a lactating cow with antibiotics. While it is assuring to know that “organic cows” that receive antibiotics are kept away from the herd for a year, it is also true that the milk from “non-organic cows” that receive antibiotics is not used either until tests show it is antibiotic-free. Tanks of milk are routinely tested to ensure no antibiotic content. So, unless there is some hanky-panky going on (there was some scary talk though about a study where 38% of milk sampled nationally was already contaminated by illegal residues of antibiotics and animal drugs), you can be pretty sure that your favorite 2% milk does not contain any antibiotics.
So that’s the story of organic milk. I sign off feeling more confused than before (readers are free to advise)…
