# 14 Souvenirs of Milk
I haven't drunk cow's milk for 20 years. I don't even remember the last glass of milk I had, because it was pasteurised milk, maybe mixed with water and I don't know why. Real milk is not like that. For me it's more than raw milk. It's freshly milked cow's milk. It's a very distant memory because it's not something you find in a shop. It was on a farm when the cows came back from the fields to be milked. It's something a city dweller would never know. I was born in a big city on the outskirts of Paris, but my grandparents came from the countryside. Every summer holiday was not just a time of freedom or discovery. It was a return to the countryside, to the west of France or to the centre. It was a month or two in a small village with little shops and farms. A world that disappeared after the 80s...
When I say farms, I'm talking about a small farm with less than 20 cows, chickens and ducks, sometimes pigs or goats. It was a property of no more than a few acres with a tractor and a shed for straw bales. The transformation of French agriculture came at the end of the 60s and during the 70s. But the real end of small-scale farming came in the 80s with the era of the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe. After the self-sufficiency of France (a lie, today), agriculture produced more and more... and too much. The financial systems wanted bigger and bigger farms, automated farms and .... with fertilizers, chemicals and GMO soya or pellets. Remember what happened in the 90s with bovine spongiform encephalopathy? The farms of my childhood were dead. The last farmers in my family stopped working in that period. I remember one summer when the first milking machine was installed... A revolution, but the beginning of new problems.
Fetching milk in the evening was a ceremony. First you grab the milk can, a small stainless steel pot with a handle and lid that holds 1 litre. And then you go to the farm just before the cows came in from the field. And sometimes I could go to the field myself to accompany the herd. The cows knew their way to the barn and their place for the night. The smell of the barn was never a problem for me... I remember visiting a farm with my school and most of the children were disgusted by the smell. That was normal for me, and I remember the poor farmer trying to explain his life to the unruly children who pinched their noses in derision. Now we only have educational farms near the big cities. The final part of the milk ceremony was to hand over the can and watch it fill with hot milk....hot from the cow's body, not pasteurized. The cherry on the cake was to drink a little milk straight from the can as soon as you left the stable. It's a souvenir from the past, because even on educational farms you can't do it wi
th a machine that pumps the milk into a big tank. Even the calf can't drink its mother's milk now, because it's far away from her. He has a mixture of milk from the tank and some granules... what a shame!
Now I'm a vegan, I can't understand how farmers have changed this way of life, how we can accept to drink something called milk that is so far removed from real milk. On the altar of hygiene we have built this artificial world, with images of cows running in a field they have never seen in their real life. I only have a souvenir of what real milk was.
=> mailto:
[email protected] Comments by mail
or by a reply on your blog
