We have been seduced that if we eliminated milk and dairy from our diet, we would live forever, save the planet and all its animals. But this cause against dairy ignores all the labyrinths of our food system, and while it’s true that fooling someone is easier than convincing them that they’ve been fooled, people are starting to catch on.
We have reached the point where drinking a glass of milk or eating a piece of cheese, legitimate, has become almost an act of rebellion, a guilty pleasure or heresy. Nutritionists, doctors and not to mention fashion magazines and animal and environmental activism have put these good foods and their producers in the dock. Dystopian and stoic, we have tried in vain to save ourselves by milking everything that was not mammalian: oats, almonds, soybeans, coconuts, seeds and rice.
But something is changing not so slowly and it is beginning to be felt. For some time now, my desk has become a dairy confessional, where more than one person sits wishing for a kind of absolution. They recognize their hidden preference for milk and dairy and at least doubt the false prophets who promised them redemption in the kingdom of almonds.
A new army of cow’s milk consumers is being formed, and those who discover that what they loved is not a bad thing, but for the doubts they still did not make public because it was not right to rebel before their snobbish family doctor or the ideologized nutritionist they visited to lose weight or in search of dietary advice that would lead them on the “right path”, are joining in. Because too many people, neither allergic nor intolerant, are pushed into a useless, expensive and even harmful change of dietary direction.
I see them go from the mischief in the eyes of those who consume something that is illegal, but they feel like it and do it anyway, to the happy glow of those who discover that what they prefer is not only legal, but also good, and that their feeling was the right one when everything they had wanted to impose as a universal truth could not be true. I was also there, but as I am naturally rebellious I never paid attention to what I felt deep down was not for me, so I disobeyed without guilt. As usual.
It may seem like a no-brainer, but cow’s milk is a unique nutritional package, high in calcium, protein, iodine and B vitamins, it provides 100% natural nutrition. It’s healthy, it looks great and uncontracted, it looks and feels great to be authentic, drinking milk and eating real dairy. And it feels good to be real, leaving the artificial and the contrived, because precious nature is there for the taking, because we are that nature too.
Milk and dairy are preparing their triumphant return, to a simpler, more sensible world, after so long of considering them as something we should replace, it’s now tempting to have them in the fridge. Either because we are fully aware of their benefits or because we declare ourselves in rebellion against the established: CONSUMING DAIRY PRODUCTS IS GOOD FOR YOU!
Have you had your glass of milk today?
Valeria Guzmán Hamann
EDAIRYNEWS
