There is a long-standing belief that forsythia flowers produce lactose, but lactose occurs only very rarely in natural sources other than milk, and attempts to find lactose in forsythia have been unsuccessful.[8]
And there are certain foods I must have a glass of milk with: Apple pie. Chocolate Chip Cookies. Chocolate cake. Cinnamon buns!
I don't drink milk by itself, but there are some things I just can't enjoy without milk! And, ideally, it has to be whole milk. I would nearly rather have a glass of water than skim milk with them. 2% is nearly tolerable.
When I was a kid and lived on military bases overseas, my parents purchase reconstituted milk at the base exchange. It was reconstituted from powder and sold in milk containers. I didn't like it, it was watery and had a weird taste, but...drinking it for five years, I got used to it.
When we came back to the states, drinking a glass of whole milk felt like drinking a glass of heavy whipping cream!
As for cows-I love me some cows! Just wonderful creatures!
My wife and I stayed at a working dairy farm in Vermont for about a week one time, and I loved it. It was great. If you wanted to experience dairy farming...you could help out and do stuff. If you didn't, it was no big deal.
There were two or three families there, all with kids, and each night they served food at a large table that would seat 15-20 people, and the food they served communally would nearly kill you...farm fare, heavy, made for people who worked all day. They had an enormous barn, and I mean huge, that on the second story of it was chock full of hay bales with small walkways you could navigate through. Some of the bales were just completely broken and scattered from people walking and sitting on them. Disbursed and scattered were rusty farm equipment and implements that had been hoisted up there decades ago, never to see the light of day again. It was a real trip. One of the teenagers from one of the families lost the keys to the family car up there, and everyone, the farmers and the guests were combing through it, looking for those car keys. There was absolutely no chance we were going to find the, the kid had no idea where he lost them, and I fully understood the needle in the haystack paradigm.
Fully.
The family realized that one of the parents was going to have to return to Boston to get a spare set of keys, so the farmer drove the father to the train station, and off he went! It was a 300 mile round trip, and he returned late the next day with the keys.
While I was at that farm, they had several calves birthed, and they would stick the calf in the front of a front loader with one of the employees, and take it up to the row of calf pens. It was very routine and it all seemed quite businesslike.
Later in the day, as I sat on the porch watching, one of the employees went to clean the pens, looked in, and waved to the farmer who was perhaps 100 yards away, and when she got his attention, she drew her finger across her throat. One of the calfs had died.
They just got the front loader, put the dead calf in it, and took it down to a ditch they dug and buried it. That was it. Very businesslike. It was true that death was completely a part of life on a farm.
But they completely did not have to use any force at all that I saw the entire time they were there. They pretty much just steered the cows where they wanted them to go, and when they were done, steered them somewhere else.
At some point, a number of the cows broke out and went up to the pens that had the calves. They just walked up to the cows, and led all of them back to the cow shed.
They seemed like contented cows, and the staff seemed very unstressed. Even when a couple of pigs got out, the farmer just matter of factly got them back into their pen.
The whole workflow seemed extremely structured, predictable and a bit quiet and sedate. 4 AM to 10 AM, milking #1. 4 PM to 10 PM, milking #2. All kinds of steady work and cleaning in between.
Very different pace of work. It didn’t appear to be back breaking work, but it was 100% steady and paced.
I talked to a young man in his late teens or early twenties, and he said he loved the work. I asked him if he grew up on a dairy farm, and he said no, but his sister dated one of the farmer’s sons, and they asked him once if he wanted some work, and...now that is his livelihood.
I think I could understand how someone could love that work. My work is hair on fire work. I didn’t see a lot of things on that farm to make your hair catch on fire there. They had some pigs escape, and that was the most excitement.
One day it poured rain torrentially all day, and I asked the farmer if I could explore the property, and the farmer said sure, go anywhere you want...he suggested if I was interested, to take a look at their prize bull.
So, it was pouring rain and all mud, so I put on rain gear and walked down to where there was a structure with hundreds of cows milling about. They stopped and regarded me, gazing with their cow-like. bored and uninterested look as they chewed their cud.
I began to look for the bull, but it only took a second to see him. His silhouette protruded FAR above the backs of all the cows, he was that big. It was so big that it startled me.
And when I saw him, he had is eyes unflinchingly locked right on me.
It wasn't the dull, bored, disinterested look of the cows, it was a laser-focus look, brimming with hostility for all things human, a look that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
And it didn't waver during the fifteen minutes I was poking around. I haven't spent much time around livestock, but I would wager that bull was somewhere between 1000-1500 lbs. And it was all muscle.
As I walked around, I could FEEL the thing looking at me, and when I turned around...it sure was. At one point, it put its front legs on top of some structure in the pen, and with an immediate feeling of danger, I thought "Jesus Christ. That thing can get out of there!" Then it went over to the gate and began pounding its head against the gate, and I thought "If that thing were to get out, I would be a grease spot."
I decided I had enough sightseeing and left.
That was extremely intimidating.
Growing up on the farm, our cow was named Daisy. Once or twice she got into a patch of wild onions and my youngest brother hasn't consumed milk in the past sixty plus years, poor kid.
Thinking about that, I remembered when the County Extension Agent tested our well water and told Dad to pour a bunch of gallons of Clorox down the well. The problem was clearly that the well was too close to the cattle's feed lot. The after effect was the color bleached out of every pitcher of Kool-Aid we made for weeks.
