Palmyra Real Food Emporium

I’ve been reintroduced to raw milk at The Emporium. “Real milk” is probably a better, more descriptive term. It’s milk directly from cows at permitted dairy farms that hasn’t been pasteurized. Hadn’t drunk it for years until Tom Maurer gave me a sample at the Emporium. It’s been three weeks now since we switched to raw milk, and it’s sweet, full-bodied and delicious. It’s also completely safe to drink from farms like the two that Tom uses. We’ve been conditioned to think of raw milk as not being safe, but it is. (Be mindful that any food not handled properly can cause problems.)

Pasteurization – named for the French biologist and chemist Louis Pasteur, and not to be confused with “pasturing” (where cows graze) – was widely adopted in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to unhealthy conditions at dairies that existed alongside breweries in inner cities. While Pasteurization assures healthy milk, it’s a heating process that affects milk’s nutritional value. As Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon write in their book, Eat Fat, Lose Fat, “By the late 1940s, increased knowledge about how to produce healthy milk and advances in technology made pasteurization completely unnecessary, but it was just then that lobbying for mandatory pasteurization began in earnest. Why? Because investors and businessmen realized that mandatory pasteurization was the easiest way to consolidate the industry…”

The Emporium’s raw milk is delivered Friday mornings from the Green Acres farm (Jersey cows) and the Country Sunrise Creamery (Holstein cows), both outside Myerstown, Lebanon County. Try some and you’ll likely be as pleased as I’ve been to discover (or rediscover) the flavorful appeal of real milk. – Doug Bedell

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This entry was posted by Karen on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Food Scene, Produce Offered. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.