Going for the Homogenized: Hamburger and Milk

I’m delighted that alternatives to traditional animal meats and milks are coming on the market. Whether plant based, cultured meat or impossible burgers or soy, almond or oat milk, they are part of grand traditions of substitutes such as seitan, tofu, and almond milk dating back to the Middle Ages. They are useful for people who for ethical or health reasons can’t manage beef or animal milk. They may, depending on how the economics work out, help relieve pressure of the environment.

But!  But! But! They are boring.

When I want beef, I drool thinking of thick European oxtail soup or thin Chinese oxtail soup; steak and kidney pie with its unmatched gravy; pot roast with juice-soaked potatoes and carrots;  grapple-able crumbed deviled beef bones; the melting texture of tongue (fresh or salted); winey beef stew; Chinese cold spicy sliced tendons; beef olives with savory stuffing; crisp milanesa; piquant chili; sweetbreads (oh my); crystalline white suet from around the kidneys to grate for savory and sweet puddings; Texas barbeque; fries made with beef fat: Cornish pasties with the flaky pastry contrasting with the moist beef, potato, and onion inside; good bread with beef dripping (fats and juices, food of the gods) from the roast; and salted marrow bones to scoop on to toast.  And then there’s another whole world of veal, now almost impossible to obtain.

When I want milk, I think of the milk from the dairy on our farm.  High fat milk from Channel Island or Shorthorn cattle not Holsteins; cream rose to the top, thick cream not the oily homogenized stuff; over low, slow heat it made clotted cream, it churned to butter with bits of salty liquid. I did not grow up with real, unsweetened soured and fermented milk nor with milk from animals other than cows and goats. Those are traditions I’d love to get access to.

The alternatives that food producers are developing are alternatives to the coolers of homogenized muscle meat including hamburger and refrigerator shelves of homogenized milk, cream and yogurt in the supermarkets.

Nothing wrong with hamburger and homogenized milk, nor with their alternatives.

Except it’s worth remembering that as choice in homogenized milks, whether plant or cow–and burgers–whether plant or beef rises, choice in non-homogenized milk and beef dwindles. The new products do not come close to the delicious variety that meat and milk give rise to.

And that as the the repertoire of fresh fruits and vegetables, often of high quality, has exploded, the repertoire of beef and milk available has shrunk.

Sad.

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Yes, I recognize that this post runs counter to my usual praise of modern food. No, I’m not being inconsistent. It’s perfectly possible to believe that a higher proportion of the world population can eat better than at any time in the past and to think that there are aspects of the food available that could be better. Progress is rarely, if ever, across the board.

Yes, I realize that in certain places in big cities, you can purchase offal and pasteurized milks (I’m not advocating for raw). It takes more time and effort to find them than most.

And no, this is not a complaint about the quality of the meat and milk ranchers and farmers produce. It’s about something very different, about what turns up on the supermarket shelves.

For more on what milk could be, see Anne Mendelson’s informed and anguished appeal in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (Knopf, 2008).

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