the murderer aaron burr and a cold glass of milk

another food find in the la times. and this one, on the single beverage i've had more of than any other in my life.

yup. milk.

it's funny, because so many years later, when i think about the aggressive milk ad campaigns i grew up with, this is the one that i associate with best. and like the kid in the ad, i drank milk, and drank more and more of it, going through gallon after gallon every week, and by the time i was a sophomore in high school, was taller than my dad and all eight of my uncles. i think i drank the stuff because i thought it was cool, something that could make me bigger and stronger so easily, and like the ad says, "it does a body good." in retrospect, the ad had a long-term effect on me, though i doubt that was the primary goal of the ad campaign in the age of hi-c and kool-aid and yahoo and squeezits. you'd have to assume milk and dairy farmers just wanted to grab a foothold with young kids like me.

so here's to taking it to the next step with milk, thanks to the la times. my relationship with milk is always evolving. for a while i went on a skim binge, but then read michael pollan and was convinced there's just nothing natural about literally skimming the fat from a natural product. when that happens, it becomes something different than the milk it originally was. at the same time, i drink far too much milk in order to fall all the way back to whole milk, which if health didn't matter to me, is what i'd be drinking. but, it's fatty. no doubt. so we are buying 1%.

but then what about soy and almond milks? and so too goat's milk? there are so many different sources of milk available, and in the age of vegans and vegetarians, alternatives are easier and easier to find. so what's influenced your perspective on milk? is it even that big of a deal to you? or is it something you'd be willing to learn more about? the article really hits on things you'd never have known, and yet are undoubtedly worth knowing.

kind of frightening how much is being revealed about our foods that's been held from us, right?

milk cultivation is one of the oldest human practices that combines the domestication of animals, the cultivation of a product, and the human consumption of it, especially as a beverage, which then became so much more when it became the base for making cheese. the fact that we still drink it as much as we do, that's pretty cool, don't you think?

and here's raising a glass of the cold stuff, which we now buy exclusively organic, to my favorite milk ad of all time:

the one that started it all with two simple words: got milk?