Confessions of a Milk Connoisseur

I was back in the Green Mountains last week, and it was awful nice to be back in the arms of my family. Even the snow that fell on Easter didn't dampen our spring spirits; it merely made the brightly-colored eggs that much easier to find.

One of the pleasures to which I look forward when I'm home is drinking milk. Vermont's Champlain Valley is dotted with small farms, and just down the road apiece from our place is Monument Farms, a family dairy that has the best milk in the world.

I don't say that lightly, for I have been a milk connoisseur all of my life. When I was growing up in Maine, my dad used to stop at a small dairy on his way home from work in order to draw milk right from the tank before it had been pasteurized or homogenized. One of my fondest childhood memories revolves around waking up early to do my paper route, stumbling to the kitchen in the black of winter, reaching for the glass jar way in the back of the fridge, and letting the cold cream course down my throat.

When I got older, milk continued to be important to me: one of my criteria when I was looking at colleges was the quality of the milk they offered in the dining halls. I almost matriculated at Kenyon College in Ohio because they had some of the best chocolate milk I'd ever tasted; but their cafeteria served it at room temperature.

Milk needs to be served cold (in fact, chocolate milk is best served in a glass right out of the freezer so that the milk stiffens on the sides of the glass), and milk needs to be served whole (2% is anemic, and I don't consider "non-fat" to be milk - it's a bastardization of water with bone-blue food coloring added).

When my daughter was one, and I was staying home to care for her, every couple of days she and I would take the jogger and ramble the couple of miles down to Monument Farms. We'd go and see the sheep and the pigs and the chickens, and then we'd go to the dairy.

Monument Farms is an old-school dairy. They pasture their cows, they fertilize with manure, they grow most of their own feed, they bottle their own milk a few hours after it has been processed, and their cows aren't injected with steroids or hormones.

And while Monument Farms no longer makes home deliveries, people are always welcome at the dairy. If the office is closed, you can still go into the cooler and help yourself to whatever you take a fancy to.

While they gladly take cash, most people don't pay. They just sign their names on the yellow pad of paper next to the register, and every once in a while they'll get a bill that they can pay the next time they stop by to pick up a gallon of milk, some cheddar cheese, or a pint of the sweetest cream I've ever let course down my throat.

Every time I come home, my daughter and I still ramble down to Monument Farms dairy. Sometimes we drive instead of walking, and sometimes we don't see the sheep and the pigs and the chickens; but we still pick up a couple of gallons of milk, and we each get a pint of chocolate milk for the road home.

Cady Scout is three now; she is long and lean, all ribs and sharp angles, and her teeth are keen and white. Her doctor can't figure how she keeps growing so fast and so straight, but I have a pretty good idea: every week she drinks about two gallons of the coldest, freshest, best milk in the world.

--Steve McKibben
4/18/07