Dairy month memories

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June is almost upon us, which means it will soon be dairy month. During June Dairy Month, we celebrate the grand tradition of enjoying dairy products, a custom that was established by Christopher Columbus, who, upon first catching sight of the New World, said, “I hope they have a Dairy Queen in this godforsaken place. I’m dying for a strawberry malt.”

No, wait. That’s what my wife said the other day when we finally reached our destination after a long road trip. Even so, she was echoing what Columbus certainly must have thought when he first sighted land. So it is that we all inherited the grand tradition of enjoying dairy foods, so it is that we are all, to some extent or another, dairy heirs.

Dairy products are some of the most delicious and nutritious foods available. There’s a lot of disinformation floating around out there regarding dairy products, so we consumers must be constantly on our guard.

Many people my age and older were exposed to the vilest form of this disinformation at an early age, as schoolchildren were forced to read a story about a little boy who, while perambulating all by his lonesome in a deep, dark jungle, came upon four tigers. The boy survived these encounters by giving each tiger an article of his colorful new clothing.

The tigers got into a heated argument regarding which of them looked the spiffiest in their new togs. They angrily chased one another around the base of a tree, going faster and faster until they were miraculously transformed into a ring of golden butter.

Even though I was just a little kid when I was forced to read that story, I instantly recognized that it was false. Butter, I knew, didn’t come from tigers. It came from the milk truck.

It was a slick process. Whenever the milk truck came to pick up the milk at our farm and we needed butter, we would simply inform the driver of our need. The driver would reach into a cooler he kept in the truck and give us however many pounds of butter we requested.

The cooler never failed to produce. We kids assumed that it had the miraculous ability to cough up infinite quantities of butter.

This was not the case, of course. We eventually learned the facts of life, namely, that butter is made by churning cream.

My seven siblings and I found ourselves cooped up in our farmhouse during a particularly nasty 3-day blizzard. We were driving our parents crazy, so Mom showed us how to churn butter by sloshing cream back and forth in a quart Mason jar. This proved to be a lot of work, and we were soon asking when the milk truck would come again.

Another convenient aspect of growing up on a dairy farm was that we had access to an unlimited supply of milk for our personal consumption. We drank the milk right from the tank, meaning that it was — brace yourself — unpasteurized. It’s not as if the milk was totally unprocessed, though. It had been sent through a strainer pad to, as Dad would put it, “Keep out the big chunks.”

Chunks of what? Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.

All eight of us kids grew up drinking gallons and gallons of raw, full butterfat milk. We didn’t seem any healthier than our schoolmates, nor did we fall ill more often than they did. So, I guess growing up on a diet of raw milk wasn’t such a raw deal after all.

There was one drawback, though. The school’s cafeteria issued a glass of milk with their noontime meals. The trouble for me was that the milk had been pasteurized and homogenized and thus seemed like a foreign substance. How can it be milk if you don’t have to stir it before drinking to reincorporate the cream?

I found the flavor of the school’s milk to be so off-putting that I often gave my milk away. Insert a joke about buying a cow here.

However, it’s not as if I was ever short of a healthful, bone-building source of calcium. As soon as I got home from school, I would often go to the barn, grab a glass cup that had come in a box of oatmeal and dip the cup into the ice-cold, sweet, creamy liquid in the milk tank. I would stand beside the tank and drink my fill before sauntering off to do the chores that would produce more milk, my belly sloshing like a butter churn.

Did I bother to wash that cup between uses? Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.