At the back of Wild Things, an organic grocer in North Fitzroy, there is a small tank with a hose and tap attached. The tank is filled with Schulz’s Organic Full Cream milk, and its apparent function is to allow Schulz drinkers to reuse their glass bottles, save the planet, and knock a few cents off their high-end dairy. But if you watch closely as customers pull down on the tap and take their fill, you will notice a distinct expression come over their faces—a kind of self-satisfied concentration—as if they are being transported out of the city and onto the farm, where they are extracting milk straight from the ripe udders of a well-fed cow.
Whether Schulz is aware of or even cultivating this bucolic fantasy, I don't know. But either way, the vat is what’s hot in milk right now. Having suffered through the skim milk 1990s, and then the alternative decades of the new millennium, wherein we tried to milk various non-mammals like soybeans and oats, we have returned en masse to the joys of full cream whole milk. Evidence abounds in inner city supermarkets. There is Schulz, of course, but also St David’s Dairy, Paris Creek, Barambah, and How Now, among others. The appeal of these brands is their proximity to the farm. The product is supposed to be creamier, fresher, less processed, more authentic—and it often comes in simple, pared back packaging to signal this. Major labels have taken note and are now peddling their own mass produced versions, as with Paul’s Farmhouse Gold, which comes in a old-school dairy bottle (albeit plastic), and is advertised as “extra creamy, the way it was meant to be.”
For genuine milk-heads, though, if it is being sold in a supermarket, or even an organic grocer like Wild Things, it is probably not good enough. In fact, there is a community of milk drinkers so passionate that they procure the stuff directly from farmers, who run dairies with just a handful of immaculately maintained cows. I know because my mother is one of these dairy lovers. Luckily for her, she is also friends with one of the most sought-after milk producers in Victoria. His name is Tyrone Brown, and he runs a 20 acre dairy farm called Little Yarra Dairy a short drive from Healesville. I’ve tasted Tyrone’s milk. Honestly, it is quite a unique experience—halfway between eating and drinking. It comes in a glass bottle, with a globule of yellowy cream at the top so thick that you have to give it a shake before pouring. The liquid is buttery and sweet on the palette. And on the nose, it comes with a faint whiff of cow.
This milk, which sells for $6 a litre, is so coveted that it has a waitlist. People travel hours just to get it, and some buy up to 20 litres at a time. And yet, despite this unsurpassed reputation, Tyrone is not satisfied with his own product. This is because Tyrone has to pasteurise his milk before selling it for consumption.
Pasteurisation involves heating milk, most commonly to 72 degrees for 15 seconds, in order to kill off any pathogenic milk-borne bacteria (Salmonella, Listeria, Bacillus cereus, Campylobacter jejuni, and pathogenic E. coli, to name a few). The process is required by law throughout Australia, and regulated strictly in Victoria, where almost a decade ago, a child died after allegedly drinking unpasteurised milk. For health regulators, pasteurisation is a sure-fire way to ensure that this never happens again. For Tyrone, it destroys all that’s wholesome, healthy, and true in milk. He believes that by boiling his cows’ life-giving liquid, he is killing one of Mother Nature’s great gifts.
*
I arrive at Tyrone’s farm just before 9am, which is when he milks his cows each day. It seems like a relatively late start for a farmer to me, but as Tyrone explained on the phone the week before, he likes to get his daily yoga practice in before the lactation. It is an overcast, soggy day. The farm is neat and tidy—green pastures, early spring daffodils, Japanese maples—as is Tyrone, who is clean-shaven with closely cropped hair. He is in his early 50s, but looks younger—spritely and lean, with a bright, expectant expression that looks like it must have been formed during a happy childhood and has remained fixed ever since.
After greeting me, Tyrone says he has to prepare the barn for milking, and that I should introduce myself to the cows. Tyrone raises Jerseys, a petite and placid breed with caramel hides and small tufts of hair atop their heads. Their yield is smaller than Holsteins, the black and white cows of 90s milk ads, but they produce a higher percentage of butterfat. Tyrone has 50-odd cows in total, but only milks 12 at any given time. The current dozen are hanging around under a metal shed, grazing on some hay and flipping their ears around. Most ignore me as I approach, except one, who looks up with her giant black eyes. I hold out my hand, but she demurs. I can see a small name tag on her ear. “Hi Truffle, I’m Oscar,” I say, offering my hand again. She sniffs it cautiously from a distance. Tyrone emerges wearing gumboots, overalls, and kneepads. He climbs into the shed and walks over to a tiny, newborn calf. It was birthed only 24 hours earlier and is having trouble latching to its mother’s teat. Tyrone stayed up the night before helping the pair form that crucial first attachment.
The cows begin to jostle and shimmy, eager to get into the adjacent barn to eat their breakfast—a porridge consisting of biodynamic wheat soaked in water and apple cider vinegar. As they eat, Tyrone hoses down the underside of their bodies and then wipes each udder individually with iodine solution and paper towels. This exacting hygiene protocol ensures that no contaminants from the caked mud or shit that lines each cow’s belly gets into the milk. Given that Tyrone is now pasteurising, he probably doesn’t have to be quite so fastidious, but he chooses to be anyway. The intimate daily clean gives him an opportunity to closely examine each cow, get a sense of how they’re doing physically and psychologically.
This type of care doesn’t happen on the industrial dairies, where there are hundreds of cows milked twice a day. Tyrone is familiar with how these places work. He grew up on a big dairy farm in a town called Lavers Hill in the Otways. It was a family-run operation consisting of around 200 cows. Tyrone imagined he would take it over as a matter of course, as this is how it had worked in his family for generations. But the succession played out sooner than he would have liked. In his first year out of school, Tyrone’s dad got sick with cancer and died shortly after. Most of his childhood friends left to travel or go to university, while Tyrone stayed behind with the cows.
It was demanding, unrelenting work, which he did with his younger brother, who left school early to help out. If they wanted a night out, they had to drive two hours to Geelong and then drive back in the morning in time for milking. After a few years, Tyrone’s body began to give in. He was beset with back pain. He found Western medicine useless for his symptoms, and this pushed him to alternatives. He practised yoga with a travelling hippy from Byron Bay. He received intense, deep tissue body work from an old Ukrainian man who lived in the hills nearby the farm. And he started doing his own research about organic nutrition. Many locals found Tyrone's holistic interests kind of strange, but he didn't mind. Soon enough, he wanted to turn the farm organic, meaning no more generic fertiliser and chemicals in the soil. It was something Tyrone believed in, from a health perspective, but it didn’t make much sense financially. The Browns sold their milk to a big dairy processor near Colac, where it was mixed in with all the other milk from the surrounding farms and turned into some generic product for the supermarket. The final consumers wouldn’t even know that Tyrone’s milk was organic.
When he was 27, Tyrone left the farm with his wife Laura, a nurse he had met on one of his nights out in Geelong, a decision that he describes as “jumping off a cliff, existentially speaking.” They backpacked through Africa and Europe, where Tyrone went ever-deeper into his self-healing journey. He studied Ashtanga yoga. He grew his hair and beard. He trained in an esoteric form of body work known as Rolfing. He had a transcendental experience at a Vipassana silent meditation retreat (“It was bliss, Oscar. Suddenly there was no pain”). And then, after years of this searching and rambling, Tyrone and Laura moved back to Melbourne to take up residence in Armadale.
Tyrone had by now strayed far from his dairy farmer upbringing. He was a city boy, and a hippy, and worst of all, a vegan. His adherence to a plant-based diet was so staunch that when Laura was pregnant with their first child, and had an insatiable craving for fried eggs and tomato sauce, he freaked out. “I have this tendency to do things 100%,” Tyrone says, reflecting sheepishly on this episode. “I thought veganism was the answer and I pursued it with almost religious vigour.”
What rattled this adherence, in the end, was an infected root canal. He sought out a naturopath for the pain, who pointed him to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a not-for-profit dedicated to “restoring nutrient-dense foods to the American diet.” The foundation was named after a Canadian dentist who believed that modern diets, in comparison with ancestral eating habits, caused tooth decay—and that tooth decay in turn caused a wide variety of human diseases: arthritis, cancer, and occasionally even psychosis. His theories fell out of fashion with mainstream dentistry in the second half of the twentieth century, but the Foundation promoted them anyway, advocating a diet of meat, animal fat, and, crucially, raw milk.
Tyrone spent nights in front of the computer reading Price’s research. “The idea of eating this heavy meat and dairy diet made me feel physically nauseous,” Tyrone says. “But there was something in me that had to keep reading. I couldn’t block it out.” He also recalled that, as a boy, he had terrible gastric reflux. The only thing that helped was drinking raw milk from the cows on his farm. With that in mind, he drove out to his uncle’s dairy farm near Johanna Beach and picked up a couple of unadulterated litres. He drank it and almost immediately felt a certain healing force enter his body.
With it also came a sudden desire to get out of the city. When Laura was pregnant with their second child, they moved from Armadale to a 20 acre property in the Yarra Valley. One of the first things they did was buy a house cow called Blossom, who Tyrone milked by hand. She produced so much milk that Tyrone began sharing it with a few close friends, who told their neighbours, who wanted in. When news of Blossom’s milk spread at the local Steiner School, Tyrone wondered whether maybe there was a business here.
The issue was that selling raw milk for human consumption was illegal in Victoria. State food standards required pasteurisation, and had since the 1950s, after 23 people in Moorabbin died from typhoid after drinking raw milk. Tyrone had noticed, though, in the various health food stores he frequented, that there was often raw milk for sale, labelled as “bath milk,” meaning it fell outside of the food safety regulator’s jurisdiction. To make sure, Tyrone called Dairy Australia and asked if he was allowed to produce unpasteurised milk and sell it with labels marking it as cosmetic and not for human consumption. Yes, they said. Tyrone crunched some numbers and realised that if he increased his herd to 12 cows, he could make a viable living selling his own “bath milk” from the farm. He bought a milking machine and resurrected the rundown dairy barn on the property. Then in 2011, Little Yarra Dairy was open for business. Tyrone Brown, the hippy vegan, was a dairy farmer once again.
*
Back on the farm, Tyrone is finally done cleaning the underside of his pampered cows. He turns on the milking machine, which chugs along with a drum and bass-like rhythm. Truffle’s eyes bulge slightly when he attaches the suction cups to her teats, but then she contentedly settles back into her wheat porridge. “Those first years were just blissful,” Tyrone says, leaning against the barn and taking a sip from a glass beaker filled with some mysterious red liquid. “I did not need to advertise for a minute. The phone would not stop ringing.” In no time, he was producing raw milk for around 180 families. Many were farmers in the area, with whom he would swap dairy for organic vegetables, eggs, meat, baked goods. But there were also health-conscious city folks who wanted it, too. “That’s when I had to start the waitlist,” he says.
Plenty of other farmers were doing it as well. Most were small-scale, selling directly from the farm gate. But there were also some established players providing raw milk to high end cafes in Melbourne. Joost Bakker told me that Schulz Organic supplied raw milk to Silo, his “zero-waste” cafe on Hardware Lane in the city. He also had a restaurant in Perth called Greenhouse that sold raw milk on tap. Ultimately, it was just milk in its simplest form, the way it had been drunk for eons. Now, it had a certain hallowed quality. Inner-city gourmands were desperate for it. Hipster chefs went on and on about its aromatic undertones. This wasn’t just a liquid to put on cornflakes. It was an aspirational lifestyle.
“It was like a Golden Age of milk, Oscar,” Tyrone says. He has a habit of repeating my name when he wants to emphasise a point. “Everything was just going along great. Our industry was growing. Our customers were happy. We were making good money. But then there was the incident.” He takes a long sip from his drink. A few ducks run into the shed and weave in and out between the cows, hoping to get a bit of the leftover porridge. “Have you had a chance to look into the 2014 incident?”
I had. In late 2014, five children were admitted to hospitals around Victoria with haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), an extremely rare and serious condition with gastro-like symptoms that is most commonly caused by certain strains of E. coli found in raw meat and milk. One of them, a three-year-old boy from Frankston, died. The parents were all required to complete forms asking routine questions about where their children had been, who they had been in contact with, and what foods they had consumed in the past six weeks or so. Each noted that they had likely drunk raw milk from a certain dairy farm in the Mornington Peninsula. This was the only common link.
In December that year, the Chief Health Officer issued a warning against the consumption of raw milk, which was followed by a media release by the very recently elected Dan Andrews. “Make no mistake,” he said. “Unpasteurised milk can kill, no matter how carefully it has been produced.” The media got hold of the story, leading to headlines like “State in grip of toxic milk madness” and “Killer Milk.” Impassioned social media commentators also accused raw milk producers of being “looney hippies” and their customers of practising “witchcraft on their own kids.” In response, a joint meeting was called between the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries, and Dairy Food Safe Victoria (DFSV), the industry’s peak regulatory body. They resolved to impose new licence conditions to ensure that any so-called cosmetic dairy products, i.e. raw milk, had to be treated with a gag-inducing chemical found in anti-freeze, so as to deter human consumption.
Tyrone heard the news while on a family camping trip in Apollo Bay. “My cousin handed me a newspaper and said, ‘look at this,’” Tyrone says. “We had to pack up immediately and leave. The drive home was just awful. We listened to the radio and on every news segment there was some public health person or a dairy lobby person absolutely slamming raw milk, like we were the biggest criminals on the planet.”
He was in a bind. Tyrone was never going to add the bittering agent to the milk, first because it felt like sacrilege, but more importantly because none of his customers would buy it. (No one I spoke to in the course of writing this article has ever actually bathed in raw milk.) Nor could he scale his operation and sell to the bigger milk processors. He didn’t have enough land for that many cows. And anyway, conventional dairy farmers were doing it tough. The price of milk was dropping. Farmers were selling their product to the big processors at close to cost price, and falling further and further into debt. The pressure was so immense that record numbers were taking their own lives.
The only viable option was to get a new licence for Little Yarra and pasteurise milk on site. The last thing Tyrone wanted to do was boil his milk, but the compromise could be the difference between losing and keeping the farm. Still, switching over the operation would be expensive. “The financial stress was massive,” Tyrone says. “We had already maxed out the mortgage and had no more borrowing capacity. I honestly thought that it was all over for us.”
Many small dairies selling “bath milk” did just that—shut up shop and disappeared, often to the despair of their loyal customers. But there was also resistance. A community of farmers, health-conscious folks, and Epicureans mobilised. They staged raw milk drink-ins on the steps of parliament: Farmers in overalls shoulder to shoulder with puffer jacket-clad Stonnington mums, all chugging milk. They also made some salient arguments. The raw milkies were not advocating to abolish pasteurisation. It made no sense to drink raw milk from big dairies, whose hygiene standards were not up to scratch. Instead, they wanted regulators to set clear and precise hygiene standards, with testing protocols that farmers could follow in order to safely sell raw milk. Why not? It had been done across Europe and in most US states. In California, there was a raw dairy farm that had over 550 cows and sold product to hundreds of stores. Dairy Food Safe Victoria were unyielding. Besides, it was not their job to draft food safety codes—that power lay with Food Safety Australia New Zealand. And their findings on raw milk, which had been assessed as recently as 2009, were clear: pasteurisation is the only process that can ensure adequate eradication of milk-borne toxic bacteria.
The raw milk community continued to make their case, all the way up until the end of 2016, when the Coroner’s Report concerning the boy’s death was finalised. In her comments, the Coroner was somewhat sympathetic to the raw milk cause. She was careful not to lay blame with the dairy farm that sold the milk to the boy’s parents, as they had clearly labelled it not for human consumption. But the unfortunate reality was that it had, in her view, been the most likely cause of the child’s death. Once there was a death linked to raw milk, no official body wanted to know about it anymore. That was that. Case closed.
*
Or was it? Several sources told me that after the new laws came in, the raw milk trade went underground, though no one would, or could, connect me to this black market. In fact, as I reported this story I began to notice a secretive and embattled atmosphere in some of the more extreme corners of the raw milk community—as well as a protectiveness around the milk that verges on a kind of worship. Some raw milk advocates I spoke to insisted that unpasteurised dairy has near miraculous healing powers. On www.realmilk.com, for instance, they recommend a “milk cure,” which consists of sipping four to five quarts of raw milk throughout the day for two to four weeks, along with daily enemas and very hot baths to facilitate detoxification. This can apparently help with “cancer, infection, nerve and brain disorders, weight loss, metabolic disorders, heart and blood diseases, kidney disease, digestive disease, allergies, skin problems, urinary tract problems, reproductive issues, cavities, periodontal disease and musculoskeletal conditions.”
When I expressed some scepticism about this healing power, I was often told by advocates to “do my own research.” So, I trawled through PubMed. A lot of the research was hard to parse for someone without a degree in microbiology. But I did come across one peer-reviewed study from 2011 that offered definitive and highly convincing evidence of one clear health benefit. A team of European researchers sought to find out why asthma is less prevalent in kids who grow up on farms, and hypothesised that raw cow’s milk might be the answer. This proved true: when city kids were given raw milk to drink, they were less likely to develop asthma, just like the farm kids. (In other words, no need to leave the inner-North to give your precious child healthy lungs. Just feed them raw milk and enjoy the martinis!) This was not an insignificant finding. Asthma is a major public health burden, and getting worse. If raw milk can act as a preventative, as the study suggests, a reasonable case could be made for its consumption. Notably, the authors stop short of this, because of, well, the other health risks associated with feeding young kids raw milk—namely, bacterial infection.
When the raw milk advocacy websites cite the asthma article—and many do—they never mention this caveat. This is because raw milk has become, for some, an ideological issue, pushing otherwise reasonable people into highly credulous positions. I spoke to one former-CSIRO-scientist-turned-raw-milk-advocate who told me that he believes the ban on raw milk is manufactured by Big Pharma. When I asked why, he said it is because unadulterated dairy could put the drug companies out of business. “Does it come with any associated health risks?” I asked. “No. None,” he replied.
For such extreme raw milk advocates, pasteurisation is the enemy, despite being one of the most efficacious public health interventions ever. (In the US, for instance, milk consumption pre-pasteurisation caused some 25% of food related disease outbreaks. After, it accounts for less than 1%.) Nevertheless, at the fringes, boiling milk is seen as part of a grand conspiracy by globalist elites to install a liberal authoritarian one-world government of biopolitical control where we eat bugs, drink government issued Soylent, and live in pods. In this paranoid matrix, raw milk signifies purity, freedom, and a return to the natural order. Ironically, this makes the raw dogma appealing to true elites. This is probably why the Queen only drank raw milk. Same with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It is also why American “raw milk nationalists” post videos of themselves chugging milk and eating raw testicles, claiming, between mouthfuls, to be part of a dietary renaissance.
The Australian raw milkies have not quite reached this level of culture war, yet. (Maybe this is because cows still appear so out of place here, so distinctly colonial and invasive, that to speak of milk and tradition on this land is just too absurd.) There is some mild paranoia, though. Many believe that the 2014 incident was something of a stitch up. Raw milk had become too popular—a genuine competitor with Big Dairy. So, the establishment companies made a deal with the food regulators (i.e. paid them off): when they had a chance to pin a death on raw milk, they would. I couldn’t find any evidence of this type of corruption, and honestly, it doesn’t seem all that likely. Even at its peak the raw milk industry represented a tiny fraction of Victorian dairy consumption. Besides, most of the major dairy companies make a significant portion of their income via dairy exports, a market that raw milk producers couldn’t compete for anyway.
Some raw milk advocates also question the validity of the Coroner’s findings. I read the report closely, and there are some unanswered questions. The boy’s father, for example, wasn’t 100% sure if his son had drunk the raw milk the week before falling ill. And only one of the many samples taken from the raw milk brand in question came back positive for pathogenic E.coli. When it was compared to the bacteria found in the boy’s stool sample, it didn’t match up. The Coroner acknowledges all of this in her findings. In the end, she doesn’t rule that the milk definitely caused the death. Only that on “the balance of probabilities,” it was the most likely cause of this tragically unlikely outcome.
Should this be enough to shut down a whole industry, and more than that, a way of life? In the majority of traditionally dairy-consuming countries, the answer is no. Only Canada and Australia have blanket bans, and Victoria alone demands that farmers spike their “cosmetic” milk with a bittering agent. This rule does seem excessive. What is most galling, for the raw milkies, is how it is enforced by Dairy Food Safe Victoria. After all, this is the same organisation that, before 2014, issued licences for the sale of bath milk, ignored that it was likely being consumed, and then turned on the farmers in an instant when the dung shit hit the fan. (When asked for comment, a DFSV spokesperson said: “We take any allegations of non-compliance with food safety standards seriously and will investigate all notifications that we receive.” Since the new rules came in, they have prosecuted at least one unlicensed dairy farm selling raw milk to the public.)
Besides the family who lost their son, the person who possibly suffered most was the farmer whose milk supposedly caused the incident. She wasn’t prosecuted, but the name of her farm was leaked to the press. She was accused of being a child killer. Banks stopped lending her money. To stay afloat, she had to take private loans with high interest. The farm barely survived, and now operates under a new name—selling only pasteurised milk. I asked the farmer if she’d consider going raw again, if the regulations changed. “No way,” she said. “I don’t trust any of them. Not after they sacrificed us like that.”
*
Tyrone is very considered in how he talks about raw milk and its embattled status. He is a genuine believer in the health benefits, but he doesn’t push this on me. The closest he comes to implying any conspiracy is when he suggests, with a cheeky smile, that the CSIRO is trying to replace cows with lab-grown milk (I later look this up, and there’s some truth to it). But he does share the outrage and despair of his raw milk comrades. He tells me at length about new technologies that he could use to make raw milk ultra safe: vats that instantly chill the liquid as it comes from the cow, and hyper-accurate testing protocols that provide results about the bacterial load in the milk within 24 hours. This is already happening overseas, Tyrone exclaims. He just wants a chance to give it a go here, but none of the authorities want to hear about it. “You know, Oscar, it’s enough to make you feel like you’re going mad,” he says.
In the end, though, Tyrone tries to be cheery and pragmatic. When things were looking dire in 2015, instead of ruminating in online forums about globalist elites, he and his family did what needed to be done. By Easter of 2016, they were back in business. Tyrone takes me to the shed where the dreaded pasteuriser now lives. It is a 200 litre stainless steel vat—not really much to look at. The milk is pumped in and heated to 63 degrees for 30 minutes, the lowest legal temperature. What comes out the other end is still delicious. And there is again a waitlist of customers eager to drive out to the farm to get it. All seems well, but Tyrone remains unfulfilled. “I never got into this to make some high end dairy brand or to make money,” he says. “I was doing it for a higher purpose.”
I ask him what that higher purpose is, and he answers, without hesitation: “It’s for the children.” He wants to nourish the next generation properly. I look around. I see ducks waddling about. I see a mother and child, both barefoot, arrive at the barn door to pick up their milk. I see Truffle taking a shit in the field. Yarra Valley Dairy is far from some manosphere conspiracy dome. The atmosphere is positively estrogenic. I wonder whether this is what drives our present yearning obsession with milk, why we’re all looking for the best or the freshest or the creamiest or purest. We are trying to find our way back to that very first meal, the one that satisfied like no other. Is this why I’m here? I think, suddenly recalling that it was, after all, my mother who introduced me to Tyrone. I jot this down in my notebook, resolving to bring it up in my next session with my Lacanian psychoanalyst.
The following week, I can’t get raw milk out of my head. I have a dream in which I’m swimming in a dam filled with the stuff alongside my childhood best friend, but before I can taste it, he proceeds to piss himself. (Note: bring this up in analysis, too.) I call various restaurateurs, cheese-makers, and micro-dairy farmers and ask if they know where I can get my hands on a litre, even illegally. No one wants to know me. Then, I read a news article about the City of Yarra banning dogs from pubs, and another about a stringent new food safety regulation threatening steak tartare. Maybe they’re right, I think. Soon it will just be government-issued Soylent.
Then I hear from Swampy Marsh. Swampy is an egg farmer who was, back in 2015, one of the organisers of the raw milk drink-in on the steps of parliament. (He is also famous for saving a population of rare penguins in South-West Victoria with his Italian sheepdog, Oddball.) He tells me over the phone that if I want to purchase some raw milk, all I have to do is go to Terra Madre in Brunswick and ask for Swampy’s Pet Milk.
“Pet Milk?” I ask.
“You heard me,” he says. “I just label the milk for pets and not humans.” He’s been selling it like this for 12 or so months, after a raw milk-loving Supreme Court judge told him that it was legally above board. He’s doing 600 litres a week.
“So I can go to Terra Madre and buy it, just like that?”
“Yes, mate,” Swampy says. “It’s in a separate fridge down the back, the pet fridge. That’s the only way the food police won’t close it down. I’ve heard they’ve been skulking around, but I put my phone number on the label, so if they’ve got a problem they can call me.”
That evening I drive to Terra Madre, and sure enough at the back of the shop there is a fridge filled with Swampy’s Pet Milk. I reach in and grab a two litre bottle. I hear something behind me. I turn and half expect to see dairy cops in hazmat suits coming to take me away. It’s just a couple in matching khaki shorts and Birkenstocks arguing about whether to get new charcoal toothbrushes. I purchase the milk and rush home.
I take out a glass and pour in a splash of Swampy’s, accidentally spilling some on the kitchen table. My cat, Pico, leaps up to drink it. I try to shoo him off but he swipes at me, claws out. He’s been doing this a bit recently. He’s in the midst of one of his behavioural downswings, which I attribute to him having been abandoned by his mother at two weeks of age, leading to attachment issues and a frequent confusion of love and aggression. I take a sip. It’s nice, but no better than Schulz’s or St. David’s or Tyrone’s. I walk over to Pico’s bowl and pour the remainder in. He laps it up feverishly and then saunters over to his favourite spot on the couch, where he falls asleep.
I continue to feed him the milk throughout the week, little bits here and there. His mood improves significantly. No more claws, only head bumps and purring. He seems happy, nourished, finally at ease. A friend notices the change and asks me what the secret is.
“Raw milk,” I say, quietly.
“You know cats are lactose intolerant,” she says.
“Prove it,” I shoot back, defensively.
Later, she sends me links to several sources that state in no uncertain terms that milk is bad for cats. But the thing is, they’re all from cat food websites. Of course they’re anti-milk! They have a vested interest! They want to keep our cats on their own highly processed crap. But not my baby. He will now be drinking Swampy’s, raw, as nature intended.