Tea. Simplicity. Milking.

Travel

26 Jan

I’m not milking cows or goats now. I miss it very much. But just a couple years ago the pillar of my day was milk. Hauling on warm clothes to get down to the barn and wash up all the milking gear. Heading out to the cow shed equipped and laden with rich alfalfa hay and molasses-scented grain mix in a bucket. My cold hands would soon be warmed by the udder, the milk steaming into the pail. The drama of the full udder and trying to keep the pail clean, the sense of harvest when the can was close to two gallons full — it was all over in about forty-five minutes once you’d gotten good at it. Beginners felt like they’d never get through the ordeal but by the end of one week of milking they were comfortable, quick, and their arm muscles no longer sore. It is a beautiful way to start the day.

I began to see how intimate and important milk was. Its purity, its beautiful nutritional value shaped aspects of our culture in milk-consuming lands. From transhumance, to named cheese varieties, to the ‘milk trains’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humans have gone to great lengths for milk. Because it is so pure and beautiful straight from the cow, it must be kept more carefully than almost any other food substance. Before pasteurization this was tricky unless on the micro-scale of having your own cow or a neighbor with a cow. Post-industrial milk trains rushed the milk across the country so everyone could get fresh milk. Before that people made sure to live close enough to a cow — or goat, or sheep or yak or horse. Transhumance, the practice of moving the dairy herds to optimal pasture at different parts of the year dictated people’s lives. Now we feel entitled to a low-priced carton always on the shelf of the fridge.

I’m only using milk for my tea these days. And that’s just a tiny cloud poured into the hot black liquid once or twice a day. I don’t avoid milk but there is a world of difference between the pasteurized carton and the fresh milk from the cow with its deep layer of cream and flavors of spring pasture. It’s milk’s very simplicity that makes it a challenge to get it in its best form. In other words, it takes a lot of effort to have a cow and to make use of the abundance of milk. It depends on systems like hay farming and storage, on pasture maintenance and rotation, on breeding and birthing calves, herd management and cheesemaking. I have been there. Like some distant exotic land it feels like a dream now, yet it is totally attainable. I’ve bought cows, fed, housed, moved them from pasture to pasture, arranged for the Artificial Insemination man to get here in time for their oestrus, aided in the birth of calves, and dealt with an entire fridge full of milk day in day out.

Sometimes simplicity veils great complexity and skill; or, in the case of industrial milk, nefarious exploitation and duplicity. Industrial milk depends on mistreating cows (feeding them food they are not meant to eat, housing them in their own waste, and dousing them with antibiotics), then masking the unavoidable contamination of the milk with pasteurization.

I look once again to my compost pile to explain how the orchestration of the complex gives rise to the truly simple and sublime. How a virtuous cycle of collaboration with natural forces can yield a boon rather than a vicious cycle masked to obtain a profit.

I recently simplified my composting. Once I understood (in fact learned in my body over the course of years carting kitchen scrap and manure around) the processes going on in compost — the need for the right amounts of air and moisture, and a good mix of carbon to nitrogen, that you are actually feeding or farming microorganisms— I was able to do something ‘deceptively simple’. I now compost in situ using just a ring of hardware cloth and a lid. I’ve done away with bins and turning and tarps and taking temperatures. I place a ring of hardware cloth (a rigid fence material that is four feet wide with a half inch mesh) about three feet in diameter in the location uphill from where I will need compost (the garden, or fruit orchard). It is also near enough to the house that it’s an easy walk to empty the compost bucket. I peg the ring down and line it deeply with old hay or straw. I fill it gradually with my compostables, adding a layer of hay each time. The additions need to be spread evenly across yet centered in the pile. This way they feed the active center where the microorganisms are quickly producing heat and so that the top stays level. The lid needs to fit inside the ring, excluding excess rain, and weighing down the ingredients inside slightly. After about six month it will be full and I will leave it alone for another six months to a year. During that time I will start a new pile, possibly in a very different location, maybe down by the raspberry terrace. As each pile reaches maturity, I simply un-mold it, spread the pile on the adjacent garden and re-use the hardware cloth hoop. I might need four to six pieces of hardware cloth to complete my rolling cycle, unmolding a pile every six to twelve months.

It looks like little chimneys of brown hay cropping up around the property. Deceptively humble as all compost piles appear, but inside is a careful choreography that uses up ‘waste’ to produce the fertility to grow food. Magic!

Similarly, when I drink a glass of raw milk that tastes clean and clear, simply of milk — I taste all that labor and care and wonder it takes to choreograph a contented cow on seasonal grass; as well as the generosity of the animal who can abundantly feed her calf as well as a village.

That cup of tea was an organic large leaf black with a high proportion of fuzzy golden buds from Yunnan in eastern China.

It is rich like tobacco and malty without being tannic so needs very little milk and would not be drunk with milk at all in its native land. Tea is also something simple: the leaves of a single plant, Camellia Sinensis, steeped in boiling water — which belies a vast cultural tapestry of tradition, terroir, trade, production technique… It’s all available there in the cup to be tasted if we take the time to notice.