Milk

I picked up a copy of Harold Mcgee's On Food and Cooking, and have spent the last couple of days reading about the science of milk. In fact, milk has been on my mind a lot lately. Why just the other day I drank some really good milk. And the day before that I drank some milk that was thoroughly bland ... Oh, and the day before that accidentally drank some really bad milk. And of course the world of milk is full of these ups and downs. The whole concept of big, fat, grain-and-bone-fed, hormone-pumped, and severely-ill, kept-alive-on-various-cyclines-and-other-antibiotics, half-past-dead cows being the main source of milk in the United States is just plain old sad. I remember how much I liked that stuff in my early days, that thin, pearly-white glass of homogeneity. But milk just ain't milk if it is heated to frying temperatures for 20 minutes and centrifugally beaten into uniformity. Drinking that stuff I can't help but ask "where is the good stuff?"
I don't mean to slander uncle Louis P., but do we really still need to pasteurize our milk? Do we need to pulverize the cream into individual molecules, spread so thin that we can no longer feel it or see it? Even heavy cream it looks pretty thin and utterly un-udderly -- perfectly smooth to a fault.