Have you got milk?

[Guest guest]

Have you got milk

 

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2006 02:07:29 AM]

 

Growing up as a child in the city I didn't often see where the food

I ate came from. There were tamarind and mango trees (only good for

green kairi) in gardens, bicycles would pass dangling dazed looking

chickens tied up by their feet and on trips out of the city we could

see green paddy fields passing by.

 

But the only real impression came thanks to an aunt who kept a cow

in the shed behind her house in Chennai. We'd see the cow being

milked and then soon be given the same milk to drink. Nothing, we

were told, was healthier than drinking milk so fresh and so pure.

 

I don't know if cows are still commonly milked in city households —

there are plenty still around, even in Mumbai, but most of us have

swapped cows milked at our doorsteps for the greater convenience of

packet milk (not to mention the problem of getting cows into

apartment lifts). But that image of milk as the ultimate health

drink remains strong with us, reinforced by ad campaigns like the

National Dairy Development Board's "Doodh, Doodh, Doodh" which shows

happy, fit people drinking milk.

 

When some schools in Mumbai recently banned aerated soft drinks,

they suggested kids switch to milk drinks instead. It goes deeper.

Milk's importance in Indian history — or more precisely north Indian

history, an important distinction as we'll see — goes back to

earliest Vedic times.

 

As K.T.Achaya, the historian of Indian food notes, "milk has a very

special conceptual niche in Indian cooking. Milk emerges hot from

the udder, and is considered to be the sperm of Agni, the god of

fire, and hence naturally cooked." Ayurveda values milk, says

Achaya, because "it contains the rasa of many plants and is a

lifegiver, particularly for children and the elderly, the

convalescent and the weak. Cow's milk is an elixir of life, with a

suppressing action on all three doshas..."

 

Yet this same product is vilified by many today. Few paediatricians

would recommend plain cow's milk for infants, and there are

nutritionists in plenty who forbid milk in almost any form. Lactose

intolerance, the condition that makes it hard to digest milk, is

held to be close to a plague - 80 million victims is one estimate

for the US, which would make it the most widespread medical

condition in that country. High fat milk is accused of causing an

epidemic of obesity and a number of other diseases, like diabetes,

breast cancer and osteoporosis.

 

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