Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
1
UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS
Dreams of Purity and Contagion
“I want to know where my bread comes from! I don't want bread from some nameless basement
bakery. I want my bread from a bakery that's clean as my own kitchen. … ”
Know where your bread
is baked and how. Don't take a chance with the bread you buy. You can't afford to.
—Holsum bread advertisement, late 1920s
A HAIR IN THE MILK
There are people who believe that drinking raw milk can cure illness and restore the body to natural har-
mony. There are people who think that drinking raw milk is like playing Russian roulette with microbes.
There are a few farm families that drink raw milk just because it's what they have around, and a lot more
folks who have never given raw milk a single thought because it's so unusual. Then there are those for
whom raw milk is both scary and seductive, wholesome yet menacing. That's me.
A city kid, I grew up playing in vacant lots, not the back pasture. My idea of nature always involved
a campground—I had no experience with the working nature of food production until I was in my twen-
ties. The first time I saw milk come out of an actual cow, I was twenty-five and learning to do the milk-
ing myself while interning on a ranch in Arizona. “Red” was her name—the cow, that is. Red is not a
particularly creative name for a cow, but my wife, Kate, and I came up with a lot more colorful monik-
ers: the kind of names a cow gets called when it kicks over the milk pail, when it kicks over the feed
pail, when it intentionally stomps your foot or butts your shoulder with its ornery old lady horns.
Red's was the first clump of hair I ever saw floating in my milk. Before Red, I had never drunk milk
with the scent of cow still lingering in it or wondered how much barnyard dust in the milk constituted
“too much.” I thought
Listeria
was something you used mouthwash to get rid of, not the bacteria re-
sponsible for a deadly milk-borne sickness.
Since then I have drunk a lot of raw milk, most of it illegal, thanks to strict government regulations
slanted toward large high-tech dairies. I don't ascribe any particular natural virtue to milk's unpasteur-
ized state, but I've come to like the grassy taste and the sense that I'm getting my milk direct from a
local farmer. Despite all that, though, I have never gotten over the slight flutter of unease I first felt
drinking raw milk—the modern intuition that maybe there was something dangerous about getting milk
from a cow instead of a factory.
This unease has haunted Americans since they first began to grasp the existence of an invisible world
of small, possibly threatening organisms. Not without cause. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, city residents got their milk from fetid, overcrowded “swill dairies” or off unrefrigerated train
