Got Milk? Craig Bennett Offers a Guide to the Best in the World

by Craig Bennett*

News item: “President Trump has ordered that whole milk be served again in school cafeterias.” (Cue wild applause, whooping, cheering, etc.) Although I can find no reason to condemn President Obama’s erasing whole milk from the institutional menu in the hope of striking one more blow against the then emerging epidemic of childhood obesity, I can only see the reintroduction of whole milk as a positive.

That’s probably because I’ve been a milk drinker for my whole life. There are some things—like a tuna salad sandwich or a handful of Oreo cookies—that cannot be properly enjoyed without a nice, cold glass of milk to accompany them. When I was a kid and we had milk from one of the local dairies delivered in the mornings, whole milk was almost universal. The only readily available alternative was skim milk, and that was never in very great demand. Now, however, we have whole milk, skim milk, reduced-fat milk, two percent or even one percent milk, almond milk, soy milk, and more, some of which have no idea what the inside of a cow looks like. But regular, generic, run-of the mill whole milk is still my beverage of choice.

I’ve mentioned in this space before that back in the late 1960s I spent my enlistment in the Navy as a musician in the Naval Academy Band. At that time, believe it or not, the Naval Academy had its own dairy to supply milk to the Midshipmen’s dining hall. It was run by a fully commissioned lieutenant, whose M.O.S., if he had one, must have been “dairy farmer.” I know this because the wife of one of my closest friends in the band worked part-time in the dairy’s office—and all the milk that she, her husband Warren, and their two little girls might want was part of her pay. I was frequently invited to stay for dinner with Warren and his family, and when I first sat down to a meal of Mary’s cooking and had my initial taste of the Naval Academy dairy’s milk, it almost knocked my hat off (figuratively speaking). It was the most wonderful glass of milk I’d ever tasted! Rich, substantial, creamy, and surprisingly flavorful. Comparing it to the supermarket milk I’d been accustomed to drinking would have been like comparing filet mignon at Maxim’s in Paris to one of McDonald’s kangarooburgers back when the fast-food giant was fattening the bottom line by importing its meat from Australia.

But, like far too many wonderful things, the availability of U.S.N.A. dairy milk was not to last. Sometime during the latter part of my enlistment, the Navy decided that the dairy was an unnecessary expense and discontinued its operation. Mary lost her job at the dairy and (most unfortunately) her access to the dairy’s milk. So, she began to buy milk for the family at the supermarket—and the kids got sick on it. It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks for their systems to adjust to it, but their reaction speaks loudly and clearly of the huge difference in the overall quality of the commercially produced “whole” milk as compared to that of the U.S.N.A. dairy’s milk, which was pasteurized—period. It makes one wonder what else besides that must have been done to the milk sold by the supermarkets.

So, cruel hardship that it was, I spent the remainder of my enlistment drinking milk from cartons that no longer came in the colors of the Academy’s blue and gold. And not long after that, I got married. And (as I believe I’ve also mentioned before in this space), my wife and I were able to postpone our honeymoon while I finished my graduate degree at Hopkins, and then spend the summer traveling all over Europe before my new job began in September. We picked up our Volkswagen in Wolfsburg and proceeded north, with the intention of seeing a bit of the Scandinavian countries before heading south into the heart of Europe.

After a few days on the road, however, I began to develop a thirst for a nice, tall glass of cold milk. We were roaming around Copenhagen at the time and finally spotted what appeared to be a diary store that sold cheese, yogurt, cream—and milk! I was surprised to see that it came in cartons about the proportions of a box of cake mix in the U.S.; but I bought a liter, thirsty for the box’s contents, but also curious as to how it would taste. When I opened the carton and took my first swallow, I was amazed: I was suddenly back in the Navy, having dinner at Warren and Mary’s, and experiencing my first taste of milk from the Naval Academy dairy! It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same.

I don’t recall drinking much more milk during that summer or noticing any significant difference when I did between my first taste of European milk in Copenhagen and whatever I happened to be drinking later. But the milk experience was repeated again and again in virtually every country we visited (which was most of them) with every meal, snack, or non-dairy drink I consumed. It was one of the first things that made me feel underprivileged as an American: Europeans in general are able to eat much fresher, more wholesome, more flavorful, and better prepared food that we are. And if I want to have a really wonderful, rich, flavorful, and satisfying glass of milk, the first place that comes to mind is… Denmark.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandndoble.com, and most book stores

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