Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [82]
We heard mooing as thirty caramel brown Jersey cows came up the lane. Elsie introduced her daughter Emily and son-in-law Hersh, who waved but kept the cows on course toward the milking barn. Lily and I shook pea leaves off our laps and followed. Emily and Hersh, who live next door, do the milking every day at 5:00 a.m. and p.m. Emily coaxed the cows like children into the milking parlor (“Come on, Lisette, careful with your feet”) and warned me to step back from Esau, the bull. “He’s very bossy and he doesn’t like women,” she said. “I don’t think the cows care much for him either, for the same reason. But he sires good milkers.”
While Emily moved the cows through, Hersh attached and moved the pipelines of the milking machine. During lulls the couple sat down together on a bench while their toddler Noah bumped through the milking parlor and adjacent rooms, bouncing off doorjambs and stall sides in his happy orbit. Lily helped him into a toddler swing that hung in the doorway. The milking machine made a small hum but otherwise the barn was quiet, save for the jostling cows munching hay. The wood of the barn looked a hundred years old, dusty and hospitable. I couldn’t imagine, myself, having an unbreakable milking date with every five o’clock of this world, but Emily seemed not to mind it. “We’re so busy the rest of the day, going different directions,” she said. “The milking gives us a time for Hersh and me to sit a minute.”
A busy little pride of barn cats gathered near the bench, tails waving, to lap up milk-pipe overflows collected in a pie plate. I watched a few hundred gallons of Jersey milk throbbing and flowing upward through the maze of clear, flexible pipes like a creamy circulatory system. A generator-powered pump drew the milk from the cows’ udders into a refrigerated stainless steel tank. The truck from an organic cooperative comes to fetch it to the plant where it is pasteurized and packed into green-and-white cartons. Where it may go from there is anyone’s guess. Our own supermarket back home stocks the brand, so over the years our family may have purchased milk that came from this barn, or at least some molecules of it mixed in with milk from countless other farms. As long as it meets the company’s standards, with a consistent cream percentage and nominal bacterial counts, milk from this farm becomes just another part of the blend, an anonymous commodity. This loss of identity seemed a shame, given its origin. The soil minerals and sweetness of this county’s grass must impart their own flavor to the milk, just as the regions of France flavor their named denominations of wine.
David came in from the cornfield shortly after milking time. He laughed at himself for having lost track of time—as Elsie predicted—while communing with his corn. We stood for a minute, retracting the distances between our lives. Both David and Elsie are possessed of an ageless, handsome grace. Elsie is the soul of unconditional kindness, while David sustains a deadpan irony about the world and its inhabitants, including his colleagues who wear the free caps with Cargill or Monsanto logos: “At least they let you know who’s controlling their frontal lobes.” David and Elsie live and work in exactly the place they were born, in his case the same house and farm. It’s a condition lamented in a thousand country music ballads, but seems to have worked out well for this couple.
We carried dishes of food from the kitchen to a picnic table under the cherry trees. Hersh joined us, settling Noah into a high chair while Emily brought a pitcher of milk from the tank in the barn. Obviously this family had the genes to drink it. For the first time in awhile, I had C/T13910-gene envy. Dinner conversation roamed from what we’d seen growing in Canada to what’s new for U.S. farmers. David was concerned about the National Animal Identification System, through which the USDA now plans