Milk Does A Blogger Good

Good morning and greetings, healthy snack fans. I remember a few years back going in for my annual physical, and my doctor suggested that it wouldn’t hurt if I lost a few pounds. I immediately thought of what Ellen Degeneres once told me. “You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is.”

My doctor asked me about my diet and exercise regimen and then asked, “So, can you stop eating cookies?” I replied, “Hey, I’m a man’s man. Of course, I could cut back on my sugar intake. I’ll start right after I see Haley’s comet.”

Let’s fast forward to today, where at age 59, I’m still a growing boy and enjoy the comforting duo of milk and cookies. Actually, I don’t really need the milk, just give me the cookies. But since milk supposedly does a body good, I like to include it in my daily vegan regimen whenever there’s a substance full of sugar, sodium and saturated fat that I can hold in my hand.

So being that I’ve been pounding down the Grade A Pasteurized, Homogenized, 1% lowfat milk with vitamins A & D like a camel on spring break, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at what goes
into the making of this fantasticly nutritious white liquid. Or as Robert Fulghum once said, “Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.”

So according to my friends at the Legacy Farms in Plainview, Texas, cows, like teenage boys, have a unique digestive system that includes four stomachs. They swallow food quickly without chewing it well and store it in their first and second stomachs. After they have eaten their fill, they will burp up a small portion of the food they have stored in their first and second stomachs without saying “Excuse me.” This small portion of food is called cud or quiche.

They will then chew this cud and swallow it to their third stomach. After that the food leaves their third stomach it enters their fourth stomach where the digestion and indigestion occurs. Amd that’s why four out of five dairy farmers recommend Pepto-Bismal for their cows that chew cud.

Cows spend about six hours eating per day and chow down about 90 pounds of food in that time, not including appetizers, jello or finger foods. It takes about two days for a cow to process her food into milk, three days for chocolate milk.

And since I’m not lactose intolerant, here are some more fun facts about about the liquid that I consider to be our national beverage. Well, either that or Jolt Cola.

It used to take a person one hour to milk six cows by hand. Today, a person can milk 100 cows and a billy goat in an hour with modern machines and a vivid imagination. In case you weren’t counting, it take about 340-350 squirts from Elsie to produce a gallon of milk. Cows drink between 25-50 gallons of water a day to produce milk, and even more if they play contact sports.

In the old days before TiVo, when people traveled and wanted milk, they had to take their cows with them. Cows have an acute sense of smell – they can smell something up to six miles away, particularly a punchline. And as George Bernard Shaw once said, “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”

Speaking of which, my favorite slogans for breast milk, “Latch on, nod
off. Breast milk. Never been recalled.”

The average American cow produces 6.2 gallons a day or about 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime. A cow’s udder can hold 25-50 pounds of milk. Utterly incredible. Most cows give more milk when they listen to music, with their favorites being Soft Rock Hits of the 80′s or anything by Todd Rundgren.

 The natural yellow color of butter comes mainly from beta-carotene found in the grass the cows graze on. And finally, as my mother or Aunt Bee from the “Andy Griffith Show” once proclaimed, “Opie, you haven’t finished your milk. We can’t put it back in the cow, you know.”

For today’s photo escapade we are jetting up the coast to Davenport on the evening of May 2. There had been a beautful sunset that I had missed earlier in the week, and after checking out the cloud cover at around 5:30, I thought something special might be on the horizon. I don’t shoot many sunsets in the spring so we’re talking bonus coverage
for this cyber experience.

By the time I gathered myself under the Monterey Cypress trees, those early clouds had moved south, but as it turned out, we were still left with a colorful display of May pagentry. I am rarely disappointed whenever I turn on the TV or make a trip to the north coast and this night was no exception.

To check out these photos, click on http://www.SunriseSantaCruz.com/blog