In My Mother's Kitchen: Milk
Before I dig into the entry for this week, it's worth mentioning that while my sister and I have occasionally texted back and forth on the details of these posts, I write them alone. Everyone else sees them after they go up. My parents have occasionally sent along feedback, which I add after the fact as an edit. Sometimes that provides clarifying details, and some times it contradicts my recollection.
In any event, I don't there will be much commentary on milk. My mother obviously didn't cook milk, but it was a major part of every meal right up until I left for college. Every night for dinner my sister and I each had a full glass of milk. After we finished the milk we could have other beverages if we wanted, but we had to drink the milk first. My mother also would have a glass of milk with every meal. Our preferred milk when I was growing up was skim. I've mentioned before that Mom was very interested in nutrition, and back in the 1980s when everyone was afraid of fat skim milk had less fat and all the same amounts of calcium. Between that and our morning cereal (two bowls for me every week day), we went through many cartons of milk a week in our house. Fortunately, as a stay-at-home parent, Mom had time to go grocery shopping multiple times a week, and occasionally I was sent down to the corner store to buy a carton when we overshot our usual consumption levels.
Milk was often accompanied by jokes about my father's incredible shrinking aunts, who during my childhood were all in their sixties and seventies and none of whom surpassed my grandmother's total of 4' 11", and who often seemed to have gotten a bit shorter as they got older. Osteoporosis was high on my mother's list of personal health concerns.
As for my sister and I, we clearly needed the calcium for our bones and teeth. This may have actually worked out. I've only broken one bone in my life, which was one of the bones in the middle of my foot when a spike broke during ultimate at the tail end of college. A high school classmate of mine, DJoe, who drank a lot of pop and much less milk broke a lot of bones during sports. During a conversation our senior year he wondered if would have had those problems if he'd been made to drink more milk. I can't say, but certainly he wasn't doing anything in sports that I wasn't doing.
My father was exempt from having to drink milk with dinner. As he got older it didn't always agree with his stomach. Thus far I haven't aged into that problem, but I still drink very little milk nowadays. It got to the point where I switched to oat milk not so much for health or environmental reasons as because it stays good in the fridge for a lot longer than regular milk.
In any event, I don't there will be much commentary on milk. My mother obviously didn't cook milk, but it was a major part of every meal right up until I left for college. Every night for dinner my sister and I each had a full glass of milk. After we finished the milk we could have other beverages if we wanted, but we had to drink the milk first. My mother also would have a glass of milk with every meal. Our preferred milk when I was growing up was skim. I've mentioned before that Mom was very interested in nutrition, and back in the 1980s when everyone was afraid of fat skim milk had less fat and all the same amounts of calcium. Between that and our morning cereal (two bowls for me every week day), we went through many cartons of milk a week in our house. Fortunately, as a stay-at-home parent, Mom had time to go grocery shopping multiple times a week, and occasionally I was sent down to the corner store to buy a carton when we overshot our usual consumption levels.
Milk was often accompanied by jokes about my father's incredible shrinking aunts, who during my childhood were all in their sixties and seventies and none of whom surpassed my grandmother's total of 4' 11", and who often seemed to have gotten a bit shorter as they got older. Osteoporosis was high on my mother's list of personal health concerns.
As for my sister and I, we clearly needed the calcium for our bones and teeth. This may have actually worked out. I've only broken one bone in my life, which was one of the bones in the middle of my foot when a spike broke during ultimate at the tail end of college. A high school classmate of mine, DJoe, who drank a lot of pop and much less milk broke a lot of bones during sports. During a conversation our senior year he wondered if would have had those problems if he'd been made to drink more milk. I can't say, but certainly he wasn't doing anything in sports that I wasn't doing.
My father was exempt from having to drink milk with dinner. As he got older it didn't always agree with his stomach. Thus far I haven't aged into that problem, but I still drink very little milk nowadays. It got to the point where I switched to oat milk not so much for health or environmental reasons as because it stays good in the fridge for a lot longer than regular milk.