In Search of Amish Cows who Eat Grass

David and I made a rather large committment today to only feed our 2 year old, grass-fed cows milk. Here's the back story - Lucy was unable to tolerate cows milk for the first two years, so we had been filling her with soy milk, sure that the wonder bean was doing her a world of good - until we started reading that the wonder bean was really a devil with a great brand manager. It seems soybeans have gone the way of, say, eggs and have taken a bad rap. Too much soy is now responsible for three year olds growing breasts and sprouting pubic hair.

So, David thought we should start buying raw milk - the unpasteurized, cream-floating-on-the-top suff (David is quite certain pasteurization is some sort of corporate conspiracy to drain the nutrition out of dairy). Raw, unpasteurized milk sounded downright folksy. Imagine the looks we would get when we whipped that baby out on the playground! It was intriguing...until we realized it was illegal. I had a vision of myself sneaking bottles of unpastuerized milk into the back of a station wagon under the cloak of darkness and decided that we should investigate the next best thing.

Turns out the next best thing is grass fed-milk (although we prefer the grass fed milk in recyclable bottles, because it makes us feel greener than we are and it is, in fact, downright folksy.) "Great, this should be easy", I think to myself. But it's a bit tricky because grass fed milk is not organic milk. Grass fed is a whole different ball of hoo-ha. The stores shelves are lined with organic - which means that cows are not confined to quarters and are allowed to breathe the fresh air (because fresh air makes better milk apparently) and they do not use antibiotics, growth hormones or pesticides in their feed.

All of that sounds great. I was ready to run out and buy several gallons for Lucy to start drinking immediately. But David was not so ready. He was hunched over the computer googling, "grass fed milk".

"The cows are fed feed," he told me, as if he was Sherlock Holmes solving a great mystery. "

It seems that "grass fed milk" is actually the only milk that comes from cows who are fed grass. Makes sense. So, David does his due diligence and finds a brand he likes and buys it at the local health food store. It's called, "Natural By Nature." My kid loves it. David feels like he has maneuvered us through a nutritonal minefield. I am psyched that I don't have to scrape the creamy scum off the top of the bottle and pretend to like it. And to boot, we have milk straight from the Amish country - land of plain talk, shoo fly pie and Harrison Ford movies. I imagine an old woman in a Little-House-On-the-Prairie-Dress and an ugly hat has pulled the udders by hand and I can even hear the milk slap the metal bucket. All is right with the world.

David just peeked over his laptop to inform me that he thinks raw, unpastueurized milk is legal in Connecticut, except in the town of Fairfield. Really? Why Fairfield? What's happening there? David is hunched over the computer again, probably googling "Fairfield". I have a feeling this isn't over...