MILK FOR CHILDREN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22574, 12 November 1936, Page 17

MILK FOR CHILDREN

Sir, —George Bernard Shav is reported to have written recently to say "Pasteur is dead and milk tastes much nicer without him." So it does, and G.B.S. is right again as your correspondent M. A. MeArthur surmises. Nature intended bacteria to be present in milk, for the good of all who drink it, and mankind right through the ages has always drunk milk in its natural condition and over a thousand million primitive peoples still do so—to-day, to their advantage. The object of pasteurisation is to delay fermentation —by killing not all but some of the bacteria in milk, by heating it to IGO degrees or 170 degrees Fahrenheit, an unnatural temperature for bacterial life. Thus, when we drink pasteurised milk we drink milk plus some dead bacteria—milk minus some of its natural constituents. A far more satisfactory way of preventing bacterial fermentation is to put the bacteria to sleep—so to speak—by cooling the milk to. say, 40 degrees, a natural temperature that does not kill. After all. even if milk does ferment by excessive bacterial action, it thereby becomes, not less wholesome, but more so! Curds and whey, junket and the celebrated "koumiri" and "yoguit" of Eastern Europe and the "tyre" of India are all products of different stages in the bacterial fermentation of milk. Thomas A. F. Stone.