The Nourisher - Editor’s Blog

Thanks to Louisa for being a guest blogger. Her blog, Constant State of Flux, is inspiring and enjoyable. Stay tuned as she will be part of the Nourishing our Children Blogging project coming soon.

My family and I drink raw cows’ milk and use raw milk products every day; raw unsalted butter, cheese, creme fraîche, yoghurt and €˜curds and whey’, which I make at home from the milk. We live in the French Alps, which stills plays host to pasture-fed cows, sheep and goats. These animals, (520 cows, 250 sheep and 140 goats in our small valley alone) provide milk mainly for local cheese (Reblochon) production, which can be bought in speciality shops in the region and is exported all over the world. Our valley produces 2.6 million Reblochons per year from 2.8 million litres of raw milk. Some of that milk is put by every day at the fruitière for customers to fill their own bottles and take home to drink.

Sunny Autumn Cow

It is again the time of year when the air is filled with the dulcet tones of deep cow bells and large brown and white cows take up resident in make-shift fields around our small hamlet. They are all contained within clôtures - electric fences - that weave in and out of the chalets, using every square inch of available space and are moved every few days to a new, ungrazed patch of grass. Herds are made up typically of twenty cows, each possessing a resident bull, which you usually see quietly dozing in a corner; ring through nose. They will be here for another two weeks or so and then they will move on down to their winter quarters, further along the valley floor.

Every October and March, our surrounding fields become this kind of half-way house in a process called €˜transhumance’; the term, both in english and french, for the movement of livestock during the year - typically to higher pastures in summer and to lower valleys in winter. Cow owners have a permanent home in the valleys all year round, with a small group of herders and dogs living on the high pastures during the summer to tend to the livestock, a tough and sometimes dangerous job.

Our €˜brown and white cows’ on alpine pasture

Here, the tradition of transhumance has passed down from generation to generation intact - les chausées anciennes (the old routes) being trodden year after year. During May, the cows leave the low valley farms and are stationed out in these clôtures, where they stay at around 2,500 feet until the certainty of snow has disappeared. Then, after the first push of new spring grass has started in the alpine meadows, the cows move up to 5,000 feet where they stay all summer to feed on grass and flowers and produce milk. During summer, the cows are milked in open-air stables by machine at 6 a.m. every morning and 6 p.m. every evening, after being herded in from the surrounding pastures (before the advent of electricity, milking started at 3.30 a.m. and was done by hand). The milk is taken directly down to the fruitière in the village, where it is used to make cheese and here is where I buy my raw milk.

Furthermore, for the early part of the summer, my family and I can expect to eat the butter made from this pristine new grass growth, so prized by the locals of yesteryear and noted and analysed in the laboratories of Dr. Weston A. Price.
“When Dr. Price analysed this deep yellow butterfat, he found that it was exceptionally high in all the fat soluble vitamins, particularly vitamin A. He called these vitamins €˜catalysts’ or €˜activators’. Without them, according to Dr. Price, we are not able to utilise the minerals we ingest, no matter how abundant they are in our diet.€ - Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, p.17
When the cows return to the lower valley in early October, as the weather starts to get colder and risk of snow heightens, many local festivals are held to celebrate the cows’ safe homecoming. This tradition, held mainly for tourists nowadays, is the remnant of celebrations held since the dawn of transhumance, many, many generations ago. Cows’ horns are still adorned with tresses of late summer flowers, corn and wheat sheaves and celebrations revolve around long processions through the local villages, accompanied by the sound of accordions, alpen horns, singing and deep cow bells. Milk was held as something sacred to the people of the Alps, indeed all over ancient Europe, witnessed in the abundance of these ancient celebrations.

The brown and white cows found here are the Abondance breed, developed in the Haute Savoie region of France and whose milk is a wonderful 37.5% fat. The raw milk of this breed is used to make the famous Reblochon Cheese (The name “Reblochon€ comes from the word “reblocher“, which means “to milk again€ in the Savoyard dialect. This is interesting, because this cheese is still made from the creamier second milking of the day, resulting in milk containing more butterfat). Abondance cows were adapted for the extremes in temperature found in the Alps; needing no shade on the treeless pastures in summer, but still needing to be housed undercover during the harsh winters, eating hay. Indeed the size of the herd was, and still remains, dependent on the number of beasts that can be housed and fed undercover in winter. Traditionally, cows were kept under the dwellings of local people, their large bodies providing warmth for the householders. Indeed, only this year, our neighbour decided to build a large separate construction to house his livestock during the winter - every year previously, they were still to be found under his house all winter long.

Some traditions indeed take a long time to die out, usually with the passing on of the oldest generations as more and more young people move out to the cities in search of other jobs. Amongst the 28 milking enterprises in this valley, 18 are assured of continuation, 6 are under threat and at the end of this year, 6 will terminate. Sadly, this is happening as others in the Western World are only just discovering the benefits of drinking raw milk and some people, in America for instance, travel for hours to buy raw milk directly from the cow. How lucky I am to be able to travel 8 minutes to buy mine.

In America, milk sold in this way, in the States where it is legal, has to by law, be labelled as €˜pet food’. This denigration of one of the world’s most pristine foods, would mortify many a person involved in the dairying industry in this part of the world. But still the wheels and cogs of the €˜conglomerate-industrial-milking-machine’ grind on and we are moved further and further away from our birthright; natural, wholesome, healing food - produced in our own backyards.

The loss of the practise of transhumance would mean also the loss of the alpages and hundreds of ancient mountain hamlets, the loss of thousands of specialised plants, specialised fauna and the loss of a way of life that has survived here for millennia. But it is not all doom and gloom; although in France, small fruitières remain selling raw milk to a very small minority of locals, tourists purchase a huge amount of A.O.C. cheese every year. Unfortunately though, these are the very same tourists: skiers, walkers, climbers and cyclists who, year by year encroach on the land, as more and more space is developed into luxury chalet complexes. Happily though, the cows’ half-way-house grazing land remains safe from the bulldozers - pockets of space here and there amongst the chalets and gardens of the valley floor. This land is protected by law through A.O.C quality control from being built upon, even though it lies idle for 44 weeks of the year. This €˜idleness’ creates beautiful open vistas, which in other regions would have disappeared long ago under the digger’s greedy claw, to make way for miles of concrete.

So it seems I have the cows to thank today, not just for the good health of my family and I, but also for the stunning open spaces I see from my window as I write this post.

Perhaps butter fat candles were lit all year round in this 14th Century chapel at 3,000 feet

In the evening, cows become more interested in what you are doing

About the Author...

I am an english mummy living in the french Alps, I am a nourisher to my dear other half and two girls of five and two. I am just about to start homeschooling the girls and we aim to travel around Europe with them next year. We follow the WAP diet and live a slow life up here in the mountains.