Dairy Foods and Paleo

I’m not a pure paleo, nor will I ever be one. I just want to eat real food, and I’ve found that mostly sticking to paleolithic foods helps me feel better and control my weight. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been adhering more closely than I have for a while, but one place that I do not adhere is dairy. While I agree that there’s no way to justify dairy as a paleolithic food, I still eat it. I do impose limits, however.

I have gone off all pasteurized fluid milk products (I have a raw milk share), and I only eat real cheese. If it contains anything other than milk and cream, culture or enzymes and herbs, spices or annatto, it’s not real. This means that I mostly don’t eat cheese away from home, and if my budget allowed for it, I’d only eat raw milk cheeses. There are a some places I eat that I’m confident serve actual provolone, swiss, cheddar or mozzarella cheese, but I don’t just indiscriminately eat something simply referred to as “cheese.” Generally, that’s processed American cheese, which won’t qualify.

Sour cream is another place where all manner of crap can be added – even in a product that you’d consider “real” sour cream. At this point, I only buy Daisy brand because it’s the only brand I can find locally that contains nothing but cultured Grade A cream.

Seriously, check out the labels – you’d be surprised how much crap is in typical cream cheese or even sour cream. At a minimum, they typically contain vegetable gums (yes, even full fat products). Many contain skim milk that may have been powdered and probably contains oxidized cholesterol (added for body). I used to think stuff like carrageenan and polysorbate-80 were harmless, but my digestive system seems to think otherwise.

Those gums are part of the problem with cream. Believe it or not, it’s become almost impossible to purchase non-UHT, vegetable gum and preservative-free cream in a supermarket. All the organic stuff is UHT, and all the non-organic that isn’t UHT has a bunch of crap in it.

Since Whole Foods is a 100 mile round trip, and I don’t want cream badly enough to pay $4 per pint for it from a local butcher shop that can order it for me, I mostly do without. There’s some on my raw milk share, of course, sometimes a lot, but in the interest of not having a bunch of skimmed milk I don’t want, I consume it with the milk now. I found some fabulous coconut milk for coffee, something I mentioned a short while ago.

It’s not that I think the $4 is too much for this particular cream, but having to order it ahead and pick it up during a narrow window of hours at a shop that’s off the beaten path? All of that means the price is too high. If I could buy it in the supermarket, I would not hesitate to pay $4 a pint for local, grass-fed, regular-temp pasteurized cream.

This is kind of a jumping off point for more posts on my deviations from paleo. I started with this one because I think that while I differ on this issue, the pure Paleo eaters are right – it’s a Neolithic food. The other two points of contention I have, Intermittent Fasting and Omega-3 supplementation, I feel more justified in bitching about.