This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

Here are the details about the dairy and eggs that we eat.

Dairy:

Our overriding principle with dairy is that we only eat full-fat* foods that are as pure in ingredient as we can get them.  We also try to stick to our “local, sustainable, organic” considerations with dairy although this category is a bit harder for us.

Milk:  We buy our milk from a local farmer.  The cows live in the pasture for most of the year (as long as the grass is growing), are not fed antibiotics or growth hormones, and are part of a rotational grazing system (the cows eat the grass and so they poop, then they’re moved to another field and the chickens are moved in to eat the bugs that hatch in the manure, etc).

We buy whole milk but the farmer doesn’t take any fat out (or add any in) to make it the standardized “whole milk” fat content.  So the fat content varies throughout the year depending on what the cows are eating.  Our milk is expensive and we don’t drink a lot of it.  Ellie drinks the most out of all of us (particularly now that I’m not making any milk due to being pregnant).  I drink a glass every day.  We use a gallon a week for a family of three.  (I’m not sure how that compares to most families’ milk consumption.)  We also make sure we never waste any of it.  So if we have any left by the end of the week, I freeze it to use for baking or cooking.

Yogurt:  Either I make it for us (with milk we buy from our farmer) or we buy organic plain whole milk yogurt, which can be hard to find.  We usually get it from Trader Joe’s or recently, we found the Stoneyfield brand at the Giant near us (it’s hard to find Stoneyfield plain whole milk yogurt).  I think plain full fat yogurt must not be very popular.

Cheese:  This is an area that we still haven’t fully figured out.  Local cheese is super expensive and because we eat a lot of cheese, we really can’t afford to buy it locally all the time.  We do splurge on local cheese from time to time – for example, Nik loves the smoked cheddar from Broom’s Bloom.  So this one is still a work in progress.  But here’s what we do right now:

The main cheese we eat is cheddar.  We could also buy cheddar from our milk farmer but it’s really expensive (beyond our budget) and we don’t like the taste of it. So our compromise is to buy Cabot cheddar.  It’s a co-op, the cheese is delicious, and the milk doesn’t have growth hormones – not perfect by any means but OK for now.

We also eat some feta and kefalotiri (similar to Parmesan, but Greek).  Both of these cheeses are imported and we buy them from Prima Foods, the local Greek store.  We probably wouldn’t buy these except…we’re Greek!

Occasionally, when we make pizza, we buy fresh mozzarella (made daily!) from Mastellone’s, which is just a few blocks from us.  It’s far more expensive than store-bought mozzarella, so we’ve learned to appreciate pizza with minimal cheese because wow, is that mozzarella DELICIOUS!!  Mozzarella is high on my list of “foods to try to make”.  It’s supposed to be really easy.

Sour cream:  We don’t eat a ton of sour cream but this is still a frustrating item for me.  We’ve actually ended up buying the the Daisy (cheap) brand from our local grocery store because it’s the only kind we can find that’s affordable and also made only from cultured cream.  So many other brands (including the expensive organic ones) have multiple ingredients, including thickening agents.  I know we can easily make our own so we probably will at some point either make sour cream or creme fraiche.  I know my brother and his family, who live in England, use Greek (thick) yogurt as an alternative to sour cream.  So we might switch to that also.

Butter:  We buy the Trader Joe’s organic butter (both salted and unsalted).  Again, this is a case where we could buy butter from our milk farmer but it costs twice as much.  Some day, I aspire to buying local butter (just like local cheese) but not now.  Organic butter is also harder to find in our local grocery stores.

Other dairy items:  We very rarely use cream, half and half, or cream cheese.  We’re not coffee or tea drinkers and we just have butter on our bagels.  When I do need these items, usually for baking special desserts, I buy the cream and half and half from the farmer’s market and cream cheese from the grocery store (usually Trader Joe’s).  I usually try to avoid cream cheese actually because it’s practically impossible to find it without sketchy, unpronounceable ingredients.  I need to learn to make it myself!

Eggs:

We buy our eggs from the same farmer that we buy our milk from.  The chickens are pastured and the eggs they produce have amazingly yellow yolks from all the bugs they eat.  I wrote more about our eggs here if you want to read more about them.  We eat about three dozen eggs a week.  To me, that seems like a TON of eggs for a family of three but ever since I got pregnant with Ellie (and subsequently breastfeeding and then pregnant again), I feel sick in the morning if I don’t eat eggs.**  So I eat two eggs for breakfast every day and Ellie eats eggs with me too.  Add in Nik eating them occasionally, plus cooking and baking, and that’s a lot of eggs.

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*I know that the two main concerns about eating full-fat dairy (or full-fat anything for that matter) are weight gain and high cholesterol.  For Nik and I, we found that once we started eating full-fat dairy, we actually lost weight, not gained it.  I think this is because full-fat dairy actually tastes good and satisfies us more quickly.  So we tend to eat more sensible portions of all of our food, controlling calories, which ultimately is what determines weight gain or loss.  Our cholesterol levels are also fine. (I know cholesterol and what causes high cholesterol is a HUGE debate in the medical/nutritional world, which is why I’m not going to say anything more about that!)

**Eggs are a great source of protein and I know that’s the need that eggs fill for me in the morning.  I have struggled to find a plant-based source of protein that is palatable to me in the morning and that also keeps me from feeling sick.  One of these days, I would like to wean myself off of eating so many eggs, if for no other reason than I do get tired of eating them!

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A crazy article about how much milk is wasted every year in America (about 800,000 cows worth of milk every year).