Organic Yogurt
The Atlantic‘s October issue has a short article — unfortunately not available online — on “big organic, small organic”. It’s a compare and contrast between the small Butterworks Farms and the almost industrial Stonyfield Farms. It’s a battle of the organic yogurt producers!
The article’s lead point is that
Flavor, in fact, seems to have fallen fairly far down the list of what motivates consumers and producers of organic food: health concerns and simple market share are taking priority, not only over flavor but also over the environment.
Butterworks is hailed as the small company where you can still taste the grazing season of the cows in the yogurt. It’s only distributed on the East Coast, down to about Raleigh-Durham, because there are no additional additives like pectin to give it greater stability during transportation. Stonyfield is depicted as the company that has brought organic yogurt to the masses, and donates part of its burgeoning market share to good causes. Making and distributing organic yogurt this widely requires compromises, though: it adds sugar, markets flavors with mass market appeal, uses pectin and other stabilizers.
All this isn’t that remarkable: interesting local flavors are attenuated when marketed widely, partially for logistical reasons, partially because mass tastes are geared towards a (possibly lower) denominator. Unlike, say, some of the French, I’m neither here nor there on this issue: I think it’s great we have tomatoes and oranges in the dead of winter. And relatively cheap, too. Ultimately, the choice of whether one buys the local produce or the vegetables shipped across continents from industrial farms is one that takes place in the market. At least we have the freedom to pick one or the other, depending on what our needs and tastes are for that day.
Anyway, the main thing that caught my eye about Stonyfield’s yogurt is that they’ve bred their bacteria over time to be less sour, less acidic. This fact may explain a problem I had last month when I was making yogurt and used some plain Stonyfield as my starter. For two weeks, repeated attempts at yogurt fermentation failed miserably. Everything got back to normal after that, and I’ve been using the whey from the previous batch as starter for the next batch. The difference is that when my yogurt was failing, I had opened the Stonyfield container and ate that for a few days before trying to make my own — I was using the yogurt left at the bottom of the container for the starter — and when it succeeded, I took the starter from the top, right after opening the container. Possibly, I kept contaminating the starter. If Stonyfield yogurt is engineered to be less acidic, then it’ll be less resistant to stray bacteria. The reason it’s OK to let milk sit at 110 degrees on your kitchen counter for half a day is because L. acidophilus and bifidus lower the pH of the milk enough to kill off their competitors. Presumably, my way of using Stonyfield as starter left the yogurt environment at a knife’s edge, where successful fermentation depending on the chance that bacteria won’t land on the yogurt before I got to it.
I should pick up the Butterworks yogurt to give it a try. If only to see what difference the more acid bacteria would make for my own yogurt production. It’s available at Fairway. I can give it a whirl with whole organic milk also, but, I don’t see the need with local store-bought milk. It’ll all be pastuerized anyway.
Entertainingly, that issue of the Atlantic also has a discussion about whether “frankenfoods” will save the world: genetically modified foods lead to reductions in pesticide use, soil depletion, erosion, etc., whereas traditional farming methods, such as those practiced by organic farmers who eschew GMO crops, can have a relatively heavy footprint on Mother Earth. Given that world population isn’t going to peak for the next fifty years, where is all that food going to come from? Without GMOs, it means that forests will have to be cut down, low quality farmland exploited, and so on. Go GMOs!