Culture: Milk

“You’ll really learn to appreciate the simple things in life'” were words we heard over and over as we packed our things to move to Mali.  We have certainly learned to appreciate so much during our past 17 months, but one of those ‘simple things’ we’ve particularly come to appreciate is the luxury of cold milk –readily available and disease free. Ah, America.

In Mali on the other hand, any time you want to buy milk, you need to go on a mini-adventure. Milk is sold almost exclusively by the Fula or Fulani people, nomadic cow herders who live with their lives’ possessions on their backs and move along hundreds of miles of grazing paths from Northern to Southern Mali.  They never stay in one place for long since their cows constantly require new sources of food from the dry, dusty land. The fulane are truly an interesting people. With distinct traditional makeup, jewelry, and style of dress, it is easy to identify individuals who below to their ethnic group. However, the big ‘give-away’ is that the women usually have two calabashes balanced on their heads, one of fresh milk, one of soured milk –all for sale.

Therfore, buying milk offers the following challenges:

1. You often must seek out these nomadic milk merchants yourself if you want to purchase milk. Its only in regional capitals that you can find stores that sell milk.

2. Fresh milk (literally straight from the cow) is only available from 8:30-10am in the morning, if 10 am passes and you havn’t boiled it yet, it turns sour. Malians still cook with sour milk (somewhat like yogurt), but we’re not big fans.

3. All milk must be boiled before consuming to kill any tuberculosis that could be living inside.

4. Even after boiling, we have no refrigerator to put the milk in, so it must be consumed warm and within 3 hours of boiling or it will spoil.

5. You can only buy milk 5 months of the year. Since rainy season only supplies cows with ample feed for 4-5 months, they only produce large amounts of milk for 4-5 months. Once cows get a few months into dry season, they start losing weight due to the scarcity of food and often have to be herded for miles before they can even find a watering hole. Therefore, since the cows barely have enough milk for their young, it is practically impossible to find milk from Dec – May.

Since obtaining fresh milk in Mali is such hard work, we often don't bother. Even when we do want it for dinner, we often forget about it until 11am when its no longer available! However, luckily, powdered milk is readily available so we can use that for a lot of recipes.  Anyways, the moral of the story is, when you savor your next glass of cold pasteurized 2% milk, remember how blessed you are to have something so seemingly simple constantly available to you :)

Thanks for reading,

~Joye (and James)