The Milk Is Alive

My friend Fred Plotkin, author of numerous authoritative guides to Italy and music, especially opera, sent a link to this story, about an English dairy latching on to the treat-animals-nice movement to get itself some publicity. But it's about gelato, and music, so why resist.

The dairy, in Lancashire, imported an Italian tenor imported from Germany (where he lives) to sing to its cows and produce more lilting gelato. Why would the cows do this? Apparently it worked in Italy, where singing to the cows was an important part of the technique and recipe an immigrant Italian businessman according is using in England. A sign of what multi-culturalism and fluid borders can produce--and also, of course, global publicity thanks to the Web.

If massaging cows to produce tender Kobe beef can work--that is, if promulgating the myth can work--why not music? More fodder, of course, for parodists of happy-animals-make-happy-hamburgers farmers' tales. But then, I'll go anywhere for good gelato, not to mention English (and Irish!) dairy products. Maybe even Cockshotts Farm, near Clitheroe.