Homegrown tomatoes should be considered a gateway drug. The first taste is ecstasy and afterward life without them seems intolerably bland. Soon you’re trying anything that can be grown in a backyard or sold at a Farmers Market. Backyard real estate once occupied by flowers or grass is tilled under and put into production. Your habit may be expensive, but you’ll do anything to feed it.

So I’d found myself in this advanced state of addiction to local, fresh food when I looked in our frig and wondered, “What about milk?”

More than two years ago, I read this article in The New York Times about the growing market for raw milk, as opposed to the pasteurized variety available in stores.

Pasteurization involves heating and quickly cooling milk to kill pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.

Raw milk drinkers, however, argue that the process also destroys beneficial bacteria, proteins and enzymes that contribute to a stronger immune system and better digestive health.

Interstate sales of raw milk were banned 20 years ago by the Food and Drug Administration, but regulation is up to the states.

In Colorado, the sale of raw milk is illegal but the “work around” is to buy a share of a cow. In compensation for paying the bovine’s room and board, shareholders receive milk.

I was drawn to the idea for several reasons. I keep learning about more and more people my age suffering from nebulous immune disorders, which, it is theorized, can result from growing up in an overly sanitized environment. Because the body doesn’t know benign bugs from bad ones, it can’t respond appropriately. See this entry on The New York Times’ Well blog for more about that. So there’s certainly a parsimony of logic to me in the raw-milk-equals-good-bacteria-equals-better-health argument.

Then there’s the environmental argument. Even when I buy organic milk, it still comes from cows that reside who knows where. It has to be put in plastic jugs and driven hundreds of miles to my store. I recycle the jugs but that still consumes resources in transportation and processing.

Finally, there’s keeping it local. I want my consumer dollar going to someone I’ve met, in the community where I live.

So with this impetus, I started to investigate. According to realmilk.com, there are two raw milk providers in the Durango area, Nativo Farms and James Ranch. I called both and had all my questions answered with utmost friendliness and helpfulness. James Ranch’s cow share program is a little more costly and closes down in the winter. Nativo Farms is operating for the first time through the winter this year. So two weeks ago I signed the contract and made my first pick-up at Nativo Farms, located a couple miles south of Elmore’s Corner. (Nativo Farms now has a waiting list, according to the Web site).

This is how the economics broke down: for a one-time payment of $5, a $5 bottle fee and a $39 monthly fee for a share and half, we get a gallon and a half of raw milk a week. After start-up, it breaks down to not much more than I was paying for the organic stuff at the grocery store.

Raw milk enthusiasts have described the taste as richer, creamier and more complex. Personally, since we already were drinking whole milk, I didn’t find it much different in thickness or richness. But there is an extra dimension that is difficult to describe. It’s like milk, but more vividly, more intensely so. My 3-year-old seems oblivious to any nuanced flavor differences and chugs it with the same happy abandon as the store-bought stuff.

I won’t argue that pasteurization hasn’t played a valuable public safety role, but I think it comes down to the farm and the farmer. I’d rather trust a person I can meet and a place I can see than a faceless industry. But maybe that’s just the addict in me speaking.