Switching off Cow’s Milk
You body and planet will thank you
Remember those old campaigns for milk?
Got Milk?
The campaign was created in an attempt to return America’s milk consumption to the heights it had once enjoyed.
It was started in the 90’s by the California Milk Processor Board, then taken over by the dairy farmers themselves. The campaign still runs today, but one has to wonder… who’s watching these commercials and doesn’t know anything about milk?
“I’ve heard of this stuff, but now that I’ve seen it in a Selma Hayek commercial I have to get my hands on some.”
Modern milk production has been abusing cows and the environment for decades, who’s left that’s unaware of it?
I think they persist because they want a return America to the glorious years when little Timmy and Sally had a glass of milk every evening with supper.
They’re whipping a dead cow trying to bring back an age that’s been lost to the sands of time. And good riddance I say.
Milk uses an enormous amount of land and water to produce, making it one of the least sustainable animal sourced products we produce.
Additionally, a cow is a very expensive animal to produce large quantities of. The expense is only made worse by the unbelievable amounts of carbon they belch into the atmosphere. The planet was never meant to house the amount of cows we’ve produced for our dairy needs.
Like with all the other products we farm from animals, the process of extracting it from the animal has become incredibly inhumane. Every year we’re trying to get more and more product from a single animal before it finally gives up and dies.
Our descendants will look back at our barbaric ways and slap their foreheads in thunderous unison.
Why do we bother with conventional milk?
As is the case with most things, we drink conventional milk because it’s what we’ve always done.
Many years ago someone thought to take something that didn’t belong to them. A man drank the milk a cow had produced with the intention of feeding to her calf, perhaps he was dying, we can’t know the circumstances. But we do know that he liked it.
Then a problem arose. The milk was making us sick because we weren’t the ones intended to drink it. Never mind, we figured out that heating it up before drinking it made the problems go away.
Years later, the human population had grown to the point that taking milk from cows without machines wasn’t fast enough.
This would have been the moment to switch to something else
We didn’t.
Instead we figured out that cows could be kept in tiny cages, tied up, and hooked onto machines. By playing with hormones and antibiotics, milk could be sucked from cows for years before it killed them.
Oh no, another problem. If I keep milk in my fridge for a week it goes bad.
Oh wait never mind, if I pump it with chemical preservatives it lasts much longer.
Dairy has been mastered, take that nature.
Making the switch
It may seem surprising, but I’m not actually against animal products entirely. There are parts of the world that still source milk ethically, and thank god for that.
Conventional milk is still essential for making standard cheese, and I do love an aged cheddar.
But I don’t think I love cheddar more than I despise how factory farmed cows are being treated. If gross mistreatment of animals is a pre-requisite for my cheese, I think I’d rather have thyme or parsley on my spaghetti instead.
We’d never be in this mess if we didn’t all want the same thing. Why do we all have to be drinking milk? Whatever happened to regional diets?
Let’s jazz things up and pour different liquids into our lattes. Better yet, let’s innovate these liquids from a source we haven’t relied on for hundreds of years. Let’s give cows a rest.
In all of human history we’ve never innovated at the rate we’re innovating today. Food must be the only technology left that still has products discovered by people that died thousands of years ago. If they were alive, I bet they’d be thinking,
“All these resources and you still bloody drink the milk from a cow?? What’s wrong with you people!”
What’s wrong indeed Mr. Dead Guy.
I’ve been searching for great recipes to replace my milk with, and I found this incredible recipe for Cashew Coconut Oak Milk. This is not an affiliate link, they do not know they’re being referenced in this article.
I just think this recipe is amazing. It froths up like conventional milk and doesn’t have any added oil, it’s really great. Oh, they don’t mention it in the article, but use cheesecloth to strain the ingredients. You might need to double layer the cheesecloth, but it works great.
Let’s not eat like people who drowned women to test whether they were witches. We’ve moved on with everything else, let’s do so with our food.
