I'm not complaining about the use of (AI) tools per se, which is fine I guess.
Something feels off. Somewhere between a little-off to a bit-more-off. Sorry. I'm trying to find the right words... Perhaps a bit too polished? (Can there be such a thing?)
The cow is the index case of microbiome über alles, that is the cow cannot digest grass at all but rather it is colonized with bacteria that eat the grass and then the cow eats the bacteria and the volatile fatty acids made by the bacteria.
Another pathway is to start with 35% fat cream or crème fraiche and make butter. Then you use the buttermilk to make cheese. Then you use the whey to make Norwegian cheese OR if you started with crème fraiche you take the sour whey and make sorbet by mixing it with some fruit juice and shaking the container every hour or so as it freezes in the freezer.
It's not nearly as time-consuming as it sounds and the rewards are better than anything you'd buy. The butter is better (less water within), the paneer and ricotta are so much better than factory-made, and the sorbet is... well probably about equal to sour cream sorbet you'd buy (assuming you buy movenpick :).
— Carl Sagan
Let's also not forget that the article basically skips what rennet actually is just naming it an enzyme.
Toned homogenised milk is just a thin watery gruel colored white. For me Half'nHalf is about the right consistency but you can't get it unhomogenized.
That said, cannot not post this mandatory calvin and hobbes strip
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3Qdxv...
Is that... controversial? Obviously a cow normally gives milk without being pregnant. It wouldn't be able to feed its calf otherwise.
That said, if you don't want the calf, there's almost always going to be someone that does. We'd raise and then butcher the male calves from our milking cows. (We did milk the cows for commercial purposes).
I also grew up on a cattle farm and have made many other products when I was younger from raw milk. There are /some/ things that require raw milk because they are wild cultured, but most food products are not wild cultured when made at home so you can pitch the correct yeast or bacteria with pasteurized milk just fine. One thing that is hard to find in the US and impossible to make without raw milk is Serbian/Turkish kajmak/kaymak.
I even make my own butter at home using ultra processed heavy whipping cream. Raw milk is a great thing in some ways, but it is not in others and in any case not really a requirement to make milk products at home.
But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.
Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...
[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...
[3] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
Cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs.
Consider how imagery of a farmer inseminating a cow with his arm disappearing up some tract or fitting a spike to the baby so it can't drink its mom's milk -- or farm conditions in general -- are basically shock footage that people are insulated from until they maybe chance upon a movie like Dominion.
>Even boiled milk is awful What does this have to do with homogenization? I wouldn't want boiled milk either unless it was to be used in a soup or something.
Are you confusing homogenization with pasteurization?
But there's so much to the linguistics of animal husbandry and dairy that many folks don't know. It goes way deeper than just the milk-oriented terms in the article: Heifer versus cow, freshening and calving, steer versus ox versus bull, AI (not the LLM kind) versus natural service, the barn, parlor, and pasture, and more. Plus plenty of technical knowledge. If you're not hand milking, how many mmHg of negative pressure should you use? Do you use a surcingle, or a claw, or a robot?
Even in the milk-oriented terms, there are others not covered by the article. HTST and UHT aren't the only options, there's also LTLT. Pasteurization can be done in a pipeline, or in a vat. Smaller vats for home and small farm usage can be multi-purpose: I pasteurized milk and cultured yogurt in mine. Some folks even care about the specific proteins (A1 beta-casein versus A2), which is genetically determined by the cow (and can be bred for).
I got a cow in 2020 and there was a lot to learn.
I think a lot of people don't realize we're hijacking their reproductive systems, instead assuming cows constantly produce milk.
One could argue there's more suffering in a glass of milk than a steak, which makes ethical vegetarianism flawed despite its good intentions.
These are not sapient beings that are capable of looking out for their own well-being. We've bred that out of them over hundreds of human generations.
For example, if you want to make yogurt then grab a little bit of the leftover yogurt in your fridge, drop a dollop of it in, and viola, it'll start the yogurtification process.
You can also rely on the open-air bacteria for some culturing, but the results can be all over the place. This is how a lot of sites suggest starting sour dough.
The gestation period of a cow is approximately 9 months, similar to humans, by coincidence. Only a cow that has given birth to a calf will produce milk. The normal lactation period is 305 days before the cow is "dried up" before giving birth again. 10,000 pounds of milk is considered a good lactation total. Typically, cows are bred to calve once per year. Typically going through 10 lactations before that one way trip to MacDonald's.
Dairy bulls are notoriously nasty creatures, so artificial insemination is almost universal in the dairy industry. The "tract" that you speak of is the cow's colon. The technician is careful to guide the pipette so as not to injure the animal, and the colon provides convenient access to feel what is going on inside.
If you are squeamish about such things as cow's colons, then vet school is not for you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...
I'd liken it to claiming an anti-measles-vax person is aware of the risks of measles. They might not believe in the risk at all.
If people were drinking raw milk directly out of the udder, in a clean environment and blessed with a baby cow's immune system and microbiome, that would be pertinent, but they aren't. Even human breast milk extracted in a clean environment with sanitized tools gets risky very quickly when stored.
Am I misinterpreting you here? You're saying most people think cows are bred (you know, what causes pregnancy), and presumably think that that calves are born — I've never met anyone who didn't know what a calf is, but somehow don't realize that pregnancy happens inbetween?
What I find quite bizarre that in India (where I am from) milk is considered ethically vegetarian whereas unfertilized chicken eggs are not.
But the weirdest experience I have ever had was at the main Google cafeteria. One gentleman with a steak on his fresh plate was quizzing the attendant at length to be sure that the mashed potato was vegan. After many months of thinking I found a plausible reason.
Not just that. A cow couldn't be a cow if she hadn't become pregnant.
e.g. "[They might assume] cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs."
It's normal to never really think about it -- our society is set up so that you never have to. The secretion comes in a jug, the meat comes in cellophane, and that's it.
But that's not how it works. Every single milk-producing cow must have been pregnant at least once, and typically several times in its life to keep producing desired amounts of milk. And the calves are an unwanted byproduct that must be taken away. At least they're not shredded in a big blender like the male chicks of egg-laying chicken breeds are.
Where else are you going to get them from? A calf factory?
> And the calves are an unwanted byproduct
Am I misinterpreting you again? Heifer calves are the prized possession that ensures that your dairy continues into the future. Cows don't last forever (or even all that long).
You maybe had a stronger case for bull calves, but now that modern breeding can select for heifers with ~90% confidence, that's hardly an issue anymore. And, I mean, in this day of age of high-priced beef, even if you get the occasional bull you're not exactly complaining either.
May you expend on this? I know we kinda have selection techniques for eggs to crush them before hatch but I guess that’s not what’s happening with milk caws as the diary is the main target and the cow need to give birth to start lactation. Or perhaps it’s the impregnating technique or some hormone therapy that tricks the odds?
> in this day of age of high-priced beef, even if you get the occasional bull you're not exactly complaining either.
I depends on the breed: in this days of high volume diary and meat consumption, most of what people eat comes from specialised breeds that hare very good at producing milk OR muscle. The non-desired sexed are not so valuable. Switzerland (and others countries I can’t remembers) recently passed a calves handling low to require farmers caring them for a minimum days in response to industrial sloped into unethical territories.
That documentary shows another practice in India : some invaluable calve are just roped to a fence and forget until dehydration. https://christspiracy.com
In late 2024 I was shopping for milk when I started wondering how many cows -- or how many days -- it would take to produce my 1.5L bottle. I looked it up and found that the most productive dairy cows can yield fifty litres per day at their peak. Which means my bottle took roughly 43 minutes to produce. 43 minutes!!
My first reaction was that milk must be absurdly overpriced. If one cow can produce fifty litres a day, how is supply ever a problem? But that question quickly got overtaken by a different one. I was standing in the dairy aisle looking at the yoghurt, the cheese, the butter, the cream, the condensed milk, the powder, the ghee.. and it hit me -- hold on. This is all from milk? ALL of it? The same white liquid? How?
So I spent a few weekends Googling, and the answer was way more complicated than I expected. This post is me documenting that rabbit hole.
People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Why can't we just.. do that?
Short answer: raw milk can carry salmonella, E. coli, and listeria, among other things. Before pasteurisation was widespread, diseases spread through raw milk were a genuine public health crisis. So yeah, we process it. But the processing is where things get interesting.
Once milk comes out of the cow, it's cooled immediately to slow bacteria, tested for pathogens, then clarified -- basically filtered to get rid of dirt and debris. Clarified milk is technically the first product -- clean, raw milk ready for processing. Standard stuff so far.
Dairy Production Process
Simple enough so far. Five steps from cow to clarified milk.
Then comes the first surprise. Milk isn't just one thing -- it's a complex mix of fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals all suspended in water. The next step, separation, spins the milk in a centrifuge and splits it into two streams: skim milk and cream -- the first of many divergences in the dairy production process.
From there, standardisation adds cream back into the skim milk to hit a target fat percentage. 3-4% fat? Whole milk. 18-40%? Light cream. Low fat? Just less cream added back -- that's the light blue cap in NZ and Australia.
Dairy Production Process
One fork and already we've got six products. But we're just getting started.
Now we need to make it safe for the trip to your fridge. Pasteurisation -- named after Louis Pasteur -- heats the milk enough to kill harmful bacteria, then cools it back down. The standard method is HTST. There's also UHT -- or long life milk as most people call it -- which can sit on a shelf for months without refrigeration, which is why in much of Europe, South America, and Asia, milk comes in shelf-stable cartons rather than refrigerated bottles.
Then homogenisation forces the milk through a narrow valve gap under extreme pressure, breaking the fat globules into tiny, evenly dispersed particles. Without this step, the cream would float to the top and separate in the bottle.
Fat globules forced through a narrow valve gap under extreme pressure, breaking into tiny uniform particles.
Package it, ship it, and that's your milk. I thought I was done. But then I looked at the rest of the dairy aisle.
This is where one liquid becomes dozens of products. Remember those two streams from separation -- skim milk and cream? Each one branches into its own tree, and it's.. a lot.
The cream tree is the simpler one. Pasteurise the cream, cool it, then churn it. Churning ruptures the fat globule membranes so the fat clumps together and separates from the liquid. The temperature matters (typically 10-18 degrees C depending on season and cream composition) -- too warm and you get greasy butter with poor texture.
Want buttermilk? Drain the liquid after churning -- that's traditional buttermilk. Want butter? Keep working the solid fat, add some salt, shape it. Want ghee? Heat that butter to remove all remaining moisture and milk solids -- pure clarified butterfat, massive in Indian cooking.
Back on the milk side, things fork again after pasteurisation:
1. Through evaporation; remove the water and you get condensed milk. Add sugar and you get sweetened condensed milk. Keep drying it further with spray drying and you get milk powder -- the stuff you can reconstitute back into liquid milk with just water.
2. Through cultures; add bacterial cultures to pasteurised milk, incubate it, let it ferment. That's yoghurt. Same basic principle gives you kefir (different cultures, tangier, drinkable) and sour cream (cultured cream instead of milk).
3. Through coagulation; this is the cheese path, and it's the most complex branch of all. Coagulation is the process of turning liquid milk into a semi-solid mass -- essentially forcing the proteins to clump together and trap the fat, forming a gel-like structure that can be cut and drained.
Cheese starts with milk -- either raw or pasteurised, depending on the variety and local regulations. You add bacterial cultures to develop flavour, then add rennet (an enzyme) or acid to coagulate the milk. This separates it into curds (the solid bits -- mostly casein protein and fat) and whey (the liquid).
From here, the amount of heating, stirring, draining, salting, pressing, and ageing determines what kind of cheese you end up with:
There are over 2,000 named cheese varieties worldwide -- some counts go as high as 4,000 depending on how you classify regional variants. All from the same white liquid, just processed differently. Same starting point, wildly different results.
And the whey -- the liquid leftover from cheesemaking? For most of history, smaller producers found uses for it. Ricotta is literally "recooked" whey. But when industrial cheesemaking scaled up in the 20th century, factories were generating far more whey than anyone could use, and a lot of it ended up in rivers (NO WHEY!! pun intended).
Then the sports nutrition industry happened. Today, whey protein is filtered and processed into the stuff in your protein shakes -- a market worth roughly US$10 billion and growing fast. A derivative called lactoferrin now sells for US$200-500 per kilogram -- it's a glycoprotein with antimicrobial properties and there's very little of it per litre of whey, so extracting it is expensive. From river pollution to premium ingredient. Quite the rebrand.
Here's the full picture -- every path from cow to end product.
Dairy Production Process
The complete dairy production tree. One input, dozens of outputs.
I do this for the love of writing — each subscriber costs me money. But please subscribe anyway and spread the word.
Other ingredients have impressive product trees too. Soybeans give you tofu, tempeh, miso, soy sauce, soy milk, soy oil, lecithin, biodiesel. Corn gives you starch, syrup, ethanol, tortillas, bourbon. Both are versatile. But milk does something different.
Think of it like a skill tree in an RPG. Soy and corn are like ingredients where you pick one processing path and follow it to an end product. Milk is the one where each unlock opens three more unlocks, because you can pull it apart in multiple independent ways. Here's why.
Milk is three things at once:
Most foods are one of these. Milk is all three simultaneously. And each one responds to a different separation method:
Four independent methods, each producing intermediates that branch further. Soy and corn can be processed in many ways, but they don't separate into independent streams like this. That's what makes milk's product tree uniquely deep.
The world produces nearly 1 billion tonnes of milk per year. From around 270 million dairy cows.
And here's where I get to rep the homeland. New Zealand -- population 5 million, roughly 10 million dairy cows -- is the world's largest dairy exporter, shipping roughly 95% of its milk overseas. Fonterra alone handles about 30% of the world's dairy exports. The entire country basically runs on cows. As a Kiwi, I find it genuinely hilarious that our biggest flex on the global stage is milk.
The conversion ratios are what got me though. 1 kg of cheese takes about 10 litres of milk (parmigiano-reggiano takes 16). 1 kg of butter takes about 21 litres. 1 kg of ghee takes about 30. That wheel of parmigiano at the deli? Around 36 kg, roughly 550 litres of milk, then aged 12 to 36 months.
Speaking of parmigiano -- Italian banks accept the wheels as collateral for loans. Credito Emiliano has been doing this since 1953. They hold around 440,000 wheels in temperature-controlled vaults. The cheese ages, increases in value, and the bank clips interest. Your parmesan is literally bankable.
The global dairy industry is worth roughly US$800-900 billion -- the second or third largest food industry on earth.
I assumed milk was just a food thing. Nope. Casein -- the protein that makes up about 80% of milk's protein content -- has been used industrially for over a century:
Humans first started processing milk roughly 8,000-10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Cheese residues have been found in 7,000-year-old pottery. That's older than the wheel. Older than writing.
Here's the thing -- roughly 65% of the world's adults can't properly digest lactose after infancy. Being able to drink milk as an adult -- lactase persistence -- is the genetic adaptation, not the default. Which means early humans were almost certainly making cheese before they could comfortably drink milk. When you age cheese, bacterial cultures convert the lactose into lactic acid -- the longer the ageing, the less lactose remains. Hard aged cheeses like cheddar or parmigiano have virtually none.
We didn't wait for our biology to catch up. We just.. engineered around it. Thousands of years before anyone knew what an enzyme was.
I went into this thinking dairy was simple. Milk the cow, filter it, put it in a bottle, done. Turns out from that one output you can get fluid milk, cream, butter, buttermilk, ghee, yoghurt, kefir, sour cream, dozens of cheeses, condensed milk, milk powder, whey protein -- and apparently also paint, glue, plastic, and pharmaceuticals.
50+ distinct commercial products. One animal. One liquid. I don't know which freak first looked at a cow and thought "I wonder what happens if I squeeze that and then leave the results in a cave for six months," but I'm glad they did.
PS: If someone tells you they prefer raw milk because it's "more natural" or "less processed" -- send them this article. Specifically the bit about salmonella, E. coli, and listeria.
Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and do not represent any other parties.