The article itself is informative... But the diagrams, the low contrast on the web page, the font sizes, even some of the writing sounds...umm... AI-driven
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?)
You can do some of this at home too. I buy raw milk (it's common here in Switzerland) and make paneer or ricotta. Then I boil down the whey and make a fudge-like Norwegian cheese.
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 :).
You don't actually need raw milk to make yogurt. I use Fairlife brand which is ultra-filtered milk, and combine it with a container of plain Fage (active culture Greek yogurt) in a pressure cooker. This is a very common way to make yogurt at home here in the US.
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.
Easiest place to get it is from the product you want to produce.
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.
For industrial farms, yeah I think that calf doesn't have a happy ending.
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).
Thank you. I was a little bit disappointed that these more sinister parts were occluded but I guess that is to be expected after all, the dairy industry spends insane amounts of money to keep us gaslighted. Just ask somebody if cows give milk without being pregnant...
Let's also not forget that the article basically skips what rennet actually is just naming it an enzyme.
I think there's a linguistically-driven temporal misunderstanding happening here. A cow couldn't have a calf if it hadn't become pregnant.
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’m curious curious, what’s the English term for a female calf that lived more that two years and didn’t experience pregnancy? Never heard such a term in any language.
I don't think people are kept abreast of the realities of animal farming in general.
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.
I didn't want to put a spiked nose ring on the first calf born on my small farm because of the visual shock. Its mother didn't kick the calf off as it grew up. The calf wouldn't stop nursing, kept the cow in milk for far too long, and I believe eventually caused her death.
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.
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.
A cow must have been pregnant to produce milk. So it's artificially inseminated and the calf separated (so as not to steal valuable milk) which is arguably traumatic to both the mother and the calf. Most modern people, if they've ever even thought about it at all, likely think that cows are bred to (or naturally do) produce milk without pregnancy being involved, like sheep are bred to grow wool around the year.
> Most people think that cows are simply bred to produce milk without pregnancy
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?
Yes, you're misinterpreting me. Breeding involves making calves, obviously. But once you get the hypothetical continuously-milk-producing cows, they don't have to make calves. Making more cows can be delegated to cows specialized to making more cows, so cows producing milk for humans can do that without inconvenient pregnancies.
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.
As I said, I doubt most people think about this at all. But if they do, I find it an entirely reasonable assumption that, as I said, if cows could make milk without making calves, in modern industrial farming the calves would be made by individuals that only make calves, and milk would be made by individuals that only make milk, for efficiency reasons. That's what I would assume, probably.
> One could argue there's more suffering in a glass of milk than a steak
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.
> After many months of thinking I found a plausible reason.
Is it because protocarnivorous potato varieties are higher in alkaloids, which can be problematic for some people? Understandably most people probably have never had a reason to consider if the potato on their plate ate meat or not, but when you have special dietary needs you often have to navigate the world a bit differently.
I know a number of people who have allergies to some animal products (notably eggs or dairy). Given the growing familiarity with (and catering to) vegan diets, they find it much easier to use "is it vegan" as a shortcut to "can I eat this" rather than interrogate food workers about specific ingredients.
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.
A sidenote about unhomogenized milk, it's delicious. I don't know if it actually tastes any different, but something about shaking it up before using it just makes it feel different.
Half and Half is too much cream for most people. I've met someone who drank it constantly, but she was a former New York City Ballet dancer, with a very high metabolic rate, struggling to keep her weight up.
Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
It may have a higher % of fat. Have you tried to compare it with 95% milk and 5% dairy cream? (I'm not sure about the proportions.) Also, the pasteurization for long term unrefrigerated storage change the taste, so you can try with milk pasteurized for short term storage under refrigeration.
I'm in the US, so I'm speaking only about pasteurized for short term refrigeration. There are places that produce that, just without the homogenization.
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
I grew up with homogenized milk, and the mere smell of unhomogenized milk makes me want to vomit. Even boiled milk is awful. Unhomogenized cow milk was slightly more tolerable than unhomogenized ox milk.
Incredibly confused by this comment. Does homogenization alter the smell?
>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?
We buy 1L bottles of fresh whole milk from the local dairy, and there is always a thick layer of cream on the top, unlike store-bought whole milk that seems to be missing the cream.
I was at the off-grid farm of one of our area's premiere hippie mamas and she took me to her cow barn/milking parlor which had chickens running around and plenty of chicken crap. She told me she'd offer me some milk if her cows weren't dry which saved me the need to refuse the offer.
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]
That will vary by person. My father-in-law bred and milked pedigreed Holsteins. They had a 1 gallon pasteurizer and would just dip a gallon out of the bulk tank for household use when needed. So, most of the time they had pasteurized, non-homogenized. On occasion, the pasteurizer would break, so for a while they would drink raw milk. But of course understood the risk, and also knew darn well where the milk had come from and how clean the milking facility was.
I'm not sure. Judging by my own family, I think a lot of them have been info-silo'ed to think pasteurization is harmful and that "They" want to keep raw milk from you.
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 you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child. And pasteurization removes/diminishes nutrients in milk. It’s much more nuanced than ‘raw milk is bad’.
> If you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child
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.
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?)
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 :).
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.
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.
— Carl Sagan
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).
Let's also not forget that the article basically skips what rennet actually is just naming it an enzyme.
Is that... controversial? Obviously a cow normally gives milk without being pregnant. It wouldn't be able to feed its calf otherwise.
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.
Not just that. A cow couldn't be a cow if she hadn't become pregnant.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Is it because protocarnivorous potato varieties are higher in alkaloids, which can be problematic for some people? Understandably most people probably have never had a reason to consider if the potato on their plate ate meat or not, but when you have special dietary needs you often have to navigate the world a bit differently.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUZmojH7p8
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...
Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
>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 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/...
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.