Milk, Everyone’s First Drink
Everyone’s First Drink
Drink up: every glass is filled with essential nutrients.
If you are a mammal, and I assume you are ( Hello!), we are already well acquainted, aren’t we? I was, after all, your first food. I am the sweet secretion that f lows from the mammary glands of a mammalian mum, the perfect nutrition for a baby human, cow, dog – what have you. I’m what allows an infant creature to exit outside its mother’s body and still continue to get everything it needs from her to grow into a larger, intelligent (in your case) being, tremendously jam-packed as I am with protein, fat and delicious sugars.
The big twist with you humans, of course, is that you figured out how to continue your habit of drinking me well beyond your infancy and into adulthood. And rather than collect human milk and bottle it up, you chose a more efficient lactating creature to supply you: the cow.
This was an udder stroke of genius. By domesticating a milk-supplying animal – actually, over history, a bunch of them, including sheep, goats, buffalo, camels and yaks – you found a way to take advantage of otherwise nutritionally useless grasslands and pastures. Ruminants such as cows, sheep and goats are equipped with multiple stomachs and the (some-what impolite) habit of regurgitating and re-chewing the contents of those stomachs until they’ve squeezed out every last nourishing molecule. With this
unrivalled digestive determination, these beasts manage to turn scraggly weeds into copious amounts of rich and creamy me – and more.
A milk-producing cow makes on average around 25 litres of me a day. That’s a start, but over the years that same cow will produce several more cows’ worth of valuable side products from me. Cream, for instance: it rises to my top, as you’ll know from that handy aphorism. And then butter: one of the kitchen’s greatest daily indulgences, just cream churned into solid fat. For a while, humans were afraid of my non-skimmed versions, full as they are of saturated fat. But studies conducted since the height of fat phobia in the 1990s have suggested that full-fat dairy can be satisfying and decently healthy. Skim milk and low-fat cheese, while lower in kilojoules, just aren’t as satiating.
The two-litre bottle you have of me in your fridge (assuming it’s cow’s milk) probably comes from a farm where cows graze on grass and hay. I taste different, some say better, when I am produced by cows that are out munching their way through pastures compared to those that are fed grain and corn. My f lavour will change with the seasons, as the makeup of the grass changes. You
might buy the same cheese all year round, but if it’s from pastured cows, its taste and texture will evolve as spring turns into summer, and so on.
Spoiler alert, figuring out ways to make me last has always been of utmost importance. And boy, have you: you learnt to let microorganisms such as Lactobacillus munch on my abundant lactose sugars. This produces lactic acid and seizes me up into clots once I’m heated. Welcome to the sour cream on your baked potato and your tangy morning yoghurt.
About 5000 years ago, a wandering group of you not iced another way I go from per ishable l iquid to a more long- last ing solid. Shepherds transporting me from field to home would open the bags in which they carried their milk and discover me curdling. There was something about those bags, made from the stomachs of sheep and goats, at work: the stomachs contained an enzyme called rennet, which helps young animals digest their mothers’ milk. Thus began the epic food tradition of making cheese.
To this day, rennet from calf stomachs is st ill used to make many cheeses, including Parmesan, Gruyère and manchego – which means that your vegetarian friends would do well to check before eating them.
Over the past ten years, consumption of dairy milk alternatives has grown. Plant-based milk alternatives have been traditionally consumed in Asia in the form of tofu and drinkable soy products.
Howe ver, consumpt ion of
IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT IS CENTURIES OLD IS NEW AGAIN
ready-to-drink soy and almond milk drinks has increased significantly in recent years because of rising disposable income and urbanisation. Other reasons include a growing vegetarian and vegan market as well as lactose intolerance.
Although it’s fair to say most people know the difference, dairy farmers globally are taking issue with the use of my name – milk – to describe anything plant-based. I’m not totally sure what the fuss is about, since I’m fairly certain no one is confused about whether an almond has nipples.
Speaking of nipples: platypuses don’t have them, so they secrete milk through their skin, where it gathers in creases and folds, like sweat, for their young to lap up. Scientists think that marsurpial mammary glands are just adapted sweat or sebaceous glands and that platypus mothers operate the way ancient milk-producing protomammals might have.
Almonds and platypuses aside, cat tle should perhaps worry: as sales of me from cows continues to decline, there is increasing interest shown in another ruminant – the goat. With its high nutritional benefits, there is global demand for goats’ milk and its side products. Excellent as fresh cheese, a bit gentler than cow’s milk on a lactose-sensitive stomach, and often a main ingredient in the recently popular drinkable yoghurt kef ir, goats’ milk is trendy. In other words, what’s centuries old is new again.