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Comment by subculture | Hacker News Reader

There's certainly a trope of "...but I can't give up cheese" and as someone who went from vegetarian to vegan: Yeah, cheese is hard to replicate. But also: your body and tastes adapt.

After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.

There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpellmanrowland/2017/06/2...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8447883/milk-health-benefit

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We have blood sausages, why wouldn't we drink some animals milk. Humans have been also eating entrails and brains for a long time, so milk is just another ingredient in the omnivorous diet of humans.

You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.

> for-profit incentives of dairy industry

The fact that demand for dairy was "manufactured" is somewhat orthogonal to whether or not it is for-profit.

Vegan cheeses aren't subsidized at 73 cents on the dollar, dairy is.

Ok, I can grant dairy should not be subsidized. It would make it more expensive but that would be fair, and eating cheese would be something a bit more special, as it should.

Yeah, I also got the number wrong - it's 73 cents on the dollar not 40.

Yeah, I've found moving to new foods to be relatively painless if done incrementally. Took just two weeks to convert my toddler son from cow's milk to soy milk (Silk brand, for the curious).

First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow. Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.

You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.

Just curious, any reason for moving your kid from dairy to soy?

Their kid is probably not a baby cow, for starters.

many kids are baby goats, so there is that

A note for anyone coming across this: soy milk is nutritionally comparable to cow's milk, but other milk alternative are not. Children who receive much of their nutrition from milk should not transition directly to almond or oat milk without considering other parts of their diet as well.

Side-stepping how humans don't need milk after nursing, do you have any concerns with phytoestrogens? The closest thing to a consensus I've found with soy is small to medium amounts are probably fine, but there have been cases of funny things happening with large amounts.

This is a great point. My evidence is anecdotal but I became a vegetarian about 5 years ago. I used to hate all of the meat substitutes as the tasted "off". Now, after a few years of not eating meat, I could not tell you what chicken or meat would taste like and I have grown fond of some of the alternatives.

If the importance of dairy was invented after the war, why did humans evolve a tolerance to it?

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