Where does all the milk go?
dhanishsemar.com
dhanishsemar.com
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 diagram is almost 1:1 the same except the cheese layout which it chose to do a bit differently. The mobile version of the diagram is an AI driven layout restructure - however still true to my source material.
The writing of the article is entirely my own. I'll choose to take it as a compliment that you think it's too polished haha.
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 :).
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.
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.
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
In all of the presentations we used to have 3.3% and 1.5% fat content, but since a few years we have 3%, 2%, 1% and if you are very unlucky 0% that taste like water with watercolor. I'm not sure why we changed, probably some weird Big Cow conspiracy :)
All of that is pasteurized and homogenized.
Anyway, 3% is more tasty than 1%. I'm not sure about the difference with 3.3%. But the low fat one is recommended for diets.
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When I was young, my grandfather has a small summer house like 1 mile away from a town that is like 10 miles away from the capital city of one of the provinces in the northwest of Argentina. We use to bought raw unpasteurized unhomogenized milk from someone that had cows nearby. But we obliviously had to boil it and then remove the big layer of cream at the top, that we used for cooking (as a replacement of butter).
The problem of boiling milk at home is that it must boil for 10 minutes or something and that changes the flavor. In a factory, they can boil milt at ~150°C (300°F) for 1 second instead, that kills the bacterias but does not change the flavor.
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.
>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?
— Carl Sagan
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.
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.
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.
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.
You may have a point that many have no idea how chickens work. Egg laying being like giving birth isn't an unreasonable explanation if you had to come up with one on the spot while completely in the dark. But most understand how milk is produced because even if they've never seen a cattlebeast, they deal with milk-producing humans daily.
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.
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.
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
Huh? A holstein bull calf is selling for around $3,000 right now. That's... insane.
I remember from what doesn't seem all that long ago when fats didn't even fetch half that much. Beef has gone wild. If that's not valuable, what do you consider valuable?
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same data. Here’s the price evolution of lived calves in EU. They happen to be very high since 2025 (300€/500€ for diary/meat) but if you click « select all » on the top left you can see they use to be around 100€/200€ in the previous 10 years, going as low as 60€/head during covid.
https://agridata.ec.europa.eu/extensions/DashboardBeef/LiveA...
> what do you consider valuable
Fair point, I didn’t express it well: I don't think calves “have no value” in general, they’re sentient beings. However, as you pointed out and shown ahead, they are also part of a market and in some places their value is not high enough to care them well [0]. Some of them happen to be euthanized very shortly after birth:
> In one survey of Canadian farmers, an average of 19% of calves were euthanised at birth and of those respondents that euthanised calves, 34% reported using blunt force trauma (sharp blow from a solid object to the head) [1]
There’s also the "bob veal" (2–3 days to 1 month) [2], I guess the goal is to have a different taste but I’m not sure about that.
side note: I found the technique used to "select for heifers" you mentioned: the process is called flow cytometer and it sorts the sperm with a laser.
[0] https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(17)...
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/arti...
[2] https://www.britannica.com/technology/meat-processing/Labels...
For the sake of understanding our communication breakdown, what suggests "in this day of age of high-priced beef" is talking about 5-10 years ago?
But that isn't how it was interpreted. We saw the weakest plausible interpretation + silly criticism transpire instead. However, I trust in good faith that it wasn't intentionally interpreted in the weakest way, but rather that it simply failed to communicate its intent.
Which is where I seek an understanding of where it broke down so that I can be clearer in the future.
The communication breakdown also comes from me as we are two in the thread. I should probably re-read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", a best seller that truly changed my relation to others 15 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
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.
Carnivorous potatoes aren't as tasty?
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.
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'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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...
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/...
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.
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.