Oh no, you’re not done with me yet. It’s a Friday, which means no school and some serious blogging catch-up.
On my list of topics to blog about is “milk is gross.” I’ve been making a serious effort to cut back on dairy products. I’ve noticed that, on days that I don’t consume milk or cheese, I feel much more energized and alive. I hope to eventually ditch dairy altogether (and if you’re wondering how I’m going to grow strong bones without milk, you need to go back and read my post on bones, calcium and osteoporosis), and now seems like a good time to justify that decision.
In the interest of fairness, I have to first admit that I’m not an expert, and I only know what I’ve read. For information on the benefits of drinking milk, go to the “got milk?” campaign’s website. The first visual – animals and milk on a manufacturing line, a chicken in a bathtub (WTF?) and a horse on a treadmill – totally creeps me out. But if you click on the link way at the bottom, “Copyright 2009 California Milk Processor Board – Legal Disclaimer,” you can access all of the studies that back the strong-bone-strong-muscles-less-PMS claims.
I urge you to take everything you read with a grain of salt, and always ask yourself, ‘Who’s getting something out of this?’ In other words, when the 2009 California Milk Processor Board tells you to drink more milk, is there some kind of conflict of interests? I’d say so. So, if you’re interested enough, do your own research on this topic, and make your own decision, but always watch out for studies funded by groups that profit from your consumption of the product they’re touting. In other words: be smart; think for yourself.
"strong bones" huh?
Now, I’ll let you in on some of the research I’ve been doing.
Americans freaking love milk. We have TV commercials and billboards just for milk. We believe it when the ads (most of them funded by the aforementioned California Milk Processor Board) tell us that our bones and muscles will be strong if we drink milk. And, best of all, nobody gets hurt for milk, right? Cows don’t die to give us milk. It’s really the best of all worlds… (insert dramatic music here) …OR IS IT?
Well, if Superman does it...
Most milking, aside from the milking done by old Billy Bob down at the farm over yonder, isn’t done by hand anymore. When it was, human interaction meant a build-in safeguard against udder (utter udder) injuries going unnoticed. Today, as Erik Marcus writes in Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, cows are milked twice a day by “milking machines” that are often not maintained very well despite their constant use. Therefore, cows’ utters are often pulled too hard, resulting in just as much milk and utter udder injuries.
As Skinny Bitch so appetizingly puts it: “Cows are milked by machine; metal clamps are attached to the cows’ sensitive udders. The udders become sore and infected. Pus forms. But the machines keep on milking, sucking the dead white blood cells into the milk. How freaking gross is that? To get rid of all the bacteria and other shit, milk must be pasteurized. But pasteurization destroys beneficial enzymes and makes calcium less available without even killing all the viruses or bacteria.” Ew. As somebody who’s had milk with every dinner for the better part of my life, this offends me. Hell, as a female, this offends me.
Because THEY would know.
Farm Journal said the following: “Each cow is placed in a contraption called ‘Unicar’ which is a kind of cage on wheels that moves along a railway line. The cages, with cows in them, spend most of their time filed in rows in a storage barn. Two or three times a day, the farmer pushes a button in the milking parlor. Rows of cows then move automatically up to the milking parlor like a long train. As they go, their car wheels trip switches which feed, water, and clean the cars. After milking, the cows, still in the cages, roll back to the storage area. The cows live in the cages for ten months of the year, during which time they are unable to walk or turn around.” How very natural.
According to Erik Marcus, about 1 in 5 cows suffer from Mastitis, or inflammation of the udders, which often leads to to infections. Think about that. If you go through a gallon of milk a week, that’s 52 gallons a year. Of those, 10 (ish) came from cows with inflamed udders. How much pus do you think you‘ve had to drink lately?
Let’s not forget that humans weren’t supposed to be drinking milk past their early days of breastfeeding. We were never meant to be consuming this crap. In nature, when do you ever see a full-grown horse, cow, pig or gorilla drink milk? You don’t. No other animal in nature drinks milk past infancy. No other animal, with the exception of strange circumstances, drinks the milk of another animal. Ever. It’s just not natural. And it’s pretty “freaking gross” when you stop to think about it.
"That's just common mutant sense."
To add insult to injury, modern-day dairy cows are producing far more milk than they were ever meant to produce in nature. Genetic engineering has enabled dairy farmers to procure 16,000 pounds of milk per year from each dairy cow they own; that’s almost double the 9,000 pounds non-engineered cows produce. Genetic engineering also makes cows much more susceptible to diseases.
Old faithful, Mister John Robbins says that recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is injected into about a quarter of dairy cows in the U.S., and it serves to increase the dairy output from these cows. Unfortunately, the hormone translates to a higher risk of prostate cancer and breast cancer in those who drink milk from injected cows. Awesome.
Skinny Bitch says that most, if not all, of the dairy products we consume in the United States contain pesticide residue. And, just because Skinny Bitch always says it better than I do, one more thing:
“Even if you’re buying the low-fat, part-skim nonsense, more than half the calories come from fat. Fat free? Give us a freaking break! Remember what milk is for. It is designed to fatten up baby cows. Do you really believe it can be made fat free? Get your head out of your ass. Milk = fat. Butter = fat. Cheese = fat. People who think these products can be low fat or fat free = morons.”
So there you have it. About a billion reasons not to consume dairy. If you can’t handle soy milk, I highly recommend rice milk. There are even a lot of good cheese substitutes in grocery stores now.
Oh, and one last note. Milk cows have babies. The female calves are the “lucky” ones who follow in their mothers’ footsteps: they become dairy cows. The males, on the other hand, are born and taken away from their mothers immediately to take away any possibility of bonding (apparently, if mother and child were allowed to bond, the mothers would actually break down their cages to get to their babies). These baby males are put in stalls that do not allow them to walk or, really, move – this keeps their flesh nice and tender. If they make it to four months old (many of them die of diseases), they’re killed for veal.
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