Need Milk? Got Milk? Make Milk? Want Milk?
A Vegetarian Milk-Producing Mammal’s Evolving Dairy Diary
“You can’t go vegan your baby won’t get enough calcium!” my six and eight-year old nephew and niece insisted. English society’s belief in the necessity of dairy consumption is so well impressed upon us that many of us never question it. Here I reflect on the changing role of dairy in my life and consider if it’s needed. Turns out it isn’t…but I’m still not ready to quit even though my morals say I should.
Daily dairy
Dairy played a silent steady role in the first quarter century of my life. My early childhood breakfasts were Weetabix with milk — I felt like a winner when the fat blobbed out of a fresh bottle onto the cereal and I sprinkled extra sugar on it. At primary school, the milk monitor took a tray to get cartons of milk for everyone in class. Mum’s home-cooked dinners rotated around cauliflower cheese, spaghetti bolognese with grated cheddar and parmesan sprinkled from a plastic pot, homemade pizza or quiche with melted cheese on top. When I moved to the French Alpes, I savoured beaufort cheese made in Beaufortain, tartiflette oozing with reblochon, melted raclette scooped over potatoes and morsels of baguette dipped into a fondue pot of all the above. I love whipped cream with scones and jam and in restaurants have ordered ‘just whipped cream’ on a side plate for dessert. Home, school, and the media taught us that milk and dairy contained the calcium necessary for building strong bones.
After dialling up to the internet in the early 2000s I learnt that dairy might not be all good. Around 19-years old, going dairy free for a month was one of my earliest self-experiments. Already soya milk was available if you hunted for it in the supermarket. I cut out cheese, chocolate and yoghurt. After a month, I had less mucus.
Pricey dairy
When I moved to Japan, even poor quality dairy was expensive so it quickly lessened in importance in my diet. I realised that breakfast need not be cereal and experimented with miso soup, rice, and eggs. A wide range of soya products were readily available in all supermarkets including soya milk, tofu in all shapes and sizes, whole edamame beans, and let’s not forget the joys of introducing a Westerner to the stinky sticky stringy experience of fermented soya beans, nattō. I’d moved from the cheese capital of the world to a country which had little land for people, let alone cows. Over the next eight years, my dairy consumption radically decreased to close to zero. Suddenly all the cheese, milk, and whipped cream seemed heavy and unhealthy. Then I moved even further afield to Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, coconut capital of the world, where the only cheese available was the American plastic blocks made from yellow.
What else can a pregnant vegetarian put in a baguette in France but dairy?
When I landed back in the UK in 2020, cheese had largely been off the radar for over a decade. Even here it now seemed expensive per kilo compared to the rest of the vegetarian weekly grocery shop. Occasionally I’d buy a block of cheddar or a lump of mozzarella for home-made pizza but in the first weeks of pregnancy, I wanted to eat cheese and yoghurt again. Being a vegetarian during our rowing trip across France, cheese seemed an obvious source of protein and sandwich filler for daily baguette sandwiches: mozzarella, spreadable garlic cream cheese, and comté (one block to be consumed within 24-hours due to not having a fridge).
Dairy facts or fictions?
Spending a weekend surrounded by vegans at the vegan campout made me question my consumption of dairy. I wanted to research for myself some of the information I heard there while trying to avoid biases from both sides. Though I did my very best to research academic literature on both the health benefits and risks associated with dairy consumption, the only conclusion I reached with any certainty was that the majority of researchers with enough money to conduct systematic reviews and meta-analyses are funded by the dairy industry, and that looking at one mineral of food isolated from the whole food and the rest of diet is not very sensible.
So I will be not-sensible for a moment to consider whether it’s true that milk gives you calcium which is good for your bones. Yes we human beings require enough calcium in our diet to support bone health and strength; about 99% of calcium is banked in your bones and will be withdrawn from them if you’re not getting enough. But since two-thirds of the world’s population are lactose intolerant, how come those five billion non-dairy consumers are not wobbling around like jelly fish? If dairy is so good for strengthening bones, you might expect it to lower the risks of osteoporosis, which weakens bones and makes them more likely to fracture. Thanks to research funded by the Dutch Dairy Association, I compared the average daily calcium intake for adults in various countries, with the incidence of hip fracture at 80-years old among women.
It looks like no direct relationship between the two variables. Scandinavian countries have the highest reported incidence of hip fracture, which might suggest that getting enough vitamin D — which helps the body absorb more calcium — is very important. China, with the lowest average calcium intake, and mainly from non-dairy sources (vegetables, legumes and cereals) has the lowest incidence of hip fractures.
Isn’t milk a healthy, natural drink from cows that make it anyway?
Just how ‘natural’ is cows’ milk? The ingredient list of milk usually says one thing: milk. Non-dairy alternatives like soya or oat not-milks have a whole list of ingredients including gums and oils to make them thicker and whiter like the cows’ milk we’re familiar with. While producers of non-dairy milk alternatives are rightly obliged to include all the ingredients in their product, those selling milk produced by cows are under no obligation to state what was in the cow — what did it eat? What medication was it pumped with? Was it pregnant at the time?
Though we all know that milk comes from cows, for some reason, many of us never stopped to notice that milk doesn’t come from all cows, only female ones who have a baby cow to take care of — lactating cows.
Old MacDonald had a dairy farm, e-i-e-i-o,
And on that farm he had some male calves, e-i-e-i-o
So he killed the male calves and he called it ‘veal’
Here a dead, there a dead, everywhere a dead calf
Old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o
Old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o,
And on that farm he had some female calves, e-i-e-i-o
So he took her from her mum, made mum pregnant yet again
Stuck a milking machine on her udders
and milked til she mooed no more.
Mama’s Luxury Milk
Perhaps because I am now a milk-producing mother myself, the feeling is growing that consuming dairy is wrong. I produce the most perfect milk to grow my baby, comfort him and build his immunity. We are in tune. Even a malnourished mother produces nutritious milk for her baby. Mothers make magical milk for their offspring. How is it that we’ve been culturally conditioned to think that drinking cows’ milk is ok? How about horse, camel, or dog milk? Can someone tell me the difference?
“Oh, right, so it’s weird to drink milk from someone you know, but to drink milk from another species, some cow you’ve never met, that’s fine…?” Jeremy, Peep Show
Dairy doubts
There’s a growing number of reasons why dairy consumption is not only unnecessary but might be harmful. Dairy is not a necessary part of a healthy diet — it can’t possibly be if two thirds of the global population physically can’t tolerate it. And while dairy eaten in moderation may have both benefits and risks, the research is difficult to analyse without biases and looking at one food or mineral in isolation from the rest of diet and other lifestyle choices may not be sensible. Nevertheless, I doubt that removing high in saturated fats cheeses or whipped cream will negatively impact my nutritional intake. From an ethical perspective, eating dairy is damaging to the environment and morally unacceptable for animal welfare. You can milk a female cow without killing it but that milk was meant for her baby, who was either taken away from her to be raised as another dairy cow (female) or killed (male).
During my life I’ve evolved from daily dairy to rarely dairy to back again dairy to producing milk and doubting dairy. My own moral conclusion is clear.
But …
I’m still not quite ready to quit.
My actions don’t yet match my values.
