Got milk (alleles)?
Published by Greg February 27th, 2007 in Health, Race, Science Essays, Archaeology, Genetics, Evolution, Coevolution, Human Evolution 1001, Commentary
As you probably know, everyone should drink milk. Lots and lots and lots of milk. All your life. Or so says the American Dairy Industry, often using those sexy posters of famous people with milk smeared on their faces.
The truly amazing thing about those posters is that the people in them more often than not seem to have an ethnic identity that I, as a trained Biological Anthropologist (and thus keeper of this sort of knowledge) can easily see contraindicates milk consumption. Most of these individuals would likely be unable to break down the lactose in the milk because they have the “wild type” or “normal” allele that facilitates the shutdown of lactase production some time in early life.
Now let’s be clear about this. We humans are mammals, and as mammals, we drink mother’s milk while young. This is facilitated by the production of lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the main energy bearing molecule in milk, the sugar lactose. But your basic well adapted mammals should not bother producing the enzyme lactase after weaning normally occurs … maybe a few years after in a long-lived mammal like humans … because it is inefficient and potentially risky to produce enzymes you don’t need.
Why is it inefficient? Well, there are thousands and thousands of enzymes and if we just produced all of them all the time in all our cells, that would be really costly of raw materials and energy, both of which are required to produce them. So, evolution has shaped, via the brilliant designer of Natural Selection, our multicellular bodies to produce enzymes only in the cells they are needed in (from which they may be exuded on occasion, as is the case with lactase, a digestive enzyme). This is much more efficient. By extension, the system should be (and usually is) selected to produce specific enzymes when they are needed instead of all the time from birth to death. By doing this we save a lot of raw materials and energy.
Why is there a risk of producing an enzyme when it is not needed (beyond the risk that comes with wastefulness)? This is because enzymes are the sharp objects … the scissors, the razor blades, the Jarts … of the cell. They are highly bioactive molecules that are supposed to do a certain thing but when they to fall into the wrong hands … who knows what would happen. You’ll poke your eye out running around with an enzyme.
Lactase has no special privilege. It shouldn’t be operating in adult mammals, and I’d bet it generally is not (though I don’t think very many mammals have been checked for this, frankly.)
So if lactase production in adult mammals is weird and unexpected, then why do adult humans produce it? Well, the simple answer to that is THEY DON’T. The vast majority of people by count (numbers of people), by ethnicity (numbers of ethnic groups) by cultures (i.e., numbers of languages, numbers of traditions, etc. etc.) simply don’t. Only a few groups do.
So why do we consider “lactose intolerance” a disease, rather than thinking of “adult lactase production” or “adult lactose fixation” or even “mature nursing on cow juice” to be strange instead of the other way around?
Well, we don’t do that either, I would guess. The inability to digest milk is probably not considered at all strange by the average Chinese person, and there are more average Chinese persons than any other single group. It’s a Western thing, mainly. Just another example of Eurocentrism.
There are two main groups of people with this mutation … the adult lactase production mutation …. many (but not all) Europeans, and some (but not many) Africans.
These two groups are associated with a fairly long history of herding cattle and using dairy products from those cattle. Interestingly, some of the most famous cattle herders, such as the Maasai and similar groups in Africa, do not produce lactase in adulthood. They simply process the milk in a way that breaks down the lactose prior to ingestion.
One of the questions surrounding this observation has always been, which came first, the ability to digest milk, or the need to adapt to digesting milk, in adulthood?
I cannot imagine why such a stupid question has always been asked. Maybe because the people asking it are archaeologists instead of biologists (but that is not entirely true) or because they are anti-adaptationists (or, self styled as anti-panglossianists? Well, thank you Stephen Gould for mucking up our thinking on this one …). This is a dumb question because it is probably very rare indeed that an adaptation to NOTHING arises and then the thing to which this adaptation is adapted to comes along and fits the species. Right… survival of the fittest … ah .. niche. I don’t think so.
But nonetheless this has been a question and it now has a preliminary answer:
Joachim Burger of the University of Mainz, Germany, and colleagues worked with Mark Thomas of University College London, UK, to address this riddle by studying DNA from skeletons scattered throughout Europe. The team examined ten skeletons ranging in age from 3,800 to nearly 6,000 years old. The skeletons were discovered at archaeological sites in Germany, Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.
Cool. They conclude that the adaptation post dates the date they believe cattle were being raised by these people.
Burger and his colleagues say this supports the dominant theory on how milk drinking evolved — that milk-drinking mutations were uncommon before the practice of dairying began. Then, when humans learned to herd cattle, the milk-drinking mutations spread rapidly, because they conferred a huge advantage on those who had them — perhaps due to the extra protein and fats available in cow’s milk, the team speculates.
This is in the current issue (or forthcoming depending on when you read this) of PNAS, and is summarized nicely in Nature News.
A well written and quite informative article.Keep it up.Best wishes.
Keep it up.Best wishes.
Thank goodness I’ve bucked evolution. Deeply afflicted by lactose tolerance, I have had to suffer years of sublime milkshake drinking, ice cream eating, cooking with yogurt and sour cream, not to mention butter! It’s a disease that enriches my life every day in some small way or other. You could say it’s the cream in my coffee. How I curse those early dairy producers.
Hi Greg… I always find fascinating information in pretty much everything you write and… as I read, I always notice myself laughing!
The way you are able to give us insight into evolution and the workings of life in the simplist and most ordinary of things is clever, creative, and brilliant!
I truly appreciate your mind…
Jen
Good one. I stopped drinking milk when I was about 6, hated it then, hate it now. No lactose intolerance of which I’m aware, though.
I’ve often wondered why adults would not only drink milk but that of a different species, unless they were really up against it and had no choice.
I like cheese and yogourt but I guess they’ve been transformed somehow.
Interesting post, as usual.
OK, so your article was interesting but totally biased. The assumption made was that all milk is cow milk. Or the only important milk is cow milk anyway. Talk about ethnocentric. There are many other animals that are raised for milk, goats being a primary species. goat milk is used by more people world wide than cow milk and I think (too lazy to look it up) for a longer period of time than cow milk. Very few people have lactose problems with goat milk. I know this first hand as I raise dairy goats. It would be interesting to read an article by you about milk, all milk, not just cow milk. Personally, I’m a bit of a dairy weird person and have drunk milk from goats, horses and sheep as well as…cows. I’ll milk about anything, haha. I like goat milk the best by far though. Anyway, try again with the milk article with an open mind and an eye to dairy reality. I am curious about people of african decent as there are many goats in africa and I know a woman of african decent (OK, she’s approx. 1/2 dutch too but I can’t choose all of my friends. Joke, I have dutch friends too and they don’t have any problem with goat milk either) that has no problem with goat milk. I’ll have to ask her about how she does with cow milk.
I don’t know, there’s something almost unbearably attractive about Whoopie with a milk moustache. Or even without it.
Yeah, all those Mongols falling down drunk from guzzling fermented mares’ milk don’t seem to have too much problem with it.
Or Japanese people with their fish flavoured icecream. Bleh.
yiela, I think there’s a difference between processed milk products and the stuff straight out of the animal - the processing renders it more digestible somehow. But I agree, there’s a lot more to milk than just cows.
If there was no sheep’s milk there would be no Roquefort cheese, and life would be intolerable.
I read years ago that the molecules in goat’s milk are more like human milk molecules (smaller), which makes it easier to digest than cow’s milk, especially for infants.
Infants should only drink mother’s milk or formula, really, especially as their main source of food. The total dietary composition of milk varies across mammals owing to differences in their life history strategies. Cows and goats are probably much more alike than either is to humans. Formula is an industrially produced imitation of human milk. Also, there are differences in electrolytes, which can cause intestinal bleeding or blood disorders like anemia.
The system is evolved to be very fine tuned within each species, with zero regard for how it would work across species! The fact that cows and goats, etc. instead of some other mammals are domesticated and thus provide us with milk is not because of their milk so much as because of their behavior. Maybe we should be milking monkeys…. (probably a bad idea…)
Here the Naturalistic Fallacy gets a chance to raise it’s ugly head. It might make more “sense” to substitute cow or goat milk for human milk (and avoid the factory-manufactured formula) because cows and goats are “natural” and formula is artificial. But think of this in a broader sense. Starting with a nice “Natural” human diet that, say, hunter gatherers would eat, would you prefer to switch to an artificially flavored, artificially colored, fast food strip mall diet, or the Natural Diet of some other mammal? If the mammal is a beaver all you get to eat is bark (which humans cannot digest). I’d prefer Burger King over Lumber Yard…
But yes, there is a protein (sometimes called agglutinin but I think there are other more specific names) in cow’s milk that is not in goat’s milk, so the goat milk is easier to digest. This protein globs together (aggutinates!) fats. There are also, maybe, fewer other proteins or enzymes that seem to cause bad “allergic” reactions in goat rather than cow milk, or so it is said.
Still, both cow and goat milk, if substituted wholesale for human milk, can cause serious medical problems.
Oops, mea culpa. I meant young children, not neonates…
Yea, and for adults too.
Is goat cheese so … goat cheesy … because it is goat milk, I wonder?
John-processing makes milk LESS digestible not more digestible.
Caveat-You are correct. Here’s some info. from the American Dairy Goat Association.
“Goat milk has a more easily digestible fat and protein content than cow milk. The increased digestibility of protein is of importance to infant diets (both human and animal), as well as to invalid and convalescent diets. Furthermore, glycerol ethers are much higher in goat than in cow milk which appears to be important for the nutrition of the nursing newborn.
The natural homogenization of goat milk is, from a human health standpoint, much better than the mechanically homogenized cow milk product. It appears that when fat globules are forcibly broken up by mechanical means, it allows an enzyme associated with milk fat, known as xanthine oxidase to become free and penetrate the intestinal wall. Once xanthine oxidase gets through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, it is capable of creating scar damage to the heart and arteries, which in turn may stimulate the body to release cholesterol into the blood in an attempt to lay a protective fatty material on the scarred areas. This can lead to arteriosclerosis.”
Greg-I agree that the “natural” argument is a bad one and that mothers milk is the best food for human babies and I understand that goats were in no way made to produce dairy products for humans. I nursed my kids and also (after six months or so) fed them goats milk too. As teenagers they still drink a lot of goats milk. I am curious if you have more info. on your statement that “if substituted wholesale for human milk, can cause serious medical problems” as I am not aware of any serious problems. I know of babies raised on goats milk without problems. Again, I agree that the best thing for babies is their mom’s milk.
I’d love to see some studies on goat milk and babies. or even studies on goat milk and adults with milk issues. Not sure who would be willing to pay for it though. I have “tested” goats milk on at least four (that I can think of right now) lactose intolerant people and none of them have had a problem. One guy sat down and drank a whole quart in one sitting with no bad effects. It’s fun to experiment on your friends.
Yiela,
There is no reason to believe that lactose from goats is digestible by people without lactase. Claims about “increased digestibility” in this regard are unfounded. Lactose “intolerance” give you gas, as do lots of other things, these are very subjective things. The term “allergy” is used incorrectly in many statements. The dairy industry spends millions a year on disinformation campaigns, and there are lots of people who love their cows, love their goats, or love their sheep, who will make unfounded claims for personal reasons.
Goat milk fat is easier to digest. This is probably making the difference people claim for lactose.
The bottom line: Don’t believe anything anybody says about milk of any kind.
As for a bias, yes it was biased, I’m afraid, you are correct. When I was talking about “milk” I was mainly talking about cow milk. The researchers with the ancient DNA study were talking about cattle, not goats, and the milk cultures being discussed were mainly using cows, but I should have specified that I meant cow, thanks for pointing that out!
But trust me, this was not an anti-goat post. Goats are great. I love goats.
(By the way, domestication of cattle, as far as the archaeological evidence goes is at this time earlier in antiquity than goat, but not by much. Both happened more than once. There were probably at least two separate populations of goats, and possibly three of cattle, that were domesticated in somewhat different areas.)
The total amount of milk produced globally is mainly cow milk.
The American Pediatrics Association web site has information on the medical reasons to not “raise a child” on goat milk. (meaning substituting goat milk for cattle). There are nutrients that far more abundant in both cattle and goat milk (because of the way cattle and goats develop, very very different than humans). I’d like to see a study done of children “raised on goats milk” to see if they have higher incidence of renal failure later in life. That would be reasonable to expect.
That said, goats milk is not as bad as cows milk. But really, neither should be used to raise a baby. Let’s not harm the children for the sake of our misguided beliefs in naturalism!
Oh, here’s a good web site on infants and milk making the comparison with goat milk:
http://www.kidsnutrition.org/c.....t_milk.htm
Greg-I know your post wasn’t anti-goat. I accept that ours is a cow based society. Please don’t think that I prefer goats milk because of “naturalism”. Cows are just as natural as goats. Also, I work in the dairy industry as an inspector (and I drive a car, have a TV and only wear tie dye on the weekend, haha). I’m not anti-cow by any means but I have lost my appetite for store bought milk. Not that the industry is any worse than any other food industry really. I just really prefer to do my own dairy stuff and it is a hobby for me as well.
My personal “testing” on my friends is of coarse, totally unscientific. Only one was actually diagnosed as lactose intolerant. None of them drank milk regularly because it bothered them, mostly gas I think. Anyway, they truly had no problem with goat milk whatever their issues with cow milk may or may not have been. I agree that there is a lot of confusion about lactose intolerance and much of the cow/goat thing may be about the fat. I have no personal stake in it as I don’t have a problem with any kind of milk and I don’t sell milk. I think the disinformation comes more from people who make money on cows (or whatever), not the people who love them.
The kids nutrition page is saying that kids under one year should have breast milk or formula and only have cow or goat milk after one year. They do not seem to prefer either type of milk. So, you are saying that you’d like to see a study on kids that were raised on goats milk at under a year old, not kids raised on goats milk after a year? That would be interesting. Not sure where my kids would fall in the study as they did have goats milk before a year old but were still nursing so I’m don’t think they were “raised” on goats milk. I don’t have any big fears that they are any worse off than my friends kid who got coke in her bottle.
I know you will probably doubt my word as I am a *gasp* milk person. Both of my kids are very healthy, never had an ear infection, neither one has ever had a cavity bla bla bla. Not sure what can be attributed to goats milk. One thing I have learned from keeping livestock is that nutrition early in life makes a huge difference in the health of the adult. It think it is likely that this is true for humans as well.
I’ve got to point one thing out. You say that “naturalism” is not a good reason to choose goats milk over cows, and I do agree with you. But, you also seem to be saying that people shouldn’t drink milk because it’s not natural for them to drink milk after infancy. OK, maybe not the same definition for natural? Is it now possible that humans, some anyway have evolved to make good use of dairy products? After all, nothing we eat, other than mothers milk, was “made for us”.
Thanks, this is an interesting discussion. Yes, I do tend to make people talk about milk. A lot. Sorry.
yiela, processed dairy products contain proportionally less lactose than straight cows’ milk, so they are more digestible for people who are lactose intolerant to some degree, and some people who get adverse symptoms from drinking cows’ milk can eat yoghurt, icecream, cheese etc.
I would like to fabricate a hypothesis that the first cow herders processed the milk, but that would probably not explain the strong positive selection that has occurred for lactose tolerance in northern Europe, so I think it is a non-starter - they probably started out just drinking the milk and discovered how to make the other products later.
I have an Italian friend who told me one of his favourite dishes that they serve in Rome is where they butcher a young calf that has just been feeding from its mother and then cook the intestines with the milk still inside them.
I can’t say it would appeal to me, but it is not too much of a stretch to imagine this happening occasionally with hunter/gatherers, and before modern humans. So humans did not need to start domesticating and milking animals to acquire a taste for the milk of other animals.
This is all very interesting:
Y: Right, I basically agree with you. There is experience telling us that goat milk is easier for humans to handle than cow milk AND there is a reasonable scientific explanation for this (the way the fats are packaged up) so I believe this. I would think that people should try goat and cow milk with their kids (not infants) and see how it goes, possibly expecting better results with goat milk (same would go for adults as well). With my daughter, I picked organic over commercial because I chose to believe organic would lack nasty chemicals.
A cow is not very high on the food chain (eats grass, etc.) but within a mammal, the milk itself is one level up on the food chain … so if you drink milk (anybody’s milk) you are two levels up on the food chain, if that is your main source of food. Cheese can be though of as yet another level. So in terms of concentration of heavy metals, etc. if yo u mainly ate cheese, you are like a supercarnivore that eats carnivores (or a carnivore that eats carnivore livers!). This is why in huge areas of Europe, you can’t produce cheese any more, because of Chernobyl .
There are all kinds of systems that are simply not turned on yet or that are slowly developing in infants. It probably varies across individuals a great deal. .. after all, a new born may be developed more or less by many many weeks in one area or another … so for the first few months after birth, I can imagine a lot of things can go wrong in many areas, with diet and everything else.
During the first year, an infant is becoming more and more “human” in this very special way that we can eat a very wide range of things and manage it … as adults we appear able to eat things that easily give lab rats cancer, without any problem, for instance. But still, “normal” humans continue with nearly 100% of the diet form human milk for about a year, with small percentages of other things being brought in (but never the milk of another species) with milk still there in the diet in decreasing importance for another four years.
So I would guess there are a few stages:
I. birth to four/six months. The immune system is very immature, I would guess that some systems for handling surpluses of various molecules and elements are not in place, etc. The negative effects of a bad decision are probably very serious.
II Four/six months - a few years. There is more tolerance in the system but I would assume that dietary balance (proportion of various things) is still important, and growth is REALLY fast, so missing nutrients will have a serious cost, etc.
III A few years on through childhood. It is probably hard to metabolically screw up a child too badly, but there are two critical things going on that you can screw up: Growth (continuing) and neural development (continuing … our brain is the only organ that is not, in a sense, fully developed at birth, and it is still developing through childhood). But mostly, we’re talking about total caloric input being sufficient and nothing important (the usual nutrients) lacking.
Following this kind of general rule, I would say:
Stage I…Human milk (mom if possible) and NO non-human milk unless it is formula, which is the only viable imitation of human milk.
Stage II… same as stage I as the basic supply of nutrition, but supplement with other things (watching for allergies, etc.) is not bad, may be a good thing.
Stage III … deficiencies are bad, but surpluses of many things probably not bad (there are still things that are poisonous to children but not as much to adults, such as vit. A, etc. ) and more and more diversification in diet is good.
But of course diversification never really works, so have a LOT of macaroni and cheese on hand.
I also think kids should be given different milks over time so that, if they are likely to continue to drink milk through their teens and twenties and beyond, so they don’t develop the extreme “pickiness” I’ve seen in a lot of young adults. When I have kids with me (in their 20s, really) in the field overseas, it is very common for people to hate the “local” milk and this totally disrupts their routine … they can no longer have their morning cereal. Interesting phenomenon. I my house, I alternate among brands of milk so my daughter doesn’t become unable to consume milk that is not a certain brand.
All milk has a wide range of molecules of the kind that are likely to produce negative reactions in some people, obviously, so it seems like a dangerous liquid sometimes.
And yes, it is the big industry paying the big bucks for their side (all the big food industries do this).
John and others; The origins truly are mysterious! Some processed milk breaks down the lactose, some does not. But we often don’t know, and people’s perception is probably not reliable (again). People who believe a certain cheese or other product has zero or does not have zero lactose may actually be reacting (variously) to things that are not the lactose. It does make sense to figure that the first milk use was processed milk use.
Here is an interesting fact: The Maa speaking Nilotic Pastoralists … this includes the Maasai (who are famous) but lots of other groups as well … they are a set of cultures who are totally integrated with and dependent on … and who gain their prestige and wealth etc. from … cattle. They are more “cattle culture” than any other cattle based group, including Texans. We know from various research angles that these people diversified linguistically, and spread across the landscape (from north to south along the Eastern Rift Valley in Uganda/Kenya/Tanzania, maybe including Somalia/Ethiopia as well) PRIOR TO their adoption of cattle. They were foragers, spread out and differentiated, then cattle came along and one group after another adopted cattle, probably fairly late in time, and now it looks as though cattle have always been the basis of their culture, the integration is so strong (though origin stories do indicate a pre-cattle hunting and gathering society … today they disdain hunter gatherers for the most part).
Here is the really interesting thing: Lactose tolerance is unknown in these groups. A huge proportion of their calories come from the milk from cattle, but they can’t get energy from milk at all unless it is processed. Their daily food consists of milk mixed with blood (also from the cattle) and processed in such a way that breaks down the lactose.
So this is an example of a culture of hunter/gatherers, for whom hunting was probably important and who would have known a lot about animals … who have adopted cattle keeping and invented a method of using the milk.
Did they invent it or did they stumble on it?
Invention stories almost always involve a degree of accident and a degree of “invention..” Even the invention stories in high-tech cultures. However, when we look at ancient cultures, and especially African cultures, and ESPECIALLY ancient African cultures, we (westerners) tend to assume accidental discovery because it is impossible to believe from a Eurocentric perspective that dark skinned people living on the equator have intelligence of any kind. This is terribly annoying for many reasons, obviously.
But in this case I think one could make a very strong argument that it is very difficult to imagine how one would accidentally come up what the Maa-speakers to with their milk. It must have been thought up.
JOHN: I would like to fabricate a hypothesis that the first cow herders processed the milk, but that would probably not explain the strong positive selection that has occurred for lactose tolerance in northern Europe, so I think it is a non-starter - they probably started out just drinking the milk and discovered how to make the other products later.
No, I think you may be right. I have a very hard time believing that you would have a cattle culture (or goats!!!!) without using the milk at all. But if you have processed milk you may also use non-processed milk.
Lactose intolerance is somehing that comes on slowly … so perhaps kids are drinking cow/goat milk until it bothers them and they stop, and every now and then there comes along an individual who can drink milk all their lives. That allele could be selected for.
And now we can go crazy, and since this is the internet why not: The rare individuals who could go their whole lives drinking milk are revered for their magical powers and have multiple wives. Thus speeding up the rate of selection. This probably did not happen but it would make the core of yet another Michael Creighton story…
I once read an article that hypothesized that 46,000 years ago Australian aboriginal people must have had the most technologically advanced culture on earth - they needed it to get to Australia.
Sorry, that is getting way off the topic, but in relation to the observation about people not crediting ancient African cultures with intelligence, it is an idea I like a lot. There are a lot of very highly inventive things in traditional Aboriginal culture, and I don’t see any reason why ancient African cultures should not have been just as creative, if not more so.
John- from homestead milk handling experience I will hypothesize that cultured milk products happened shortly after the first milking happened. Probably later that afternoon. What I mean is that there are cultures everywhere and if you don’t chill milk right away (they couldn’t have done that in most cases) then you will get cultured milk. Around here we have what we call “chicken cheese”. That is when I pour extra milk in a bucket for the kids to take to the chickens. Well, they often don’t get to it right away and on a warm day it will set a curd within a few hours. I have even heard of people making cheese this way. It would be just like making cheese the normal way only you just use whatever is floating around (in the air) for starter culture. Without refrigeration and containers that you can sanitize (glass or stainless steel) and the ability to boil your equipment, you can’t avoid cultured milk products. Cheese is a great way to preserve milk and is surprisingly easy to make. I think it would have come about quickly.
Greg, Yes, the organic milk certainly should lack the chemicals/hormones that are used regularly on non-organic dairy farms. I choose not to be organic with my own animals. I do feed non-sprayed hay when I can get it and I finally found an almost reasonably priced organic grain. But, I choose to use chemical wormers and vaccinations for my animals. I am not willing to lose animals to easily preventable illnesses. Since I know when they have been treated I am able to be sure that milk and meat withdrawal times have been met before consuming them.
Now that we have clarification on what “raised on milk” means I do agree for the most part with your opinion. I’m not as thrilled with formula as you seem to be. Never used it for my kids but boy does that stuff stink when it’s barfed up. Yuck. I just can’t get past that. It would be very easy to find people for the study on babies raised on milk. I remembered that my husband and his siblings were all raised on homemade formula of canned milk with sugar in it! Ugh! My mother in law says that was very common among her friends at the time. Her kids are all of about average health for old americans. There was a while there when nursing was considered pretty uncool and a lot of babies were raised on formula and other things. I have a friend of Mexican decent who was raised (as baby now in his 40’s) on goats milk. He’s darned healthy but he makes an effort to live a healthy life. I think these anecdotes probably speak to the resilience of humans rather than the superiority of canned milk though. It would be very interesting to research things that people have fed babies.
As far as processing making it easier to digest, I’m not sure what is meant by “processing”. Its not like raw milk is “hard” to digest so I’m a little confused. Those non-western folks certainly did plenty of discovery I’m sure. Not only did they figure things out but I’ll bet that a lot of them that did were women.
Kefir is an interesting milk culture. It is little blob things. You put them in milk and they will culture it into the familiar kefir stuff. I don’t drink a lot of it myself but I do keep a kefir culture. I use it to culture milk for my bottle fed baby goats. That way I don’t need to refrigerate the baby milk and over fill the refrigerator. I keep a big jug on the counter and when I feed I pour it through a strainer into bottles. I imagine cultures could have been used for short term preservation like this for a long time. The kids do fine on cultured milk. It’s also good to cook with.
Now that you mention the condensed/evapo milk formula of the old days, I suddenly remember hearing of that. Maybe a very early childhood memory is coming back…..
To put some of your comments together: Long before people would have ever had any animal to milk, they knew a about cultured milk products, because they are produced by infants all the time….
(OK, no more ricotta cheese for me…)
yiela, yes of course, good point about the cheese. My fabricated hypothesis was going to say that early herders would have been very interested in ways to preserve milk products longer, and possibly also make them more easily transportable. So any accidental discovery no doubt got experimented with very quickly. Humans are a curious species who love to fiddle with stuff to see what happens. And as you point out, the accidental discovery happens fast with milk. I guess yoghurt must have happened pretty early too.
And to add to the anecdotal collection, my sister was a chronic asthmatic as a kid, she could never drink cow’s milk because it gave her asthma attacks, but she could drink goat’s milk no problem. My own daughter couldn’t drink anything with cow’s milk in it as an infant, although she can sock down a big glass of low fat cow juice now and loves it, so she had to have soy milk formula. Gee, does that stuff stink.
I’m curious as to why goats milk is generally not commercially procurable (where I am, I mean). It seems a bit of an obvious omission. There’s any amount of goat’s milk cheese available, obviously.
I had a friend who was born in Malaysia during the Japanese occupation during WWII. Formula or any kind of milk was unprocurable, but his family had a dog (well, bitch, I guess) with pups which was lactating, so that’s what he was weaned on - dog’s milk. He grew up and became a self-made multi-millionaire. I’m not suggesting there’s a correlation, but on the other hand he did survive and prosper despite his infant diet obviously being far from any kind of natural or desirable option. Not recommended. He died young from stomach cancer, by the way, although I’m not suggesting a correlation there either.
Oh no, we’re back to Romulus and Remus again.
I’m sorry, on reflection my friend’s death was probably a detail I could usefully have left out. He used to worry and would always ask me whether I thought the dog’s milk he had as a baby would adversely affect his health, and I always assured him it would not. (What the hell would I know, I’m a civil engineer, I just didn’t want him to worry.)
And I should have spelt it Whoopi.
By the way, I see that in a 2006 interview, Whoopi Goldberg explained how she got the name Whoopi (from whoopie cushion) by saying “If you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go.”
Maybe that’s how she copes with the milk.
John - Yeah, things tend to happen fast with milk
Commercial goat dairies are becoming a bit more common. It’s a big financial investment to build a dairy and even more of a gamble than a cow dairy as the market may or may not be there. There are a lot of regulations (as there should be) and it’s expensive to get one set up. Also, a goat dairy must usually do their own processing as there are few creameries that take goat milk. Feed is expensive for all farmers but a small goat dairy can’t buy in So, that’s more expense, time and employees. The price of commercial goat milk is usually $10-$13 a gallon so it’s a specialty market for sure. Non-legal milk where I live is about $6/gallon. We have a small goat dairy where I live that is doing OK. Sometimes you can buy canned goat milk but be warned, it tastes AWFUL. I wish it didn’t even exist because so many people think that that is what goat milk tastes like.
I’m sorry about your friend. I doubt that his childhood diet was the cause of his problem. I’m really curious about all the wierd things that have been used as food for babies now. I tend to think that there are usually other factors in a persons life that will have a greater impact in the long run though. Like smoking, crack, loads of junk food or whatever. Child rearing is a very charged social issue. I took a load of crap because I “starved” my babies by nursing them and not giving them real food until they were about six months old. Then, I didn’t feed them proper baby food, I heartlessly mashed up regular food that didn’t come in cute expensive tiny bottles and gave them that. To top it off they nursed FOREVER (which is two years in case you are wondering).
I kind of wish I didn’t know how Whoopi got her name.
Thanks yiela.
Sounds to me like you did a great job with your children. My wife did the same, cooked fresh food for our daughter and minced it up. The right solution with the crap merchants is just ignore them. You know you’re doing the right thing.