Milk: from Magic to Disillusion (by Aurélie Chevalier)

 It was a year and a half ago. A month had passed since my daughter’s birth and I was gazing at her in awe. She had changed so much and grown so much. How so ? With love and a little bit of milk. Of my milk. This seemed so natural that no alternative was conceivable. It was toward the end of that month that I understood the magic of milk.

For milk really is magic…for young mammals.
At this time, eighteen months ago, I was drinking cow’s milk religiously because I felt guilty after reading some document according to which nursing women have acute needs in calcium, the same calcium we « obviously » in milk products, as advertisement and official nutritional recommendations keep reminding us. One would think the milk industry is trying to make the mother absorb the milk she did not give to her baby in powder form…It is not the acute calcium needs of a nursing mother that I challenge today but this hype around milk products.
Around this time, when my cooking and my eating habits were packed with milk products, from milk in which I drowned my breakfast cereal to the sour cream in my quiches, by way of the milk powder added to my bread (this was the recipe in my book), home made whole milk yogurts, delicious raw cheeses I savored on the way back from the market each Saturday, and the condensed milk in my chocolate spread (also home made), I was unaware of the following facts :  

• We're the only mammals who drink milk from other mammals
• We're is the only mammals who consume milk throughout our lives, long after the normal weaning time
•  Humans started drinking bovine milk in the neolithic era, ten thousand years ago. This is little in comparison to our age (2,5 million years). Certain scientists think that our genes have not adapted to this major change in our eating habits. 
• Milk contains calcium but cows don’t drink milk.
•  The calcium from cow’s milk comes from plants the cow solely feeds on. A plant  rich diet can be high in calcium. 
•  Cow’s milk is designed to ensure the growth within a few months of a young bovine weighing several hundred kilos, and with apparently a lesser intellect than humans. 
•  Westerners have acute calcium needs because their organism uses up the calcium in their bones in order to balance pH which has been turned acidic by a diet overly saturated with animal proteins. 
•  Many scientific publication incriminate cow’s milk in various pathologies, notably certain cancers (e.g. prostate), osteoporosis, Type 2 Diabetes. 
•  Only 3 types of cows represent 95% of French bovine milk livestock, with a predominance of the Prim’Holstein kind, the black and white cow that represents 71% of the livestock by herself, and whose output is today more than 6 000 kg/year, whereas milk output did not reach 2 000 kg/year/cow in the 1930s and until the mid 1950s. The Montbéliarde and the Normand kinds lag far behind and represent respectively 14% and 10% of the livestock. This standardizing is done at the expense of races obtained through a patient selection throughout the centuries. However, diversity is the basis for a lesser vulnerability to environmental mutations. 
•  In France, Grand Ouest cow dealers run two thirds of French milk production. This means that—though less so than in other European countries than or in the US—by an intensification of production. Cows see grass more and more rarely. Their diet is increasingly based on corn and soy. The first strongly contributes to global warming and water pollution through the use of mineral fertilizers it’s production requires. The second comes from Argentina, Brazil and the US, that between the three of them, produce 80% of the global soy production. Soy farming is the main cause of deforestation of the Amazonian forest. And the consumer has no means of knowing whether the cattle whose flesh or milk he eats has been bed Genetically Modified soy (except for rare notices with the Organic label). 
•  The milk and meat industries are related. If a cow is to produce milk, she must give birth to a veal every 12 to 14 months. This veal will become a milking cow or future meat : it’ll then get fattened with more of less space…rather less than more ? His fat will be used to make suet for deep frying. It may also become part of the diet for farmed pigs and poultry. 
•  8 plant calories are required to make 1 milk calorie. The space used for cereals to feed cattle could be used to farm grains that directly feed us. 
•  On a global scale, livestock consumes 8% fresh water used by humans, and is the main cause of pollution in aquatic sources. 
•  On a global scale, livestock uses 80% of all farmed lands. 
•  On a global scale, activities linked to livestock contribute for 18% of all global warming related anthropogenic gas discharge, which is more than transports.

Now my daughter still benefits from a few drops of mother’s milk, while I have stoppoed drinking bottled milk and I feel lighter  in every way. Milk, like other animal products, is filled with saturated fats. It’s one less thing for our bodies—our beautiful machines—to procress. I have left the protein and calciun rat race behind and I can assure you that I I’m still perfectly able to swim and run, even more so than before ! I’m fortunate to live near a gorgeous organic orchard and I prefer to stop there for food than waste my time, my money, and my heath in our local supermarket’a milk product section. And it’s the economics of it that might account for our compatriots consumption of the infamous white liquid which we often force children to drink. And sometimes we consume it without knowing, because the food industries adds it to everything : in ice-creams of course, but also in cookies, chocolate bars, cured meats and other processed foods, and as milk powder, lactoserum, texturing agent, emulsifier, etc.
I always admired cows’s eyes : big, beautiful, and sweet. I understand how our ancestors were fascinated by this powerful animal whose milk must have dramatically improved their daily nutritional needs from a bland diet lacking in fatty acids….to the extent of making her a God in certain culture…and such a different diet from the food we have access to now. A world stands between the times of a deified cow and ours, where cows are a mere production tool that needs to bring optimum output.

Aurélie Chevalier,
September 2010
 (translated from French by Anne-Sophie Martin-Mondiere, September 2010)

Aurélie Chevalier's Biography

Aurélie Chevalier is an engineer who has been working for ten years in the car and plastic industry. Shes also experienced with water treatment and waste industries. Passionate about sustainable development and to complete her Master’s degree, she did thesis research on the advantages of organic produce. When look for the best way to feed ourselves, she found controversy on our calcium and protein needs. She dissected the food model for industrialized countries (and that other countries seek to follow) and has put elements which makes it worth some criticism from a nutritional and environmental stand point (global warming). Aurélie Chevalier would like to work in a research program dedicated to sustainable agriculture and to invest herself in bringing awareness to those matters. For more information on Aurélie or to contact her : http://fr.linkedin.com/pub/aur%C3%A9lie-chevalier/4/69/a31 

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