Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Then health experts working in these countries found a notable jump in infant mortality as well as in the number of cases of gastroenteritis and malnutrition. This was clearly connected to the use of formula.

  It was not that the formula was toxic or lacked nutrition. It was just ill-suited for the developing world. It came in a powder form, to be mixed with water. Most poor women had little access to clean water. They could boil water for the requisite twenty minutes, but this involved burning some kind of fuel that they typically could not afford. Maybe just a few minutes would help? It wouldn’t. Also, while the women knew the importance of washing the bottles between uses, the water with which they washed them usually wasn’t clean and often infected the bottles. Many babies died from germs lurking in washed bottles.

  A woman left the hospital with a small supply of free formula. By the time it was used up, she was no longer lactating, so the decision whether to breastfeed was now out of her hands. When she tried to buy more formula, she was surprised to discover that it was incredibly expensive, a significant part of the family income. So she stretched the formula by mixing it with water. Some babies were getting mostly water, and it was often tainted water.

  What next happened was similar to the public campaign against swill milk in the nineteenth century. In 1973 a British magazine, New Internationalist, published an exposé, “The Baby Food Tragedy,” that broke the story. Other articles followed, as did lawsuits, a public outcry, a movement to boycott the formula companies, and a 1978 U.S. Senate investigation led by Senator Edward Kennedy. The United Nations then established worldwide regulations to monitor advertising campaigns.

  The baby formula companies survived, but they had lost the public trust. And it wasn’t just that mothers no longer trusted formula companies. They no longer trusted formula itself. Between 1971 and 1980, the percentage of American mothers breastfeeding beyond six months rose from 5 percent to 25 percent. International organizations that had encouraged bottle-feeding, such as UNICEF, started to advocate breastfeeding.

  By the second decade of the twenty-first century, 79 percent of American mothers were breastfeeding their children for the first six months, and 49 percent of American mothers were continuing to breastfeed beyond six months. In New York City, 90 percent of mothers were breastfeeding; mothers who never breastfed were becoming a rarity.

  And tremendous claims were being made for breastfeeding: It would reduce the risk of ear infections, pneumonia, a sometimes fatal intestinal infection called necrotizing enterocolitis, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), allergies, eczema, asthma, type 2 diabetes, leukemia, cardiovascular disease, behavioral disorders, and even low intelligence. Unfortunately, medical research has ruled out most of these claims completely and found little evidence to support the rest.

  One of the stronger arguments for breastfeeding is what is known as “attachment theory.” This contends that a happy, healthy child needs to establish a strong bond with its parents at an early age. Breastfeeding, it is claimed, creates a strong mother-child bond.

  The great irony is that while the move toward breastfeeding was in part an attempt to escape the duplicity of profit-hungry large corporations, other corporations have discovered that, in America at least, there are tremendous profits to be made from breastfeeding. The U.S. government’s push for breastfeeding has also become a push for breast pumping. This new progressive approach allows babies to benefit from the nutritive value of breast milk while freeing mothers from the burden of breastfeeding. A mother can now pump her breasts and save her milk in bottles, so that while she is at work, a caregiver can feed her baby. So the first thing to go was the attachment theory.

  When Bill Clinton was president, the White House had a breast-pumping station for staff. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act agreed to cover the purchase of breast pumps. Private insurers followed. And once health insurance covered breast pumps, sales exploded. It has become a huge business in the United States: the industry expects breast pump sales in 2020 to reach $1 billion, and related paraphernalia sales are expected to reach another $2 billion.

  This means that human milk has become a very valuable commodity in the United States. There is now an oversupply of breast milk because breast pumps induce mothers to produce more milk than their babies need. (Milking machines for cows do the same thing.) Women who pump often find their freezers full of unused milk. Then the question becomes, what to do with it?

  There is a century-old tradition of milk banks. First established in Boston in 1910, their mission has traditionally been to provide one mother’s excess breast milk to another mother who needs it. But today, some customers, believing that breast milk has medicinal purposes, are buying it when they are ill. Some athletes, who believe that it will make them stronger, are also buying it. Other customers sell soap made from breast milk, and when a London ice cream shop started selling vanilla-with-lemon-zest breast-milk ice cream for more than twenty dollars a scoop, they could not keep up with the demand.

  Breast milk can now be bought or sold online at websites such as www.onlythebreast.com, where many dubious health claims for human milk are made. The sellers are free to say whatever they wish. One, reported on National Public Radio, stated, “My milk makes giants.” But like other types of milk, human milk from sources that are not well regulated are problematic and can be dangerous. In 2015, doctors at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, tested 102 samples that they ordered online and found that 10 percent had cow’s milk added.

  According to the researcher Sarah Keim, 13,000 women were buying and selling breast milk online in 2011, and by 2015, that number had risen to 55,000. She also found that 75 percent of the milk that she bought online had bacterial contamination and disease-causing pathogens.

  Humans aside, the issue of what milk is the best milk is also still far from settled. Although cows dominate throughout the world, that has been a pragmatic decision. It has not been agreed that cow’s milk is superior, only that cows are the most efficient milkers, although some Asians also see the advantage of buffalos. Outside of India, few think cows produce the best milk, except, of course, cow’s milk producers.

  There have always been, and still are, passionate goat’s milk fans. Donkey’s milk has also retained a following, especially since it has been determined that people who are allergic to other milks have no problem with donkey’s milk. But donkeys do not produce large quantities of milk. The Swiss donkey’s milk company Eurolactis has one thousand donkeys but struggles to produce enough milk. Donkey’s milk is also in demand for cosmetics, and Eurolactis has started a line of milk chocolate bars that they say are lighter and more nutritious than normal milk chocolate bars because donkey’s milk has less fat and is rich in omega 3 fatty acids.

  Camel’s milk, which is very similar to cow’s milk, is still produced in a few places, notably Mauritania. Australia is also trying to establish a camel’s-milk industry. In the nineteenth century, the British imported camels to the Australian outback for transportation and construction projects. But soon trucks and jeeps arrived, and the camels, being of no more use, were released into the wild. Since then, their population has grown and may now number a million. Dairy companies are now attempting to harvest their milk.

  Asians, especially in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, still greatly value buffalo’s milk but in recent years have been turning to cows. In Vietnam, the Afimilk company built twelve dairies with 32,000 cows. They began importing Holsteins from New Zealand in 2010 and growing feed. Their operation is now too big for grazing. The cows are fed in feedlots, where they are lined up in front of food trenches.

  An even bigger dairy in an even less likely place is a Saudi Arabian farm with 180,000 Holsteins. Fidel Castro’s idea of keeping cows in air-conditioned barns is in use here and doesn’t seem as crazy in this wealthy desert land as it did in Cuba. Here, it is only a question of how great a financial loss is acceptable. It helps to be an oil-producing kingdom that provides cheap energy.
The dairy, the pet project of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is supposed to be an example of Saudi Arabia building up industries other than oil. But keeping that many cows comfortable, and milk chilled and shipped around the Arabian Peninsula that is the world’s second-largest desert, takes energy. So do the nine thousand refrigerated vehicles that distribute the milk.

  The worldwide tendency for milk to be produced in ever larger farms has raised awareness about animal welfare issues. First, there is the issue of space. While it is true that farms with larger herds have more acreage, the acreage per head tends to decline. Few cows have as much space as the three on the Kochs’ little five-acre farm in the Hudson Valley. Second, there is the issue of food. Thomas Jefferson in his farming notes wrote, “The number of cattle to be kept on a farm must be proportioned to the food furnished by a farm.” But today farms rarely grow all of the food that their cows need. In some cases, they provide none. In the Saudi Arabian dairy, all the feed is flown in from Argentina. Patrick Holden, who runs an organic dairy farm in Wales with a herd of Ayrshires from which he makes cheddar cheese, said, “Most farms are like airports, with fertilizer, feeds, everything coming in from all over the world.” His goal, which he has not entirely achieved yet, is to have an entirely sustainable farm, a farm that supplies all of its own needs.

  There is also another issue. Cows are sensitive creatures. No one who has ever looked into their big soft eyes would doubt that. Goats are mischievous, sheep are insecure, and cows are sensitive and sweet. It has been understood for centuries that happy cows produce more milk. Cows that are stressed produce poorly. In 1869 Catherine Beecher advised, “Gentle but firm treatment make a cow easy to milk and to handle in every way.” And in 1867, Annabella Hill wrote, “No animal repays kind and generous treatment more than the cow.”

  A number of studies suggest that music makes cows happy, leading some dairies to provide music for their cows. It is widely believed that cows have a preference for classical music, but there is no science to support this. At Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, New York, musicians come every Christmas to sing carols to the cows. If some Americans find this odd, Indians would see nothing strange about it.

  Many farmers give names to their cows because they are convinced that cows enjoy being called by name. Sometimes they just choose names they like and sometimes they choose names that are memory aids, to help them remember which cows are which, though the cows usually have numbered tags as well. At the Brinkworth Dairy in Wiltshire, England, they name their cows to distinguish their bloodlines. Each cow of the same bloodline has the same first initial—Candy, Ceri, Cookie. The cows also have numbers, and Chad knows a cow’s name only after he sees her number, but his father-in-law, Joe, knows every cow’s name as soon as he sees her.

  The Ooms family started their upstate New York farm in 1950, but they come from a long line of farmers who have owned dairy farms in Holland since 1500. They have four hundred cows, which is considered a large dairy for that part of New York, and though they have a reputation as large-scale, no-nonsense farmers, they name each of their cows. But four hundred is a lot of names, and when asked for a few examples, Eric Ooms turned shy and said, “Oh, I’m terrible with names.” But he did recall that New York senator Chuck Schumer had visited the farm and so there was one cow named Chuck and a second named Schumer.

  Alan Reed has a small farm in Idaho that was started by his uncle in 1955. The farm was in the country at first, but since then Idaho Falls has grown and now the dairy with between 140 and 250 Holsteins is in the suburbs. A tall, lean, quiet Westerner, Reed sneered a little when asked if he named his cows. “We don’t have time to name them,” he said. But then he admitted that he had had to change that after children started visiting his farm for regular events and were very upset to learn that the cows did not have names. So he instituted naming contests, and now many of the cows do have names. Another Idaho farmer, with forty-four hundred cows, Jordan Funk, said, “I only name them if they step on my toe.”

  Basque dairy farmer Tambourin said that he names sheep that display particular personalities. “But,” he said, raising his index finger didactically, “never name a pig.” He declined to explain why.

  But whether farmers name their animals or not, they eventually have to kill them.

  The lifespan of a cow depends on how well she is treated. In some of the huge dairies where thousands are lined up in feedlots, cows only live three or four years. Smaller, gentler farms can keep them a few years longer, even to the age of ten. A cow could even live well into her teens, some to twenty or even older, if not overworked. A cow’s natural lifespan is thought to be about twenty years, and one was famously recorded to live to be forty-nine.

  But older cows do not keep lactating. A cow eats more than 60 pounds of feed every day, and on most farms, feed is 70 percent or more of operating costs. It can cost $70 or more a week to keep a cow. That means that a modestly sized farm with only one hundred cows would spend $7,000 a week to feed its herd. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to make a profit from milk. Each cow has to produce more in the value of her milk than she costs to feed, and when she stops producing, the farmer can no longer afford to keep her. This is true in the big “factory” farms as well as the small family farms.

  When a cow stops lactating, a truck usually arrives to take her away to a slaughterhouse, where she becomes hamburger. Cows are the leading source of hamburger meat in America. Dairy cows are very lean because they put everything into producing milk, so they make good lean ground meat.

  Lorraine Lewandrowski, a lawyer who also owns a dairy farm in the Mohawk Valley, New York (increasingly, farmers survive by having two careers), once had cows named Aviva, Anneke, Benazir, Celeste, Esther, and Fiona. Each cow had a name with the first initial of the cow’s mother, and Lewandrowski talks about their “sweet and trusting eyes.” And yet she eventually has to kill them. She finds it particularly sad to have her cows end their lives with a long, frightening truck ride, followed by death alone in a strange place. So she will often have them shot on the farm. As Patrick Holden said, “Dairy farming is tough.”

  Another tough reality of dairy farming is that a newborn calf is usually separated from its mother within a few hours and bottle-fed. Farmers have always found this to be a key to having a successful dairy. In the frieze of “the dairy of al-Ubaid,” five thousand years ago, the heifers wear muzzles to keep them from suckling their mothers.

  The mothers mourn their loss with loud moans and big sad eyes, sometimes for days. There are no eyes sadder than those of a sad cow. But not all cows are natural mothers. According to Ronny Osofsky of Ronnybrook, a popular dairy north of New York City, “Some cows are very maternal and moo a lot. Others don’t care. Some cows feel maternal toward every calf they see.”

  Sometimes cows are in visible emotional pain following the loss of their calves, but most farmers accept this as part of dairy farming. If a calf was left to suckle on the mother for a few months, as nature intended, the cow would be happier and the calf healthier, but the farmer might lose what small profit he had. When the young grow up to depend on the farmer, not the mother, it makes the farm more manageable.

  According to Patrick Holden, the separated calves are upset for two or three days and the mothers are sad for a week. He said that some farmers have been experimenting with letting the cow suckle for three months, but he pointed out that a cow has a calf a year—occasionally twins—and if you let it suckle during the first three months, you lose a third of the milk for that year. “There is a lot that is upsetting about dairy farming,” he said.

  In the last two decades of the twentieth century, more and more multi-thousand-cow dairies started up opening up while many small family dairies went out of business. Large-scale industrial farming was the key to survival. The most traditional dairy regions, New England and New York, were the biggest losers as the dairy industry moved west, to states where there was space for giant industrial farms owne
d by corporations, not families. California became the largest milk-producing state in the country. The state is now popularly known for its anti-industrial food movements, but those movements were born out of the fact that California is the heartland for industrialized food. The second-largest state for milk producing is Idaho, traditionally a farming, lumber, and mining state that is new to the dairy industry.

  Even though the consumption of milk had started declining in the United States in the twentieth century, there were new uses for it. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, the dairy industry started using organic chemistry to transform elements of milk, whey, and buttermilk into industrial products. The field was called chemurgy, and the first milk-derived products were made out of the protein casein, found in a high percentage in cow’s milk, which as early as 1900 had been used for such things as making buttons and a coating for airplane wings. Casein was also used in glue, in finishing paper for color printing, and for making paint. Skim milk, once the unwanted product left over from making butter, was the primary source of casein, and it took 33 pounds of skim milk to make one pound of casein.

  But there were not always enough uses for the extra milk produced. The European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union, once paid European farmers to overproduce—though they didn’t see it that way. They simply agreed to buy whatever milk the farmers couldn’t sell. This led the farmers to produce far more milk than could be sold and created a scandal, with the famous European “lakes of milk” and “mountains of butter” going to waste. Europe then, to be less wasteful, switched to the “single farm payment,” with a single payment given once a year to every farm based on its acreage and compliance with environmental practices.