(This article originally appeared at the former NA Confidential blog on January 16, 2017. The clauses have been rearranged.)
I believe that drinking milk is an aesthetic and culinary outrage on a par with Coors Light and McDonald’s.
Moreover, drinking milk is a conspiracy foisted on us by the multinational dairy lobby.
Apart from all that, I dislike milk intensely, though you can make it into something else and I’m all in. I adore cheese, cream-based sauces, dairy-laden desserts and Milk Stout; obviously, I can tolerate lactose, but drink it from a glass?
That’s just wrong.
Yuck.
Milk is little more than liquid snot, and to drink it by the glass has struck me as revolting for more than thirty years. It’s just a bonus to be “un-American” by rejecting milk in liquid form, although I’ve returned to eating cereal with soy or almond milk as a moistening agent.
Last night I had a dream in which I was drinking milk and commenting about how perfectly it paired with a dish. Now I’m scared to set foot outside the house. Booze is the preferred antidote to this condition, although probably not White Russians at a time like this.
Let’s join the earth’s other mammals, and do away with the outrage.
Got Milk? Might Not Be Doing You Much Good, by Aaron E. Carroll (NYT)
Almost no one will dispute that when a baby is born, breast milk is the best nutrition a mother can provide. All mammals nurse their young, and breast milk benefits a newborn infant in ways above and beyond nutrition. In fact, until 1 to 2 years of age, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, the Institute of Medicine and more promote breast-feeding as optimal.
Unfortunately, breast-feeding until that age is often difficult, if not impossible, because mothers have to return to work, and children go off to preschool or day care. So we often replace human milk with the milk of cows or other animals. But at a certain point, we have to acknowledge that we are the only mammals on the planet that continue to consume milk after childhood, often in great amounts.
More and more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. This is in spite of the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture and other organizations advocate that even adults should drink at least three cups a day.
Photo credit: the author, who snapped it while in Indianapolis in 2012, having stumbled across a propaganda rally by the dairy lobby.
