Today’s random object out of the Random Object Randomogrifier was labeled simply: “Northern Cow.” Based on the black and white markings, I pegged it as a Holstein, the most popular dairy cow in North America, and probably Europe too.
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Holsteins produce about 23,000 pounds of milk per year, which works out to seven gallons a day per cow. That’s a lot of milk from what I can only describe as happy, fat, well-fed cows. They basically walk themselves into the barn because they want to be milked.
But the part that really gets me? Humans started milking cows before we could even digest milk. Back then, we were all lactose intolerant. The lactase enzyme, which lets us break down milk sugar, normally shuts off after puberty in mammals. So why did we even start milking them?
What we weren’t doing was drinking it straight. We were transforming it, making cheese, yogurt, butter, and ghee. Archaeologists have found milk residues in clay and leather strainers dating back 8,000–9,000 years, so it looks like we figured out how to make dairy last. Cheese and butter gave us protein we could store. Ghee (boiled down butter) lasts practically forever. Milk spoils. Cheese lasts weeks. Butter lasts months. Ghee outlives everyone.
There’s also a theory that early humans might’ve used milk for medicinal reasons instead of food. If you’re lactose intolerant and haven’t pooped in three days, a block of udder might move things along. I could imagine Thag, hunched over in a cave, glaring at the shaman who gave him a hunk of rubbery cow meat. “Thag hates shaman.”
The distinction we make now is between being lactase persistent and truly lactose tolerant. Most of us don’t tolerate lactose well, we just keep making the enzyme past childhood. Only about 30% of North Americans are lactase persistent, and if you’re Indigenous to the Americas, odds are close to zero. There were no milking animals here before European contact.
The US has 9.3M of the roughly 270M milk cows in the world producing 900M metric tons of milk annually. Now thats a MOOOvement.
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