Milk

1480:

Many people today are realising that cow’s milk is not nutritionally essential, and even that it is an unhealthy food.  Because there are thousands of different products made with it, almost all people still continue to buy it or foods that contain it.

There’s a tendency amongst humans to insist on getting what we want.  Perhaps it’s a ‘dominant species’ thing - we want it and prefer to get it without any struggle.  Take milk, for example.  It is legal, cheap (subsidised) and plentiful.  It is therefore the favourite low cost, 'enriching' ingredient used by many food manufacturers.

For the consumer, fresh supplies are available everywhere.  We often need to go no further than a few meters down the road, to the nearest corner shop, to get our milk, at which shop they also sell many other products, with milk as a chief ingredient.  As consumers we almost fall over ourselves to get milk, because we can only contemplate our tea and coffee with some in it.  It is a product so widely used that life without milk is unimaginable.  Everyone has a carton in their fridge (except vegans and those who are lactose-intolerant).  There is no more prevalent consumer item on the market, and therefore milk is a guaranteed money spinner for the Dairy Industry.  They’ve turned it into something as natural as fresh air. They say it’s essential to human life, turning the use of milk into an entrenched consumer habit.

         

We forget that whenever we buy milk we implicate ourselves with the violence practised in cow prisons.