The Milk Myth

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When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is eat. It’s a routine most people observe, young and old. It often involves milk (not for me of course). There’s a vague sense that protein is needed to start the day, an ingrained habit, often a ‘corn flakes and milk’ habit. Kids go for cereal and milk, which makes it easier to get them to eat something for breakfast. Milk is central to breakfast and therefore great for the milk industry.

My milk, if I use it, comes from soy beans or rice or oats, but traditionally milk comes from cows. Children use milk, as it’s associated with sweet things, used with sweet cereal, used in making most confectionary. Kids grow up believing milk is an essential food. They’re told that it’s ‘given’ willingly and comfortably by cows.

That’s all they need to believe for an uninhibited milk-habit to form. From the parents’ point of view it’s a great food, it’s fresh, it’s cheap (subsidized) and available from any corner shop. Cow's milk is found in almost every fridge. Children drink lots of it and so do adults. Yet how it comes to us is a mystery to most people, other than it comes from cows. Most people wouldn’t think that milk involves cruelty and death, but it does.

Cows get killed for milk, as do their calves too. The dairy cow must be made pregnant to stimulate her mammary glands to secrete milk. Simple biology. And because humans want the milk, the calf isn’t allowed to drink it. So once it is born, the calf has served its chief purpose in utero and, unless it’s a female destined for the herd, it is usually killed, either for veal whilst still very young or fattened in a beef herd and then killed when it has put on sufficient weight.

If a female calf is produced, she may be put with the dairy herd and milked and impregnated for seven or so years, after which, as a milked-out dairy cow, she is sent to the abattoir - some 10 years short of her natural life span; by that time, her milk output will have dropped below the commercially viable level, and therefore  no longer useful, and therefore expendable.

Milk production is something most people don't want to know about in case it is associated with animal cruelty. If they turn away from milk on ethical grounds they will have to turn away from many hundreds of food items made with milk. And that wouldn’t go down too well with kids, which is why they are never told about cruelty to dairy cows and calves.