Take milk for example

I started this post over a week ago but have not been able to get back to it because of a backlog of other priority tasks. But I hope to be back to blogging on a more regular basis now.

I started this post because there had been a lot of stuff in the air - and there still is - about climate change, recycling, and a whole range of other environmental issues, and as I was battling with that irritating extra bit of packaging you have to remove from your milk bottle under the lid, I thought I would take milk as an example of the difficulties of eating well and at the same time taking care of the environment.

Milk, as shown in the photograph above is often described as pure, as the best possible food. It's certainly the first food we imbibe - although not cow's milk as a rule, unless you were not breast fed - whole other issue that I won't go into here. And, in fact, according to the Guardian two-thirds of the world are lactose intolerant and so do not drink milk anyway. This is apparently due to a mutation that occurred thousands of years ago which means that most people in most 'Western' countries can process lactose and the rest of the world can't. Not an absolute of course, but a rough guide.

“From a human perspective – no, to go further than that, from a mammalian perspective – the norm is to be able to tolerate your mother’s breast milk, and then as you get past infancy, to stop producing lactase and become lactose intolerant.” Adam Fox - Nutritionist

As a child I might have been lactose intolerant. I certainly didn't like milk - I forced it down at school but it made me gag. I realise now that I should have just thrown up and they might have stopped giving it to me. I really didn't like it, and actually I still don't like to drink straight milk. But I can't be lactose intolerant because I do like cream and I can certainly drink milk shakes and eat foods that have milk in them. And I love cheese. Maybe I just didn't like the taste of unadulterated milk.

Indeed the same article pointed out that until the advent of refrigeration and of pasteurisation it was generally not safe to drink milk anyway due to it going off rapidly. So mostly it was just the people who milked the cows who drank the milk. Safely anyway. Cheese and butter were Ok but not milk.

In the twentieth century milk became the big healthy thing. It was provided in schools and I even remember General de Gaulle promoting it instead of wine for kids. Back in the day even children in France drank wine at mealtimes - watered down admittedly but they did drink wine. I was certainly offered it - at the age of thirteen was the first time - and I did try it, but I didn't like it, so they gave me mineral water instead.

But then they decided it had a lot of unsaturated fat in it and it was no longer considered a good thing - which is when skimmed milk and light milk came in.

Now though we have the boom in vegetable milks. And here's a little bit of trivia - they became really popular when they managed to get themselves into the refrigerated section of the supermarket, and also because of Instagram, which managed to make them all look trendy and desirable. And, also of course, because of the influence of the Clean Food movement. Now you can get 'milk' made from just about every kind of nut, and also grains and legumes. Pea milk is the latest thing for example. In America apparently just under half the population buys some kind of 'alternative' milk weekly.

I have now read a few articles on the nutritional benefits of the various 'milks' as opposed to milk itself and it seems to me that milk is still the most nutritious - indeed one of the ingredients (carrageenan) that is often added to some is potentially cancer causing. For there are often lots of additives to these various vegetable milks to give them the same or similar nutritive value as milk.

“It has a lot of nutrients in it. It’s a great source of calcium, it’s a great source of protein, it’s a good source of riboflavin and potassium. So you can’t make the argument it’s not a nutritious food.” Dennis Savaiano - Professor of Nutrition Science

But from a superficial look from me at all of this it seems that soy milk is the only real contender in nutritional value - and then you have to like the taste. So, in fact, the contenders concentrate on highlighting the bad things that are missing from their product.

"we’ve gone from buying foods on the merits of their ingredients, to buying them on the basis of what’s left out." Oliver Franklin Wallis

And you could probably say much the same about milk itself which comes in a myriad of different forms.

But enough on the nutritional value - if you want to know more do read the excellent article from The Guardian, called White Gold: The Unstoppable Rise of Alternative Milks.

What I really wanted to talk about was how, yet again it's hard to do the right thing by the planet and at the same time eat and drink healthily. And you an probably apply much the same arguments to any kind of 'natural' food. With respect to our example, milk, basically all of these alternative milks came about because of concern over the health of the planet - well amongst other things I suppose, with the basic thing being, less animals, less Greenhouse Gases. Apologies - I have lost the source of this quote below.

"If you compare the ratios of global warming potential (GWP) to primary energy consumed, producing a cow comes in about 50% higher than a pig or chicken. And the methane cows emit remains in the atmosphere 21-23 times more effectively than CO2."

So too many cows, too much methane and too much Greenhouse Gas.

“The worst thing that could happen [environmentally] is if the Chinese people started to drink dairy milk, because there wouldn’t be enough cows in the world to support that,” Toni Petersson - CEO Oatly

So really you should not invest in A2 Milk and all those other milk companies that are trying to push into China. Leave the Chinese to their soy milk.

But it doesn't stop with the animals themselves. They consume grain which takes up space that could be used for other purposes. As do the cows of course. The grain uses chemicals that pollute, and machines that not only pollute but also use energy. Clearing land for grain, is, of course, a bad thing to do, for any number of reasons. The milking of the cows uses energy, and sometimes the conditions in which the cows are kept are inhumane. So you are also into ethical concerns.

Then you have the packaging - which started me off on this. Do you really, really, need that extra layer of protection from the outside air? And does the bottle have to be plastic? When I was young it was delivered by horse and cart to the house. The horses provided manure for the gardens if you were quick enough to scoop it up. The glass bottles were recycled - we returned them to the milkman - and the aluminium? bottle tops were recycled too.

When I was at High School we had to take it in turns to wash those bottle tops so that they could be recycled. In winter this was not a pleasant task as the water was icy cold.

I guess recycling glass bottles also takes energy, so maybe it's not better, either economically or environmentally. We are not sure about recycling itself any longer are we? Mind you I am guessing that back in the day those bottles were just washed and sterilised and reused as they were - no breaking up and remaking involved. And why not do that? Surely it's possible to make them sterile and therefore reusable? But of course there would be water involved - and where do you get that from? Honestly it just goes on and on.

Then of course there's all the marketing and advertising and general running of companies that sell the milk - well I'm sure a lot of bad things could be said about them, but at least it gives people jobs.

So I don't know. On the one hand you have a very nutritious, natural product but with major environmental impact problems. On the other you have possible less environmentally damaging 'alternative' milks - although this too is questionable apparently - particularly in the case of almonds and water - but somewhat less nutritious products - unless you add artificial vitamins, minerals, etc., which surely can't be good. And seriously, they don't taste the same at all. If you are thinking about cream and cheese - this is not cream and cheese.

As in all things I guess it's a balance. In our house we do not actually consume a lot of milk. But we do consume quite a lot of cheese, and a lesser, but still significant amount of cream and yoghurt. Maybe we should just look at ways of improving our cow husbandry and just using less dairy and more vegetable oils and vegetables in general.

And, as I said at the beginning, milk is just an example. I'm pretty sure you could look at any food you buy and find something bad to say about it. As my husband so often says - the real problem is that there are too many people on the planet.

Veganism - coming up soon.