But Tom missed the big picture and root of the problem: dairy products are completely unnatural and unhealthy.  While I have no intention of giving up my very occasional pizza, mole cheese enchiladas, and ice cream, I fully realize that they're junk food.  No one needs dairy for any nutritional requirement, and many entire continents traditionally did not eat it (Asia with the exceptions of India and high mountain countries like Nepal), the Americas, and Australia).  So that actually puts dairy eaters in the minority.

Conclusion:  Don't eat this garbage for nutrition and certainly don't eat it on a regular basis.  My parents' forcing me to drink milk as a child caused constant ear infections that I later learned are quite common, and which were resolved by removal of my tonsils at age six (thanks western medicine!).  Milk is strictly for babies, and it should be their mothers' milk, not that of another species.

Most traditional societies consumed dairy products where ever herds flourished.  The whole of Europe, the Caucausus, a huge swath of central Asia nd the Himalayas, south Asia, large regions of Africa.  Even the Andes had vicunas and alpacas, so perhaps they gave milk for humans too.  Most of these people consumed dairy as fermented products, full of useful micro-organisms, or as cheese or butter.

It is interesting to me how often people extrapolate from their own personal experience to the entirety of the human race.  

Bacon, the gateway meat.

It is not at all clear that, whichever of the native peoples of the Americas actually kept domesticated animals, most notably the peoples of the Andes, they actually milked those animals.  What evidence there may be for milking llamas  seems sketchy; and many experts suggest that llamas do not produce much milk:

http://www.llamas.co.uk/Pages/tl3.htm.

In the Mediterranean countries, the part of the world that I know best, some cattle were kept in antiquity, but of course the most numerous domesticated mammals were always sheep, goats and pigs.  Cheese from one source or another (not pigs, though -- it is just as well, but why has no one seriously tried to extract milk from pigs?), as an added feature in meals containing other nutritious ingredients, has been traditional for some time.

(And, if I may respectfully quibble with good old Wolverine, pizza is NOT junk food.)

On the other hand, drinking straight milk out of cups -- yuck! -- is not at all traditional.  Whether anybody does it nowadays is possible, but that is in imitation of Northern European or American manners.  Cafe' au lait / cafe' con leche / caffe` latte is a relatively recent invention, and anyway is taken only at a certain time in the afternoon.  Similarly, that rather awful breakfast bowl of thin hot chocolate milk, given to children, is also recent, and probably has some fantastic connexion to weaning.

Anyway, as for what the cows are feeding on, and how it affects the quality of their milk: duh!  Women who are breast-feeding their first baby often comment with fascination that if they have had something pungent to eat, such as onions or garlic or chile, the baby will recoil somewhat from the tit, and maybe even react with plain displeasure.

It just goes to show, lots and lots of people who raise and exploit animals are economists and mechanics at heart, with no great curiosity about the nature of animals and their lives.  That is just another reason why it is unethical to allow the meat industry, as it is, to continue.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Hey, I wonder if you fed human beings a diet that their bodies were evolved for (a plant-centric omnivorous diet consisting of varied whole foods)if that would have an equally positive impact on our health? Instead of the "extruded food products" most of us consume now, that is. Whaddya guys think? Should we try it?

Sometimes people are so freaking dumb it makes me wonder if we're worth saving, ya know?

Caffe Latte is not a traditional afternoon drink, except for children.
Cappuccino with breakfast, macchiato in the morning, espresso for the afternoon.

In ogni caso, there is a time for this and a time for that.  And we North Americans, visiting Italy, have a very hard time getting used to Italian schedules of eating and drinking.

To say nothing of paying the damn check: it can take a huge chunk of one's life, from requesting the check, till actually getting it, paying it and leaving.

But still, it is Italy, so che significa?

As for chickens (and turkeys and friends) in a field, pooping on it and fertilizing it:  I have never actually seen that, but it would not surprise me if European farmers do indeed let their chickens "graze" and poop at will.

By the way, Caffe, there is no problem with the way you use "graze," technically, except that in this country, we always have cattle in mind.  Or anyway big critters with hooves, e.g. bison, or sheep.

But the world would certainly be a better place if the chickens entrapped in the CAFOs of Arkansas and thereabouts could be released and allowed to go grazing in the grasslands.  With dogs to help them stay away from highways.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

It is an extremely useful practice, especially combined with other grazing modalities, to build and enrich soil, because of the heavy pulsed input of naturally-produced nitrogenous waste.  It mostly ends up incorporated in the soil, with little ammonia off-gassing or run-off.

Bacon, the gateway meat.

The native ungulates in the west are deer and elk, which are browsers, not grazers, and there are no heavy animals that resemble cattle, aside from a few small and rare bison herds that made it into the mountains.  Western grasses have horizontal root systems, not vertical ones like eastern grasses, and thus cannot take the pressure of much grazing.  Without anything else, it's easy to see how cattle -- and, to a lesser extent, sheep -- grazing turned the western grasslands into deserts.  Unfortunately, there's more.

Ranchers kill anything they see as potentially harmful to, or competing with, their livestock, and are responsible for the devastation of predator species such as wolves, mountain lions, and grizzlies, which also leads to further ecological collapse by removing a necessary predator from the ecosystem.  Without predators to keep them moving, cattle congregate in riparian areas, destroying them.  Their immense weight also unnaturally compacts the soil, which is a much bigger ecological problem than most people realize.

Again, this is a nutshell.  If you want more detailed info, read "Sacred Cows at the Public Trough" By Denzel and Nancy Ferguson and/or "Welfare Ranching" by George Wuerthner.

As to Joe's comments, if the above is not specific enough for you, read the books.  And we're both wrong about who traditionally consume dairy products.  When I think of Asia, I usually forget what is usually referred to as "Central" Asia but what is actually western Asia.  So yes, people in that part of Asia consumed dairy.  But from western China eastward, there was no such consumption.  You are dead wrong that people in southern Asia consumed dairy, unless you mean southern India.

What is considered the best mozzarella is made from the milk of water buffaloes.  The Wikipedia article suggests that the buffaloes were brought to Italy in the very early Middle Ages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozzarella_di_Bufala_Campana ....

That strikes me as unlikely.  A site dedicated to mozzarella production from buffalo milk, labellerouge.com, suggests that the buffaloes were brought to Europe by returning Crusaders -- as though there were buffaloes in Palestine!  (They are not native to that region.  But who knows?; given the internationalization of Islam, buffaloes might have been imported into Palestine and Syria in the late Middle Ages.)  I suspect a bit more research might find a more reliable account of the introduction of water buffaloes into Italy.

By the way, I am not opposed in principle to taking some of the milk of nursing mammals. so long as their babies have enough for themselves too.  But raising animals with a view to keeping them as often as possible pregnant, then milk-producing, is exploitative.

As for my pal Wolverine's term "garbage," well, I would not go so far.  It is true that milk from animals, and dairy products made from that milk, are not for everyone, for one reason or another.  But that is not to say they have no nutritional value (see the mozzarella article).  Still, there is no reason to promote dairy products as a necessary or central part of anyone's diet.

A while ago, Gristmill had an occasional correspondent named Pandu, presumably an Indian-American, who lives on a small piece of land in south-central Pennsylvania, with animals, including at least one cow.  Within the particular Hindu tradition that he follows, his ideas are sophisticated, and he would write to us from time to time from that perspective.  I recall his saying that he did indeed milk the cow; but I do not remember how he said the milk was used.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Milk and blood were used as food obtained from the herding animals without killing them.  Laplanders use reindeer blood to make bread.  This efficiency allows a longer happier existence for all involved.

I'm not sure if this helps put dairying in persprective, but it is another way to look at it.  Reframing?

Insects are herders too.  

Are animals in a herd protected, but exploited by humans different animals from wild?  Symbiotically evolved with humans and dogs and cats.  

Cats protecting the whole arrangement from rodents.  Who co-evolved along with us all, as even bubonic plague and the fleas that carried it on the backs of the rats did too.

So we all are who we have become, together.  This whole agribizz factory treatment of our fellow creatures is not in the symbiotic mode.  It puts life out of balance.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Frankly, the Denzel Ferguson book is 25 years old and dated.  While doing undergraduate thesis work at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 1979, I used the library at the Malheur Field Station in SE Oregon which he directed at the time, and he was a hero to budding young western ecologists.  He spelled out that problems with conventional grazing practices and the history of destruction better than anyone. Since then, and partly thanks to his work, it seems that the most effective people have moved on from confrontation to cooperation.  There is a lot of interesting work being done in restoration ecology, and ranchers are a necessary part of the solution.

Bacon, the gateway meat.

Dairy is hardly garbage.

In the lovely Pacific Northwest, cows are run year-round on lush, green grass only a few miles from my home.  If only everyone were so lucky!