Milk - The White Stuff

Feature Story:

Dairy - Milk is widely regarded as nature’s miracle food – and it’s easy to see why. Apart from being packed full of essential protein, vitamins and minerals, it is arguably the most versatile food on the planet. Julie Mitchell looks at a global phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing.

Frothing cappuccino coffee, an indulgent cake oozing with cream, a cool glass of milkshake on a summer’s day, butter melting tantalizingly on hot toast, a crusty bread roll crammed with delicious, nutty flavored Cheddar cheese.

There’s no doubt that dairy products regularly feature in the daily diet in most parts of the world. The uses of milk are legion. As a drink, flavored with fruit or chocolate or added to hot drinks. You can process it into a variety of milk types. Skim the cream off the top for myriad culinary uses or churn it into butter. Curdle milk and you get cheese – the varieties run into thousands. Whey, the by-product of cheese-making, which used to be discarded as waste, is today a valuable raw ingredient for the food industry. And even when milk turns sour you can still enjoy it as yogurt. Such is the cultural impact of dairy products that they have inspired many well-known phrases. People in the US refer to an important person as ‘a big cheese’, while the French expression ‘en faire tout un fromage’ means to make a big deal of something. Similarly, ‘to milk’ is associated with making the most of a situation, for example, “he milked it for all it was worth”.

The uses of milk are legion: Skim the cream off the top for myriad culinary uses or churn it into butter. Curdle milk and you get cheese – the varieties run into thousands.

How milking developed

There’s no conclusive evidence to pinpoint when humans started to drink milk from animals, although it is generally accepted to date from when man learned to domesticate goats and sheep in the Middle East around 8000 BC . It’s also known that people were herding cattle in parts of Turkey as early as 7000 BC .

The ancient Egyptians enjoyed dairy products. Murals on some of their tombs show cheese being made. And there was also a cosmetic value – Cleopatra famously bathed in ass’s milk to improve her skin. The Greeks, too, were into cheese. One of their most famous sons, Homer, immortalized it in his epic poem, The Odyssey, where he describes the Cyclops making cheese from sheep and goat’s milk. But it were the Romans who are credited with establishing uniform cheese-making techniques in Europe. They also introduced them to other parts of their Empire where cheese making had previously been unknown.

Eventually, dairy products were on the menu throughout Europe as well as parts of Asia and Africa. Then, during the Age of Discovery in the 15th-17th centuries, Europeans spread the word to the far-flung corners of the globe when they took domestic cows and dairy production to their colonies.

Today, more people drink milk from cows than from any other animal. According to the International Dairy Federation’s World Dairy Situation 2007¹ cow milk represents 84 per cent of world output – 551 million tonnes in 2007. Interestingly, the report also reveals that, in India and Pakistan, buffalo milk production is growing faster than cow milk production. Sheep and goat milk production is estimated at 21 million tonnes worldwide. Other animal milk sources include camels, yaks, reindeer and horses.

People in Central Asia are partial to drinking fermented mare’s milk, which they call kumis, while in Sweden and Russia there are moose dairies. Because milking is a labor intensive process – between three and five minutes per cow – up until relatively recently dairy production could only be achieved on a small scale. Milking had to be done by hand – the farmer or milkmaid sitting beside the animal with a bucket. But when electricity was discovered in the mid-19th century the race was on to transform milking from an art to a science.

After 50 years of trial and error the first pulsator was introduced in 1895, paving the way for the modern pulsator machines.Another key development around this time was the milk pipeline, which replaced the cumbersome task of carrying pails of milk to collection tanks.

But the real breakthrough came in 1929 when the first rotary milking parlor was installed on the Walker-Gordon dairy farm in Plainsboro, New Jersey in the US . Called the ‘Rotolactor’, it could milk 50 cows at a time. It remained in use until the 1960s when it was superseded by more sophisticated rotary milking parlors.

Advances in milking technology, not least rotary parlors capable of milking more than 100 cows an hour, have enabled dairy farms throughout the Western world to become huge corporations with thousands of cows. And the trend is spreading to new markets such as China, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. During the 20th century mechanization, food processing technology and refrigeration have made a huge variety of dairy products readily available around the world.

1/2 Bulletin of the IDF N°423/2007 – The World Dairy Situation 2007, International Dairy Federation, Diamant Building – 80, Boulevard Auguste Reyers, 1030 Brussels – Belgium, www.fil-idf.org.

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