Well, yes, since we already do that. And human milk is at least from our species.
I personally think that would be very weird, but less weird than drinking the breast milk of other species.
I'll refer you to another response from this wonderfully lively thread:
""What do you like to drink?"
"Milk."
"What's that?"
"This breast juice from other animals. It's super healthy for the percentage of our population that can digest it."
"Oh...Why from other animals?"
"Well, we're not going to drink human breast milk, that would be gross. I mean, we give it to babies. Cow and goat lactation, though, that's for grown-ups.""
You're trying to make it seem like drinking milk is weird because it comes from an animal other than humans. But nearly all the food anyone eats comes from something that's not a human.
You're also ignoring one of the big reasons we don't drink human milk for longer - most human mothers stop producing milk after a certain length of time, whereas cows and goats and the like produce it more regularly, for longer periods of time.
You only think they don't because we force-impregnate the eugenics cows to be pregnant and lactating all the time. When they have their babies, the baby is taken away immediately and the cow is force-impregnated again 6 weeks later. After a few years, the cow is killed and becomes deli meat.
That is a strange horror show you are cheerleading for as "normal".
Also, stop pretending I'm saying things I'm not. It didn't work for the others and it won't work for you.
Not dissing your argument at all, but my first thought was of babies eating little pieces of human flesh and it made me giggle. Well now that I wrote I down it just sounds freaky, but in my head it sounded silly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fair enough. Like the other commenter said in response, it's good to remember that weird doesn't mean bad, but you're not wrong, it is pretty weird lol. The world is a goofy place :)
Agreed, there are tons of weird and goofy things everywhere. They don't bother me, but I notice and appreciate them.
Drinking milk from other species is just one of the most common weird ones and one that I don't think we examine fundamentally often enough haha. Plus I always think it's funny.
I always think of that. Tom Green skit where he drank milk straight from the udder of a cow and the ostensible joke is like look how crazy this guy is that he's willing to drink milk straight from the cow!
But that's basically what everybody is doing, in my head anyway whenever I see someone drinking milk. It's fun up there, in my head.
Käse in German means cheese. A dairy product. Therefore my comment.
But you are not wrong, it is colloquially used to describe somebody talking rubbish in the following sentences: Du redest Käse. Das ist doch Käse.
If we think about this way, yes it is indeed pretty weird but it has really great nutrients which are crucial for children to grow in a healthy way (in moderation just like with any other food, fruit, vegetable).
I think milk has vitamins and nutrients as well, vitamins and nutrients that can be easily supplemented by other dietary sources.
It's much more the fact that it's just day to day normal to drink breast milk from other animals.
"What do you like to drink?"
"Milk."
"What's that?"
"This breast juice from other animals. It's super healthy for the percentage of our population that can digest it."
"Oh...Why from other animals?"
"Well, we're not going to drink human breast milk, that would be gross. I mean, we give it to babies. Cow and goat lactation, though, that's for grown-ups."
I don't think "it's weird therefore bad" is a good argument. If you're gonna argue for veganism (which I don't have a problem work doing!) I think there are way, way better reasons.
"it's weird and should be more stigmatized" that seems to be making a moral claim right? I guess you never explicitly said that it's because it's weird that it should be stigmatized, but it certainly seemed to be structured like that.
And ah maybe I misunderstood, what you were saying just sounds like how a lot of ppl talk about it on the vegan forums I used to regular, lmao.
I'm not sure what triggers a moral defense there, except for the traditional context of the word "stigma", maybe? Yeah, might have taken it one assumption too far.
I guess you can make a moral argument against drinking milk because of factory farming infrastructure, but even with factory farming I think anyone would find it easier to argue against the mass slaughter in horrific conditions before the milk charge would make waves.
Even though drinking xeno-boob-juice is super weird.
So you used to be a vegan? Or you just crashed their forums?
Yeah I was talking about milks too. Probably it's relatively easy to supplement milk with other sources but are those choice economically viable? Protein powders are a bit expensive + as an average joe, payin 3x+ more for plant based milk products are bit too much for me currently, but a 2x could convince me to opt for a plant based one. I'm not really knowledgable in this area, there must be some other options too for replacing milk in a cost effective way.
Yeast is the way to look in terms of a realistic cost effective nutritious alternative to milk that tastes and feels similar. I think anyway. Synthesized yeast proteins, acids and fats is a pretty interesting field.
We can just program yeast to incorporate a certain amount of D3, or whatever other detail of nutrition we care for, within the milk or other substance they produce.
Oh, it's super cool. Scientists were able to persuade yeasts to produce all sorts of things in small colonies decades ago, but there are actual companies now that the technology has matured that are trying to bring yeast farms into commercial scale. And yeasts are so variable in their strains and productions that you could basically make a yeast produce any combination of protein, fats and acids that you'd like. They're hoping to synthesize biodegradable plastics, milks, it sounds like nearly anything organic should be able to be synthesized via yeast.
I love milk in my tea and cream in my coffee not to mention ice cream but it's still meant for helping calfs grow quickly into cows at the same time. We are talking huge gains quickly here.
Some argue it's why north American kids grow up so much faster and bigger than our Asian counterparts where milk and cheese is not as huge part of their diets. The kids hit puberty sooner too as a result. That's changing in other parts of the world as cheese and milk make their ways into the diets even in places that never understood why Americans eat so much cheese on everything.
Low fat products created enormous sources of removed fat that could be turned into all kinds of dairy products including cheeses. It's also heavily subsidized by government too. Dairy is so cheap in the US as a result compared to even Canada.
I don't guzzle milk anymore like I did as a teen due to the amount of phlegm the body can create with its consumption. I've never forgotten a health video years ago that equated milk to drinking a glass of puss due to the things done to cows to make commercial milk.
I guess in my mind cheese is adjacent but not milk, but that's just fooling myself as I eat my cheese.
It's a huge industry in the west and I don't think we will ever not see how great milk is for us. A lot is dedicated to keep those consumption numbers up and I do like my dairy products.
Wow! I think I had actually blocked out that pus memory but as soon as you said it my brain was like. Oh yeah you hated that, so I might have seen that.
What gives you the idea that eating animal meat is unintentional?
I can think of plenty of examples of one animal eating the meat of another, but only one example of a majority of a species drinking the breast milk of another species.
So yeah, drinking milk seems weirder to me than eating meat.
I dont know man. Ants are farming aphids for their sugary digestive secrets aka their shit. Bears eat Honey, which to all logic remains half digested bee-spit. Praying Mantis cut off the head off their mate after mating and eat it. Anglerfish males are not the mighty toothed beasts, but weird little parasites that nist themselves in the females and eat them from the inside until the female just lays its eggs before death.
So humans drinking other animals milk is maybe unique, but certainly not more weird than other ways of procurung nutrition, that nature invented.
I don't think anyone claimed drinking the breast milk of other species is the weirdest thing on the planet, but I'm not sure your examples quite hit that level, although ants and aphids is a point.
I guess the counterpoint is that aphid secretions are nontoxic and largely sugar, while humans have fancy coffee that's made from beans extracted from actual cat s***, and the cat s*** coffee farms are a lot weirder and more gross than an aphid farm.
But bee honey is just dried out nectar, it isn't even spit or vomit because there's no bile or added secretions. It's just dehydrated flower juice.
As for the angler fish and praying mantis, that doesn't seem strange at all with so many ways that evolution and reproduction have evolved.
Milk isn't some instinctual thing, humans know where milk comes from, know the cow has to be pregnant, and know which baby animals milk is for, and chose to build an industry around artificially impregnating cows year round, sucking the moo juice from their swollen breasts, taking away their babies after they're born and processing them for food, then artificially impregnating the agitated mother and sucking more juice out of her for a few years until she's worthless as a moojuice producer and is moodered for our consumption. Then there's the hormones that we used for decades and the terrible conditions the animals live in.
Factory farming, artificial insemination and separating families are choices that we are making to enjoy the elite privilege of drinking the lactation of other species.
Milk isn’t some instinctual thing, humans know where milk comes from, know the cow has to be pregnant, and know which baby animals milk is for, and chose to build an industry around ...
Neither is bread, beer, pizza or any other processed food. Think about it, how weird it is, that humans decided to take seeds, that they cannot digest well and isntead of letting the seeds just seed, they grind them with stones and then they add water and they let it spoil and then they take the spoiled bunch and put it over a fire. And of course it couldnt stop there no! they all started to make it in different ways and when they imagined some standarized symbols they added these symbols together to describe how to do it. And they learned how to breed the seeds so they get more of the white fluffy stuff and they started playing with the dirt to dirigate water to where the seeds grow. And then they noticed the seeds to grow better when they put animal shit on them, so they did that too. And then they used the little symbols they invented, to measure how much seeds each human is growing and how much seeds they need to give to the alpha-humans and some of these alpha humans got so rich with seeds, they built themselves giant gravestones, that are still among the largest buildings to this day.
You can describe anything that humans did since they stopped slapping bunnies with stone and collecting roots as being super weird. I share your criticism of industrialized farming, but not because it is less or more weird, but because it is detrimental to our survival and well being.
Breaking things down to their fundamentals isn't weird, the thing itself is weird.
No, the development of crops is not weird. Bread is likewise not weird. Capitalism, or the hoarding of resources, is more detrimental to humans than crops or bread, but not very weird.
Developing an industry around humans harvesting the non-essential lactation of other species meant for animal babies is much weirder than bread.
Milk - forcefully inseminate animals, confine the animals in filth, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, secure the cow lactation for the pleasure of the percentage of the human population that can digest cow milk instead of the animal babies it's intended for, boil the milk because it's dangerous for humans, kill the baby once it's born, ignore the bleating and stress of the cow, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, artificially inseminate the cow, repeat
try milk from lactating cow - realize you are able to digest it - get more milk from that cow.
All the rest that lead to most Europeans being lactose tolerant, which is an insane genetical success story and the subsequent refining of that process came later.
But maybe to help you with the seeds: A common way of breeding new seeds, that isnt specific GMO, is to radiate the seeds for random mutation. How is the following process not weird? "apply death ray to seed, get defeberated seed, see if it has any useful properties, crossbreed degenerated seed with less degenerated one until you get your right mix of degeneracy"
Or should we go about processing old dinosaur meat into transparent wrappings to buy our cow lactate in? Name it and i can tell you how it is weird. The process is just creative and the result is arbitrary.
You're literally doing what you're accusing others of in order to make inorganic sterile processes sound strange.
I'm not arbitrarily defining my level of detail, you can break down bread as much as you want and use as many dramatic or inaccurate terms as you like, but bread is never going to be as weird as artificially inseminating chemical hormone pumped eugenics cows so that we can steal their baby juice. I don't need to make euphemisms or make things sound more dramatic - that's actually what's happening.
You're pretending that radiation is weird when it's literally everywhere constantly, and using the word crossbreeds to falsely equivocate eugenics and hormonal manipulation in higher life forms with retaining the seeds of successful fruiting plants.
I understand you're upset that you can't make milk less weird, but pushing for grains to be weird is not a winning route for you.
Your weirdness with milk stems from it being from a mammal and you seeing more similarity with a mammal. But the underlying processes are equally estranged from the perceived natural way. and for the natural way again the definition remains difficult, because humans 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10.000 and 50.000 years ago all had very different lifes in which very different things happened.
What you described with artifical hormones is something of the past 50 years. But what about the other 6.000 years of humans drinking milk already? What you describe isnt specific to milk.It is specific to modern industrialized countries.
The original weirdness comes from thousands of years that humans saw these other animals with their animal boobs dripping milk into the mouths of their babies, and decided that we need some of that non-essential nourishment at any cost.
That's why it's weird. And it only gets weirder when we have to build up industrialized processes to support an obviously unsustainable and harmful process because...the percentage of the population who can stomach the non-essential infant cow juice want it so badly?
That weirdness has been happening as long as we've been stealing milk from cow babies.
Because you alleged that meat is not something I was intended to eat, which doesn't really track with the uncountable natural examples of predator and prey for all of knowable history.
Things happening have nothing to do with intentions. Your implication of milk is not intended to be consumed by humans doesn't track with the history either. We consume milk a fuck ton in various forms over hundreds of years.
Of course it tracks - You think that breast milk produced by cows and goats for baby cows and goats specifically is intended for human consumption? No, of course not. That animal breast milk is intended for the young of that species.
Humans may continue to suckle at the teats of other animals, and it may continue to be common, and it will be weird.
That just brings back the question of how's cow meat is intended to be eaten by you. That muscle is intended to let the cow walk and eat and reproduce. It is specifically evolved for those purposes.
I don't think I have the time or inclination to explain the entire history of predator and prey to you, but if you type in those two p-words, you're going to learn a whole lot about a very long history of carnivores and omnivores eating meat.
Carnivores are meat eaters and omnivores eat many things, btw.
Humans as a predator, are biologically and historically intended to eat prey, the cow. Or pig, or whatever animal.
Look it up, you can choose nearly any animal you are familiar with, and they will fit into the food chain somewhere as an iteration of predator or prey.
You are just keep switching the subject of intention for your convenience. Milk is not intended to be... humans are intended to... If you only consider the intention of the consumer, of course it is always intended to consume whatever is nutritious. The logic flaw is in the case of milk you suddenly switch to consider the intention of the producer which is the cows. Are you doing this intentionally (pun intended) or is it a blind spot for you because you hate milk?
If you keep asking questions about different topics, you're going to receive answers about different topics.
That doesn't mean I'm being inconsistent, it means that I'm consistently answering your inconsistent questions.
Your newest topic is based on the false premise that I am considering the intention of cows, which I am not.
You're making that up and then following up your false claim by asking me why I believe cows have intention because it's an indefensible point.
You got confused four or five comments ago and you're trying to use disingenuous, obscure questioning and false assertions in an attempt to ignore and draw attention away from the clear answers you've received that logically show you why meat is biologically and historically intended to be eaten by carnivores and omnivores.
It's not working, but it is funny that you keep trying, so go wild.