Why rob world of yoghurt?
Re: “The unintended irony of World Breastfeeding Week”, Have Your Say, August 3.
Once again Jenny Moxham makes the silly claim that those of us who consume milk or dairy products are in reality breast-feeders. However, milk from cows and goats is just one of many sources of nutrition that Homo sapiens has discovered, or invented, down the millennia. An Internet search tells me that people first started consuming milk in central Europe about 7,500 years ago, and the habit obviously spread.
Yoghurt, which is of course made from milk, is a Turkish word, and it is a dietary staple of hundreds of millions of people in India, Nepal, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Milk is also the basis for other useful and delicious products such as butter, ghee, single cream, double cream, whipped cream, ice cream and cheeses of infinite variety and flavour, and of course it is included in a whole range of chocolates and puddings. Imagine how dreary our diet would be if such delights were banned.
The vegan/vegetarian brigade will of course lecture us about the environmental impact of dairy farming, and point out that alternatives to milk are available. True, but these substitutes often don’t taste as good as the real thing, and producing them can also harm the environment. For example, an increasing demand for almond milk has resulted in the creation of huge almond orchards in California, but these orchards need to be irrigated, putting more pressure on that drought-prone state’s limited water supplies. Apparently it takes five litres of water to produce just one almond nut. Now that’s what I call food for thought!
Robin Grant
