The article itself is informative... But the diagrams, the low contrast on the web page, the font sizes, even some of the writing sounds...umm... <i>AI-driven</i><p>I'm not complaining about the use of (AI) tools per se, which is fine I guess.<p>Something feels off. Somewhere between a little-off to a bit-more-off.
Sorry. I'm trying to find the right words... Perhaps a bit too polished? (Can there be such a thing?)
You can do some of this at home too. I buy raw milk (it's common here in Switzerland) and make paneer or ricotta. Then I boil down the whey and make a fudge-like Norwegian cheese.<p>Another pathway is to start with 35% fat cream or crème fraiche and make butter. Then you use the buttermilk to make cheese. Then you use the whey to make Norwegian cheese OR if you started with crème fraiche you take the sour whey and make sorbet by mixing it with some fruit juice and shaking the container every hour or so as it freezes in the freezer.<p>It's not nearly as time-consuming as it sounds and the rewards are better than anything you'd buy. The butter is better (less water within), the paneer and ricotta are so much better than factory-made, and the sorbet is... well probably about equal to sour cream sorbet you'd buy (assuming you buy movenpick :).
You don't actually need raw milk to make yogurt. I use Fairlife brand which is ultra-filtered milk, and combine it with a container of plain Fage (active culture Greek yogurt) in a pressure cooker. This is a very common way to make yogurt at home here in the US.<p>I also grew up on a cattle farm and have made many other products when I was younger from raw milk. There are /some/ things that require raw milk because they are wild cultured, but most food products are not wild cultured when made at home so you can pitch the correct yeast or bacteria with pasteurized milk just fine. One thing that is hard to find in the US and impossible to make without raw milk is Serbian/Turkish kajmak/kaymak.<p>I even make my own butter at home using ultra processed heavy whipping cream. Raw milk is a great thing in some ways, but it is not in others and in any case not really a requirement to make milk products at home.
where do you get the bacteria/ yeast from?
Easiest place to get it is from the product you want to produce.<p>For example, if you want to make yogurt then grab a little bit of the leftover yogurt in your fridge, drop a dollop of it in, and viola, it'll start the yogurtification process.<p>You can also rely on the open-air bacteria for some culturing, but the results can be all over the place. This is how a lot of sites suggest starting sour dough.
This should have included the insemination and slaughter as well. That cow didn't come from nowhere.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”<p>— Carl Sagan
e.g. to get the cow to make milk you have to get it pregnant and thus you get an unwanted calf.
For industrial farms, yeah I think that calf doesn't have a happy ending.<p>That said, if you don't want the calf, there's almost always going to be someone that does. We'd raise and then butcher the male calves from our milking cows. (We did milk the cows for commercial purposes).
Thank you. I was a little bit disappointed that these more sinister parts were occluded but I guess that is to be expected after all, the dairy industry spends insane amounts of money to keep us gaslighted. Just ask somebody if cows give milk without being pregnant...<p>Let's also not forget that the article basically skips what rennet actually is just naming it an enzyme.
<i>The Tech Tree of Milk Is Insane</i> (Feb 2026)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUZmojH7p8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUZmojH7p8</a>
It doesn't even start with the cow!<p>The cow is the index case of <i>microbiome über alles</i>, that is the cow cannot digest grass at all but rather it is colonized with bacteria that eat the grass and then the cow eats the bacteria and the volatile fatty acids made by the bacteria.
A sidenote about unhomogenized milk, it's delicious. I don't know if it actually tastes any different, but something about shaking it up before using it just makes it feel different.
It absolutely is.<p>Toned homogenised milk is just a thin watery gruel colored white. For me Half'nHalf is about the right consistency but you can't get it unhomogenized.<p>That said, cannot not post this mandatory calvin and hobbes strip<p><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3QdxvsR2p5pHnxSGGu61jA1W3rUPmygT9zgp2n_N-FEbAqc25v9kUz29F&s=10" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3Qdxv...</a>
Half and Half is too much cream for most people. I've met someone who drank it constantly, but she was a former New York City Ballet dancer, with a very high metabolic rate, struggling to keep her weight up.<p>Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
I am thin for my size (having graduated from skinny) but my doctor gets heart attacks looking at my lipid profile. Calcium score still zero, which could be a very mixed blessings.<p>My doctor had to work hard to persuade me to come off my 3 eggs for breakfast routine.<p>I don't exercise, like at all and feel fine. On the other hand I have to pace all the time. So much so that my first job interview was very awkward, just can't think pinned to a chair.<p>My wife is a ballet dancer so maybe I inherited the metabolism from her :)
It may have a higher % of fat. Have you tried to compare it with 95% milk and 5% dairy cream? (I'm not sure about the proportions.) Also, the pasteurization for long term unrefrigerated storage change the taste, so you can try with milk pasteurized for short term storage under refrigeration.
I'm in the US, so I'm speaking only about pasteurized for short term refrigeration. There are places that produce that, just without the homogenization.<p>I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
There's something to be said about variety of consistency/taste to excite the tastebuds I think!
I grew up with homogenized milk, and the mere smell of unhomogenized milk makes me want to vomit. Even boiled milk is awful. Unhomogenized cow milk was slightly more tolerable than unhomogenized ox milk.
We buy 1L bottles of fresh whole milk from the local dairy, and there is always a thick layer of cream on the top, unlike store-bought whole milk that seems to be missing the cream.
I appreciate the raw milk warning in there. Raw milk kills people ever year. It gets lost in the flood of dairy marketing.
I was at the off-grid farm of one of our area's premiere hippie mamas and she took me to her cow barn/milking parlor which had chickens running around and plenty of chicken crap. She told me she'd offer me some milk if her cows weren't dry which saved me the need to refuse the offer.
There's a raw milk lobby. [1][2]<p><i>But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.</i><p>Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-right-rebrand-of-raw-milk-00145625" rel="nofollow">https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing-your-milkman/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/4/963.html" rel="nofollow">https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...</a>
If you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child. And pasteurization removes/diminishes nutrients in milk. It’s much more nuanced than ‘raw milk is bad’.
I'm pretty sure people who drink raw milk are aware of the risks.
They very much are not.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearly_killed_me_ama/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...</a>
That will vary by person. My father-in-law bred and milked pedigreed Holsteins. They had a 1 gallon pasteurizer and would just dip a gallon out of the bulk tank for household use when needed. So, most of the time they had pasteurized, non-homogenized. On occasion, the pasteurizer would break, so for a while they would drink raw milk. But of course understood the risk, and also knew darn well where the milk had come from and how clean the milking facility was.
You'd be surprised. <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/u-penn-survey-shows-only-56-americans-understand-drinking-raw-milk-risky" rel="nofollow">https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/u-penn-s...</a>
I'm not sure. Judging by my own family, I think a lot of them have been info-silo'ed to think pasteurization is harmful and that "They" want to keep raw milk from you.<p>I'd liken it to claiming an anti-measles-vax person is aware of the risks of measles. They might not believe in the risk at all.