I did not take offense to it, I have just always gotten squeamish easily whenever discussing biological matters this in depth. I agree that in many ways, including the how we sanitize dairy, America has to differ in method due to its size. Though he took a pretty extreme stance on it, his comment that now dairies could do whatever they wanted to the animals and the milk, as long as they pasteurized it, really resonated with me. The food industry is extremely corrupt, and many disturbing things happen behind closed doors.

As to your point about drinking milk during adulthood was not the evolutionary norm, I too thought back to that reading when analyzing his argument. Do we really need all the nutrients in milk, or is it just a marketing scheme from the dairy industry?

I found the breeding descriptions to be little more detailed than necessary but certainly not gruesome or gross. I pictured Kessler kind of smirking as he wrote it, but it just come down to basic biology that happens every day in every animal species.

I didn’t like his negative stance on pasteurization. He wrote that pasteurization kills or denatures many of the beneficial aspects that come from drinking milk, and I agree with that statement. However, it also is incredibly important for destroying the potential dangers that reside in dairy products. Now, he also states that there’s an alternative – rigorous testing similar to many European regulations. However, something to keep in mind is that what might work for a European country may not work for the United States, purely based on geographic reasons. Most European countries are the size of one of our states, and that small geographic scale make many things more convenient or practical (such as having inspectors go all over the country to test facilities). When it comes to diseases I’d prefer to err on the side of caution and pasteurize our dairy. Any nutritional drawbacks can easily be made up in other areas (as has been pointed our numerous times, drinking milk into adulthood is not the evolutionary norm).

I had some similar thoughts during the reading. I think it takes us back to the discussion we had a few weeks ago about coevolution being a part of the domestication of animals. Like you said, it appears that our relationship with cows altered our genetics, and likewise it definitely changed the evolution of cows. It seems to me to be a prime example in the argument that in domesticating animals, humans have actually just been acting within nature. I know we’ve talked about whether or not what humans have done has been “natural,” and it seems to me that the coevolution of humans and cows demonstrates that actions humans have taken are just as natural as the coevolution between any other two species. It’s all part of nature in my view.

I really like your thought about the real issue being monoculture. I see the problem the exact same way. The issue with modern agriculture looks to me to be our insistence in growing one crop (say, corn), time after time, destroying the land and soil in an attempt to meet the demand of people. When I traveled Nicaragua last year, we visited a permaculture farm, where the thought is to model agricultural methods on natural growth tendencies. They had a large variety of species that were naturally prone to the area, and as a result had a very successful growing operation. This requires humans to change their preferences and essentially take whatever happens to be growing at the time instead of trying to force nature to change to our desires. Definitely something to consider.

This is what I mean though when I say you cannot seperate us from the technology too much. In the scenario where we’re wholly dependent on the technology to think and act for us, we are it, or it is us. There is some very interesting sci fi around this topic, Learning to be Me is a good short story about technology and identity.

Definitely an interesting topic. Makes me wonder if this unloading of our cognitive processes onto automated technologies and clouds will eventually leave us mindless, living blissfully in a world that does everything for us.

What a great post! There’s so much here to talk about – including the ways in which we (still/always) want to invoke “harmony” and “natural” as positive descriptors of an ideal and idealized past, when it stand to reason that if things are not perfect now, they likely weren’t then either! Tanner’s point is a good one as well – people probably did experiment with seeds or become “accidental farmers” just for the heck of it – sometimes. But at other times, and probably lots of other times, it seems quite plausible that cultivating / domesticating had overtones of desperation. And of course what we most easily forget (with our focus on “western civilization” that began in the middle east), is that the vast majority of early people were nomadic pastoralists rather than agriculturalists.

Don’t fret the werms. Let’s talk cows in class.

As fascinating as gene therapy for weight loss is, I hope we can take up the issue Megan raises in her comment about milk. Corinne highlights the obvious when she considers what prompted humans to start drinking the milk of other animals (awkward!), and the article Megan cites offers good insight about the importance of fermentation and dairying to making milk palatable and digestible for humans. Fermented mare’s milk helped sustain the armies of Ghengis Khan and is (still) an important food in central Asia. (https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/freerangedomesticate/2013/02/12/drink-your-kumis-or-fermentation-as-humanitys-best-friend/)

Like I mentioned briefly, he discusses how humans evolved the enzyme to digest milk as a result of agriculture, but he also seems to attribute our current obesity epidemic to the rise of monoculture. He states we tend to “stick to the few species that grow best,” leaving us with a massive consumption of dairy, cereal, and sugar, (also booze in his opinion). Furthermore, he describes our relationship with cows as mutualistic, rather than simply us domesticating them- they give us dairy and beef, we ensure them grass. However, Dunn sees that now, do to advances in the food industry, we are moving further and further away from our historical means of food, and he thinks it takes people away from their culture and their sense of identity.