this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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Big Milk is so powerful, I've had older women in China ask me how I got so tall if I don't drink milk.
This is China, with no history of drinking cows milk and like 90% of the population is lactose intolerant.
In fairness, China's southern and western provinces have historically been on the shorter side. But also, like.... Yao Ming.
You can improve lactose tolerance if you introduce milk to kids at an early age and drink it continuously. My 50s-era Jewish family are all horribly lactose intolerant, but I grew up chugging the stuff and do just fine with it. Plenty of ABCs can and do drink milk and eat dairy, just as a matter of living in a country so full of cows and cow-products.
What happens in another 20-40 years, as we obliterate our grazing lands and drive the cost cow products skyward? Idk, man. But milk is a consumer staple for a reason. Calorically dense. Very useful in cooking/baking. Relatively cheap to produce and distribute. Goes well over cereal.
If milk did not exist, we would have to invent it.
Pretty sure most people in USA don't need more calories.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611097/
Dairy is literally the least sustainable and least efficient form of food production next to meat and palm oil.
https://www.trvst.world/sustainable-living/worst-foods-for-the-environment/
1 in 5 kids in the United States is living with hunger. That's nearly 14 million children, which has increased from a year ago.
Milk is a highly effective method of fattening kids up who are malnourished or otherwise underfed. Whole milk is the go-to for toddlers coming off breastmilk/formula for a reason.
Natural gas is a leading contributor to climate change. It is also the cheapest (for the moment) form of energy per kWh.
"Sustainability" is not the same thing as "Cheap" or "Easy to Distribute". Quite the opposite.
Now, a lot of our cheap milk is a byproduct of our intensive animal agriculture, which is highly profitable but dismally inefficient. If that changes (because we killed a big chunk of our cow herds by mismanaging grazing land and water rights and fucking up disease mitigation) then I can see a world in which cow-milk drops off the menu quickly.
So, hey, let me know if that changes.
We did invent superior forms of milk, such as oat milk.
We invented alternatives, definitely. But there are still plenty of trade-offs. Much lower in calories and saturated fats, for instance.
If you're trying to fatten up a skinny little baby (as I'm currently working on, having placed with a toddler a few months back) the pediatrician is going to stare daggers at you if you say you've been giving the kid oat milk rather than whole milk. Literally had this conversation already and got hit in the head with a stack of literature just for asking.