There is no way the 6x yield increase per cow did not negatively affect the taste, nutrition, and quality of the milk. Indeed, most of the "milk" you buy in large industrial countries barely deserves the term - it's got no taste or subtle flavor. It's even worse regarding derived butters and cheeses.
Yield is a great and easy thing to optimize becuase it's easy to measure. And if you increase yield at the expense of taste at suffiently slow rate, the change is impercetible to the customer. Happens slowly over decades so that a nice glass of milk is now like drinking dirty wash water. And a nice fat steak becomes ground up crickets and synthetics.
Moral of the story. Get your own low efficiency cows.
Yeah, I know it's a bit hyperbolic but high end milk and eggs seem like the Monster HDMI Cable of food goods.
Some cow breeds have a high milk fat content and if you drink that un-homegenized you can tell, but once the milk fat is normalized I can't tell a difference. I can tell a much bigger difference between vat and HT pasteurization.
Same with eggs, sure high omega three eggs have a yolk that is more orange but unless your doing a back to back comparison on a a very runny soft boil yolk you really can't tell a difference in flavor. If the egg is an ingredient the difference becomes completely undetectable.
I think these types of "steps" removed products like eggs and milk have a much narrower band of quality than people think.
These biologically manufactured products just don't seem to be as directly effected by inputs as the organisms themselves.
I was inspired to perfect my French omelette skills over the summer and went out of my way to slowly improve each ingredient.
* I can earnestly say Kerrygold (or Irish butter from ALDI) makes a real difference than regular butter.
* I can say that kosher salt does help as well.
* I found a difference with (fresh cracked) white pepper but I don't personally prefer it over black pepper.
But most surprising to me (and what confirms your thesis) is I did not find a difference with the freshest of local eggs. I purposely went directly to a local farm with their own chickens, but nope- still the same as mass market eggs.
I've tried every expensive egg that Sprouts and Whole Foods sells and the only ones I've found to be notably different are the Happy Egg Co. Heritage Breed Eggs specifically. Sprouts is the only place I know of locally that sells them. They're blue and brown, the shells are extremely thick, often have feathers stuck on them, and they're $8 a dozen (and have been all through the shortages and everything, the price has never gone up or down). The yolks are so dark especially in the summer it's astonishing.
Absolutely right on Kerrygold, in my experience. Nothing else I've bought has come close.
Fresh eggs make it easier to get the right texture, especially for new cooks (less albumin separation -- same reason fresh egg whites whip better). If you're already past the basics, freshness won't impact the result much outside of, perhaps, a bit of weepage.
Egg flavor is fairly resilient though. Even repeatable effects from, e.g., flaxseed in the diet, are pretty small. You might notice them, but in a french omelette the egg is a smooth base for delivering the actual food -- butter. I'd experiment there (very easy to make your own cultured butter at home) before playing with the flavor of eggs, and personally I basically ignore flavor when evaluating which eggs to buy.
For anyone else reading along, room temp eggs also make it much easier to get the right french omelette effect, especially without a nonstick pan. 5-10min in warm water if you refrigerate your eggs should suffice.
They absolutely do. There are cheats and hacks you can use to make decent-looking poached eggs regardless (molds, vinegar and salt in the poaching water, double-cooking with an intermediate ice bath, straining off the weaker outer proteins before cooking, ...), but fresh eggs give a more consistently good result.
I've only tried Kerrygold (which is Irish butter specifically) and the white label ALDI Irish Butter which is by all account I've read online...also Kerrygold.
I've never heard of "Normandy AOP butter", you'll have to enlighten me on that one.
Costco carries the New Zealand butter that's almost indistinguishable from Kerrygold. There are inevitably some flavor differences, but not when cooked and imo not in terms of quality.
That explain a lot, I didn’t totally care for the flavor. It was sold to me as “just for appearance” (no black specks in the final product) in most recipes but I didn’t see that reflected.
I buy "high end" eggs not because they're better for me, but because there were fewer or less toxic pesticides put into the environment to produce feed for it, and there's less chance the chicken spent its entire life in a cage so small it can barely move (or on the floor of a barn so packed that, again, it can barely move.)
That's the straw-man people who attack organic food buyers with. "You silly libtard, buying organics because you think it's better for you!"
Nope. It's only partially about my health. In the case of a lot of organic produce, it's more about my not wanting to support industry growers whose field workers are exposed to incredible levels of pesticides.
There are exceptions. Canadian grain for example, which farmers drench in pesticides using them as a drying agent to reduce spoilage rates. They take advantage of reduced regulations around pesticide residue that was pushed through by lobbyists hired by Canadian grain producers.
So, I will not buy any grain based products that aren't organic.
What is particularly scary: a producer who sells in bulk targeting the restaurant industry (Badia) was one of the higher levels tested.
Anything made with central/south american fruit puree? Organic only. Why? Producers used to spike the weight of their shipments with lead in the bottom of the containers. The lead would then go through the processing machinery. Result? Huge numbers of latino kids getting extreme lead poisoning.
I won't buy any central/south american produced candy period, because manufacturers like to print the labels with lead-containing inks among other problems, and they repeatedly test high for lead, have for decades, because those governments don't care or are being bribed: https://www.nmhealth.org/publication/view/help/2154/
Organic farming uses larger amounts of less effective poisons. Modern poisons are highly targeted and require smaller amounts. Typically they target disruption of metabolic pathways that are specific to plants.
"Organic" as a concept has fallen victim to regulatory capture.
If you douse your fields in copper compounds which aren't currently regulated as fungicides then you can keep your certification, no matter the quantity. Last I checked, ~80% of organic produce in the US had worse pesticide use than traditional farms (if you include things which aren't illegal yet, using rolling policy changes causing previous "organic" behaviors to be regulated as an indication of what the status quo is).
As a related concept, "GMOs" (selectively adding desired genes to a crop) can't be organic, but radiation and chems to increase the mutation rate 100,000x and then select the winning crops is organic.
I know you said health doesn't matter, but if you look at recent produce-induced health scares, the vast majority are e-coli from the fecal-oral route on your organic produce.
Not to mention, something like 3-8% of organic produce _still_ has the pesticides that are explicitly banned for use in organic farming. The same kind of people who spike a shipment weight with lead will also bribe an inspector and use pesticides. There's a lot of money sloshing around when you can charge twice as much for your crops.
That's not to say per se that you shouldn't buy organic food (when I'm purchasing from a large retailer, I do personally avoid it on principle, but that's a separate conversation), but don't let a particular buzzword short-circuit your critical thinking. You seem to be very aware of the kind of harm that can happen when you purchase products produced by megacorps in countries with low incomes and a culture of bribes. You, unfortunately, still need to apply that analysis to each product. The heuristic of "organic == good" doesn't apply in today's day and age.
> I also won't buy non-organic spices or teas. Turns out that a lot of non-organic spices - like cinnamon - have very high levels of lead, but the organic versions have much less, or none
This is hit or miss depending on the substance. E.g. organic chocolate has more lead than non-organic chocolate, on average.
The lead amount has more to do with the very specific place that a given crop is being grown, not so much to do with organic food or not.
If you use organic farming practices on top of soil that's got a lot of lead in it, the resulting food thing will have more lead in it
You should probably buy non-organic eggs if you want healthier eggs. Due to the regulations regarding what they can eat ("natural" food), they will eat more dioxines and heavy metals. Synthetically derived ingredients skip this issue because there is no bioaccumulation of contaminants.
I grew up with a family garden and a father who bow-hunted, fished, and worked at various levels of "industrialization" in food industry throughout his career.
As a kid, I thought _everyone_ had chest-freezers of trotters, bluegill, crappie, and venison in the basement. ;)
There's simply no other way to get that many calories out to the masses and we've had multiple generations of "masses" raised on artificial consistency and engineered taste.
Ignorance is bliss. Fresh food is also bliss.
"Really good noodles"
"Which is why chicken tastes like everything"
"A single cell protein combined with vitamins and minerals"
For many sound reasons, we're living in a blue-pill world, but try to take the red-pill whenever you get the chance.
Taste is one thing, the nutrient content also differs. In dairy and meat the fatty acid profile is different based on the animals feed and breed, in vegetables it depends on the plants growing conditions and variety.
Modern varieties optimize for simple KPIs, but lack nutrients. A modern grocery store tomate will have the same amount of nutrients as a smaller older variety, but since the older variety is smaller you will end up eating more tomatoes and have a more nutritious diet.
Most people just don't care. Food is energy and it needs to be cheap. Worrying about taste is a privileged concern. It's for most people, "good enough".
Interestingly, the "alternative" breeds I'm familiar with are marketed as _high_ efficiency because they produce milk on very little input (all or mostly grass; very little corn and soy). For example: https://licnz.com/products-services/lic-cow-breeds/
Milk from lower yield cows doesn’t inherently taste different, there’s a wider range of breeds but you can get identical tasting milk from low yield cows.
There’s several other ways milk tends to be worse but the primary issue is simply age. It can be a long time between when a cow is milked and when you’re adding milk to your morning cereal. Which then requires various compromises in the final product.
Yes, they still exist! In my limited experience the milk does taste better but I think it's because of management, not genetics.
The "get big or get out" Holsteins of conventional dairying will produce themselves to death. That is, they'll make milk even at the expense of their own bodies. To handle that, they need to be fed very intensive grain-based diets (corn and soy). Otherwise they'd waste away.
One of the local dairies has better milk, and anything derived from milk, than the others. Their secret is that some of the herd is of Guernsey and Jersey breed. Milk from only those cows is yellowish in hue, and certainly richer in fat, some would say it tastes better but it definitely tastes different. I prefer the combined milk from the dairy in question (in the US) to pure Guernsey, which is also available, depending on locale.
I would say that the effect of breeding for quantity is less extreme for dairy than for chicken meat, but it's there. The main impact on flavor isn't actually higher production by the cows, it's large-scale homogenization and high-temperature pasteurization as side effects of scale. The larger processing machines oxidize the milk more, and longer pasteurization increases shelf life but it does reduce the taste/quality further. I'm not talking about UHT, which produces a quite noticeable difference in the milk, one which some people like, just processing which leans more in that direction.
Raw milk is milk that has not undergone pasteurization or homogenization. Depending on the state (in the US), raw milk may be illegal to sell, but there are ways to work around that for the determined.
Creamline milk is milk that was pasteurized, but not homogenized, so the cream floats to the top. It doesn't store well long-term in grocery stores, but can often be found at farm-to-table stores and other specialty boutiques.
Note that the U.S. (including my parents growing up before we got milk cows) has an obsession with "reduced fat" milk. Switching from 2% milk to whole milk makes a world of difference for taste, even without going cream line.
My favorite milk was raw from our Jerseys (they have average ~5% fat compared to national average of 4% [1]), but I've had raw Jersey milk, mixed-breed creamline milk and store-bought whole milk depending on what's available, and they all taste better than 2%.
Raw milk isn’t inherently more flavorful than pasteurized. It’s by necessity consumed sooner which enhances the flavor profile vs milk that’s spent weeks going through the typical logistics chain before you buy it. But, the safety concerns are significant and you could also get pasteurized milk that isn’t particularly old.
I've been drinking raw milk almost exclusively for about 5 years (and milking my own cows for the last 1.5 years). Whenever I get store-bought milk, I'm hit by the "cooked" flavor of it. I assume it's the pasteurization that makes the difference because I've also scalded milk on the stove -- same taste.
You’re likely noticing several other factors. Scalded milk is much larger impact via higher temperature for far longer.
The real test is to blind taste milk immediately before and after pasteurization and I couldn’t tell the difference with High-temperature short-time which only hits 71.5C for 15 seconds.
At home you can try a blind taste test after heating to 60C for 20 minutes, but we use HTST because it’s basically undetectable. UHT has a longer shelf life, but there’s just a hint of a taste difference.
Meanwhile, there's been an alternative storyline prioritizing other goals: low maintenance, high fertility, good yield on a grass-based or all-grass diet, high portion of milk solids. These genetics are also available on ice, for example, from New Zealand: https://licnz.com/products-services/lic-cow-breeds/
At my farm, I milk three cows from that herd and distribute the milk and cheese to family, friends, and neighbors. We all agree it's delicious but it's hard to say whether it's the breed, the diet, or the freshness.
Fantastic article. I didn't realize dairy cows lactated ~60lbs/day or ~3.5% of their body weight. Totally insane. Chickens appear to be this way too -- from some quick research Rhode Island Reds are ~3kg, lay ~300 eggs/year and each egg is ~62g.
The graph at the end ("US milk yield continues to grow, but falls short of its genetic potential") is interesting. If I saw that graph, I would interpret it as dairy farmers overfitting on the genetic yield potential measure, not as something that needs explanations like climate change.
> America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.
Is that all the cows in the US? Why tell us how many cows produce 10 percent of demand?
I put whipped soy milk on my vegan homemade pumpkin pie last night and it was great. Do not miss dairy, and am thankful for modern food innovations that are helping us get past the suffering and environmental devastation of dairy.
I make different vegan milks, yogurt, tofu, etc., at home, using ingredients such as cashew, almonds, soy, peanuts, rice and more. For some other items, I prefer buying a commercial brand from a store. The variety is great. Reducing the harm I do (which is an ongoing thing) was the main factor in this change a long time ago.
Dairy is the only thing keeping me away from going vegan. Can't really eliminate Whey protein, tea/coffee with milk (it's just a quarter of a cup). Would appreciate pointers if anyone did substitute those.
There is no dearth of information on this online, but it’s better that you try it yourself. At the beginning of every year, there’s a whole month (January) devoted to trying vegan. It’s called Veganuary. You can sign up on the site [1] for what to try, alternatives to use, etc.
I would also strongly recommend looking for vegan groups wherever you live. Joining a local community and getting support can be helpful.
If you tried some grain milk and they didn’t fit you taste, maybe have a go with a "barista" one or any other with extra fat, they tends to be a bit more creamy. Pea and soy protein are also complete and quite cheap.
The hardest part for me wasn’t to remove the obvious diary (milk in coffee, yogourts, cheese…) but the many form of processed milk present anywhere in processed but also traditional dishes.
Why bother? You’ve already made the most significant changes in your life by cutting down your reliance on animal agriculture to a quarter cup of milk and some whey.
If it’s for some kind of ideological purity thing, it’s probably not worth it.
But if you must… oat milk for coffee is my preference, and pea protein for whey.
Yield is a great and easy thing to optimize becuase it's easy to measure. And if you increase yield at the expense of taste at suffiently slow rate, the change is impercetible to the customer. Happens slowly over decades so that a nice glass of milk is now like drinking dirty wash water. And a nice fat steak becomes ground up crickets and synthetics.
Moral of the story. Get your own low efficiency cows.