[kosko]

(08-06-2013 09:54 AM)Low Status Beta Wrote:  

The whole reason people started drinking the milk in the first place, is cause they realized instead of killing the animal and having enough food to eat for a week or two, they could milk the cow and get enough Food to last them several months. That's how the human population expanded from 10,000 to 1 Million plus (and eventually 7 Billion after agriculture)

I'd say
Meat > Dairy > Grains
in that order

Why would you assume this?

I am not sure the reasons behind milk as a staple but keep in my Cows milk was only a staple in parts of central Europe. The Dairy cow is 100% European and 80-90%% of the world did not mess with it for thousands of years.

Food is energy and you need energy to get food energy. Hunting was energy intensive but you were rewarded with a abundance of energy for your work. A full cow with its usable meat is 400-500lbs of meat with about 100-130lbs of fat which will give you a estimate of like 664500 +/- calories. That is enough flesh to feed a family of five for a long time, months even.

Even more abundant in nutrients and your return on your energy ratio was agriculture where a human could use its brain to create sophisticated growing systems that would yield them more calories for less work. The human diet never historically had more then 30-40% flesh in their diet. There wasn't enough energy or time in the day to make it happen in those older times, it was meat once or twice a week for most with grains and plants adding to the bulk of their food they ate. In today's world with cheap oil and subsidies us in the West can we consume 70% meat weighted diets

Your not milking 600K Calories from a set of cow. Plus nobody likes to think of how they had to rotate pregnant Cows back in the day, a cow is still a animal and milk can only be produced when its pregnant, so not sure what type of shit they did before science caught up with insemination practices. Plus, many factors made raising cows difficult as many groups of people did prefer chickens, pigs, goats, lambs as grazing animals for food because they were easier to maintain. You couldn't keep cows close to where you lived like chickens or goats or they would eat of your plants and grasses up. Cows generally were on their pastures up hill where more bountiful grasses were and humans had to trek up to get milk from them each day.

You could have one or two cows but if none of them got pregnant what would you do?

Prior to insemination practices I assume Europeans got to love Veal as a meat source because if you had a pregnant cow in the pasture her babies were going to be drinking your milk. You had to 'X'-off those small cows to maintain the milk for your family. The milk runs out eventually and if you continue to kill off your your young cows to get milk you just end up killing off your population of cows once your milkers age and get used for meat.

This is why goats have always been superior. They aren't fussy with food, and can be herded up and caged easily, and work better in more diverse climates. 70% of the worlds population eats goat meat and many more groups of people have a tolerance in digesting goat dairy products. You could have 10-12 goats pastured up on a small plot of land while you need a football field to feed two fucking cows. This was why the goat was the staple grazing animal for people whom did not mess around with pork, or did not have bison or other substantial game near them to hunt down with ease. Goats are way way more resilient to and can live in more mountainous parts of the globe, each corner of the globe has been able to raise goats well.



Cheap oil was the reason the earth's population grew so rapidly. You can almost cross-plain the charts of population growth and access to cheap fuel and they almost follow each other exactly. Cheap oil great lowered the ROI that we get from food energy and thus populations were able to sustain themselves much cheaper and with less energy.

My theory is that Europeans favoured Cows milk just because the climate in those parts with the rolling hills just made it easier, plus the fact that every culture/group had some type of pro-biotic staple in their diets for good bacteria. My guess is Europeans just used raw milk for this purpose and for the good fats and vitamins you can get from it from well fed cows. But in a modern sense the stuff is just sludge, without the good bacteria and cows eating healthy grass their milk is no better then garbage.



^ You can't fuck with that. This is a pasture in Ireland and these parts of the globe just have amazing grasses, the cows must of just thrived in that environment.