Plant milk and Animal milk

 

Plant based milks are in the mainstream talk nowadays...

As they try to take hold of a market, miniscule as it may be, an expected  volley of questions crop up, the chief being about their cost and nutrition value.

Now plant based milks are taken by some people who avoid dairy milk for health reasons or allergy and intolerance to some of its components.

The other segment who take this are Vegans ( for health, environment or ethics )

Costwise one has to accept that plant based milks are expensive....and we should also admit that as the market increases the cost will  necessarily

come down as with any other product.

And the nutrition value - let us suppose, for calculation purposes, that we consider the nutrition value of the milk from an elephant or tiger or lion or a giraffe or a hyena ...those milks will probably be more nutritious than cows' or buffaloes' for obvious reasons like large size, strength, height, cunning, persistence and other such qualities.

The question is do WE need them?

And the obvious answer is NO!

As far as humans are concerned the milk of a cow or buffaloe is same as that of these animals.

Human babies ideally need the breast milk of human mothers.

And when we wean them out of it we are supposed to meet their nutritional requirements from other food sources.

But what we have cunningly done is to domesticate a few gentle mammals, get them pregnant artificially by force, and when they deliver their babies we grab the babies away sooner or later, so that we can drink their mothers milk.

Left alone a cow or a buffaloe would yield just enough milk for its own baby which is natural enough.

But we cross breed the cattle and also medicate them with hormones and other medicines, to increase the milk production.

We have been doing this for so long now, that we have forgotten the fact that the cow/ buffaloe / goat / camel is an individual mammal (I would call her a person) just like us with the same emotions of motherly love and pain of separation.We have come to consider them as milk machines.

If one shoves aside the tradition, and looks at what goes on with an objective eye, one will realise how shameful and ungrateful our behaviour is, inspite of all the talks and heart touching videos about humanity, kindness and compassion that do the rounds daily in the various social media platforms. All the livestock that provided us the milk are invariably killed in the most cruel way and eaten up....it seems the virtue of loyalty gratitude and compassion is reserved to be shown to humans....?

Hence the discussion about the nutritional value of the milk from cattle and other livestock FOR US

is ludicrous.

Why are we even doing it?

We do it  because we are so used to it that we consider it  OUR food!

That said, even nutrition and health wise there are evidences coming up about the ill effects of dairy milk on the human body.

And the plant based milks in my opinion wean us away from this harmful food born out of extreme cruelty.

There is no need to compare and contrast the two....

They are just two different drinks...one born out of cruelty and the other a benign one having arrived to replace the cruel one.

The nutrients from both can as well be had from other plant based food..

Nutrition versus Sources

_________________________

Carbohydrates...All grains

Proteins.....All lentils

Fat ....... All plant based oils

Vitamins ....All fruits

Minerals ....Nuts and seeds 

( sesame seed contains iron and calcium)

The above is just a general idea.

I have not gone into the percentage and exact proportion of the nutrients in each one deliberately ...for the simple reason that none of us till date, ate our food with these calculations in mind.

We were lucky enough to have three meals a day, and many vegetarians I knew never had milk or milk products, either they could not afford it or never liked the taste.

So they were unintentional vegans.

And nutrition wise, i think most of us are now over burdened with it, rather than deficient.

The point being that speaking from the humanitarian and  ethical point of view, dairy milk should be avoided at any cost......The discussion about nutrition is redundant and uneccessary.

incidentally this cost is not a high one - it is just a question of developing a new habit.

#plantbasedmilk

#veganmilk