"The trouble with cheese" New Scientist

[andyswarbs]

As someone who was a cheese-aholic for 40 years of vegetarian life I can relate to the start of this newscientist.com/article/mg... article. I have to say that I loved my cheese an awful lot. Now I could not care less about it even if you put some premium quality cheese right under my nose. The article talks of global milk production doubling in the last 50 years, of cheese being a refuge for people who gave up meat (like I did).

Much of the article is about the carbon footprint of cheese, the worst offender being cheddar reaching up to 16kg of CO2. The industry is trying to manufacture the zero-carbon cow, about which I am sure the cow is most pleased!

The article then goes on to the animal rights aspect, talking about repeated forced insemination, since only for the 9 months of pregnancy does a cow produce milk. With that repetition being for all its adult life until it's lactate drops and is deemed unprofitable. Once a cow reaches that point it is killed for burger/sausage meat. I won't go into further details here, but just summarise from a quotation in the article attributed to Marc Bekoff, "dairy farming is hideous."

The article finishes with how dairy farming addresses this. There are two extremes, at one a calf stays with its mother cow and lives a life grass fed. This incredibly inefficient and expensive. The other end is more intensive farming with cows being tethered day and night. This is how cheap cheese gets to the supermarket. It may be inhumane, but it has a lower carbon footprint.

Whichever way it goes dairy is now in the limelight.

[Agoodenough]

I was vegetarian for years and it never crossed my mind to look into the dairy industry. It was then later in fact, the cruelty in the dairy industry that made me become vegan. I wish more people would look into dairy production as it’s shocking and I think like me so many are unaware.

Ali 🙂🌱

[Hidden]

I love cheese. All my friends and family love cheese too, we sometimes have cheese and wine parties. But am a beer drinker and I think cheese is much nicer with beer anyway.

I know what you mean though about when the calf's are taken away from the mother. The mother crying for days. I lived next to a farm for a while and it's not nice. The calf's are taken to be fatten up and sold for meat.

I think we are all fully aware of how this works, most of us learned this in school.

[andyswarbs in reply to Hidden]

I was very ignorant of milk production. The only thing I was taught at school was that milk was necessary for healthy bones and that cows were happy. As a vegetarian for most of my life I honestly thought that by milking cows we were doing them a big favour!

I never knew we caused them to produce totally abnormal amounts of milk in the first place. I never knew what happened to male / bobby calves eg, that was the veal industry. From what I know now I could go on with plenty more sentences, any one of which would have been a trigger for me to go vegan.

So much ignorance on my part. So much ignorance that I hang my head in shame.

[Hidden]

Hi Andy the best way for an individual to reduce their carbon footprint is to fly less, Airlines don't have to pay tax on fuel and if they did flying costs would soar, so maybe we should take a much wider view of 'us all' over consuming the worlds resources which's what we are doing.

Being a cheese consumer I buy organic and free range so make the best choices for me and the environment.

So I think it's great that the carbon footprint of many things is under the spotlight, as well as animal rights.

[JAS9 in reply to Hidden]

I grew up on a farm in Iowa, but moved to live in a city when I was 19. That was a long time ago, and I clearly remember how I and several of my friends from school would get up very early to do the milking and take care of the pigs, chickens, etc. And NONE of us had anything like the factory farms we have now that keep the animals locked in small spaces.

So as I lived my life for the next 35+ years, I had this idyllic vision in my head of how it used to be. Of course, there was cruelty to the animals even then, but nothing like today, so it didn't bother me very much, especially because it's hidden from view for so many of us.

When I became vegan a year ago, I originally did it for my health, and it did help a lot. But as I learned about how things really are today for most of the animals being raised for food, I've become more convinced than ever that what's good for my health is also good for my soul and the planet.

I agree about not flying. These days, I can visit anyone for free over Skype and other services. I can watch people scuba diving in the Bahamas on Youtube. Soon, I imagine we'll all have 3D goggles that will make everything even more realistic. I save traveling for very special events like weddings, which, come to think about it, I haven't done lately either.