Last Dinner: SE4

Name: Zechi Zhang

WRIT 1133-27

Professor: Eric Leake

Word: 735

05/10/2012

Milk

Every day in the morning before I go to the university, I will have a glass of milk and two pieces of toast. When we were young, maybe from four or five years old, we begin to drink the milk and people all around us always said that milk is good for your health. But I think none of us will find when we started to drink the milk and how the milk was produced. In order to figure out these two questions I did some research through the internet.

From the research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the human history of drinking is less than 7,000 years. The interesting thing is about 7,000 years ago which is the Neolithic age, the human ancestors cannot digest the milk. If someone had some milk, he or she will be got ill. Today there are about 90 percent people in Nordic can digest the milk and there are still some people in African and Asia cannot drink the milk because their body cannot provide enough lactase to digest the milk. A doctor from London University called Mark Thomas claims that in the recent 7,000 years the ancestors of Europeans started to feed cows to get milk. After a long time their body can make lactase to help to digest the milk and get nutrition from it. And then these people past their DNA generation by generation. So nowadays most Europeans can digest and get nutrition form the milk.

When it comes to how to produce the milk, I searched in google and find a short video about it. At first the video showed us a lot of cows feeding in a large farm. The farm feed the cows use special food which can help the cows make more milk. When the cows are ready to make the milk, the cows will send to a machine which can automatically squeeze out the milk from the cows. And then the staff will collect all the milk and send to another place to do some test to make sure the milk is clean and no harm for customers. After testing the milk is perfect to sell, the staffs will put all the milk into another machine to do the disinfection. At last the milk will be packaged in battles and ready to sell.

During my research I found a web site called PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in this web site I found a short article tells people how the cows treat when they produce milk for humans. They claims “Calves are generally taken from their mothers within a day of being born—males are destined for veal crates or barren lots where they will be fattened for beef, and females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers”. By reading these I think people may really treat cruel for the cows and I really started to think about to stop drinking milk. This short article also mentioned that “A cow's natural lifespan is about 25 years, but cows used by the dairy industry are killed after only four or five years. An industry study reports that by the time they are killed, nearly 40 percent of dairy cows are lame because of the intensive confinement, the filth, and the strain of being almost constantly pregnant and giving milk”. I can hardly imagine if the cows have thought and can speak, what they will say to humans and how can they get though the tough time, and in the middle of their life the cows will face the death.

From my prospective, even though I drink milk every day and we all knows milk has a lot of nutrition and good for your health, but I think if anyone know how the companies to produce the milk and know what kind of things the cows struggle with, the person will think about am I doing it right by drinking milk every day? Still, people will say through Darwin's theory of evolution: Survival of the fittest law of the jungle. Human is in the top of the food chain, so whatever the human do is no right or wrong. Thinking about the two attitudes for the milk, I would like to say both aspects are right base on what your thoughts are. Maybe I wake up tomorrow morning and still have glass of milk.