hey @somethingburger, love the post and as always, appreciate the citations.

I don't have any issues with your conclusions, but I do question the framing of blood content in milk. Certainly there's an ick factor, but is it necessarily a bad thing either for the consumer or the cow?

Another upsetting fact about cow health is that Grade A milk can contain up to 750,000 blood cells, secretory cells, and squamous cells per milliliter, because cows regularly bleed while being milked.

I dont know much about milk, but I know it's complex. Milk isn't just protein and sugars, but vitamins, hormones, microbes, and immunoglobulins. As milk expert and person-who-I-quote-alot, Prof Katie Hinde at ASU said, "Milk is food; Milk is signal; Milk is medicine." 1. For instance, those immunoglobins are plasma antibodies, which are found in blood.

By nature, lactation is a parasitic system. It's one creature sacrificing nutrients and resources to take care of another, "the most physiologically costly component of rearing infants" (2). So it's not hard to make negative portrayals of the impacts of milking on the mother, because yes, it is intrinsically bad for the mother. Only when the benefits to the offspring outweigh the costs to the mother does lactation evolve and persist.

So, milking might be bad, but how bad is the alternative? Is all milk created equal? What are the best practices of dairy milking for 1) the mother's health and wellbeing and 2) decreasing environmental impact? Clearly, industrial diary is NOT satisfying these measures. Just as understanding diary biology can inform our consumer choices, it should also inform the diary industry's methods.

(1) Check out Katie Hinde's blog and twitter

(2) A review article - Primate Milk: Proximate Mechanisms and Ultimate Perspectives