California Milk Processor Board along with their ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (probably all men) have launched a new "Got Milk?" ad campaign touting the benefits of the white stuff in reducing the symptoms of (gasp!) PMS.

The campaign comes complete with a Flash-heavy microsite called Everything I Do Is Wrong and these print posters:

So, ladies, are those great ads for milk or the greatest ever?

Via Adweek and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish

She has to have worked on a dairy farm or shown dairy cows for FFA or 4-H. She must be single. She must be a legal resident of Washington. She must have a neat, professional appearance without any tattoos or piercings.

These are all the requirements of being a Washington State Dairy Ambassador. As strict as some of these requirements are, one requirement that might seem logical is missing — namely, that she be able to consume dairy products.

Laurel Gordon, 18, a senior at Elma High School, was Grays Harbor County’s Dairy Ambassador for 2010 to 2011 and is a contestant for the state dairy ambassador title in next month’s competition. She is also a lactose intolerant dairy princess.

Link via Stuff | Photo by Flickr user ShardsofBlue used under Creative Commons license

Fate threw them together. He was 2%, she was whole. This video was commissioned by Friends of the Earth, a UK organization pushing for more recycling. Link -via Laughing Squid

Image credit: Flickr user francesca!!

Got milk? Well, you wouldn’t if it weren’t for these world-churning events.

MILK

You can’t spell “milk production” without g-o-a-t-s. Well, technically you could, ..but not historically. Goats were most likely the first dairy animals ever domesticated. Archeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples in what is now Iran and Iraq were selectively breeding these four-legged eating machines as far back as 8,000-9,000 B.C.E. And, while they may not look like much to us modern Americans, the logic behind goat keeping is impeccable. Small, sturdy, and able to eat just about anything you put in front of them, they’re easier creatures to keep healthy, happy, and milk-producing (particularly in cool, mountainous climates) than their larger relatives like cows and sheep. Several breeds have hair that can be shorn and used for clothing. And, like all milk animals, they’re an excellence nutritional value for what you have to put in.

Ruminants, the class of animals from which humans get all their dairy products, have a gigantic four-chambered stomach that allows them to happily digest dry stalks, fibrous vines, and leaves that other animals (humans included) write off as inedible. Their secret: lots and lots of chewing, in addition to partial digestion and regurgitation, then more chewing, followed by a healthy dose of specialized tummy bacteria. Unlike, say, pigs, which eat basically the same food as people and are only useful as meat, ruminants don’t compete with their owners for sustenance. Further, the milk they produce over several years provides far more nutrition than the meat a single animal could ever hope to put out. In fact, it only takes a couple of goats to keep a whole family of people fed for a year.

The extinct auroch.

As the concept of domesticating and milking animals spread from the Middle East, farmers adopted local beasts as their milk-giving ruminant of choice. Depending on things like climate, geography, and population, various regions favored yaks, buffalo, cows, and sheep. All have their own special adaptations that make them better for certain environments and needs. Cows, for instance, were domesticated from long-horned wild aurochs around the same time and place as goats. Since at least 3,000 B.C.E. they’ve been bred primarily for their milk, which is richer than goats’ and due to their size, more abundant. However, as heavy eaters with a grass diet, cows really work best in temperate climates. Modern European cows are much smaller than their auroch ancestors, primarily because in captivity, the winter food supply was far less abundant. There is one notable exception to the ruminant rule, however: the camel. The only milkable domesticated animal that isn’t a ruminant, camels were particularly adapted to arid, desert regions, and as such, their milk has been a staple food in parts of Africa since 2500 B.C.E.

Image credit: Flickr user Jerrold Bennett

Amazingly, China is one of the very few Old World societies that didn’t develop some sort of reliance on milk. Most likely, this had more to do with the local flora than a dislike for dairy. Much of the natural vegetation in China, particularly during the ruminants’ rise, consisted of poisonous plants like wormwood and epazote, making it unsuitable for grazing. However, when nomads, and later Mongolians, came bearing milk, the Chinese were quick to take up the beverage. By 1300 B.C.E. they were using milk to dilute their tea.

BUTTER

Almost as soon as humans began relying on milk for sustenance, they were faced with another problem: How to make it last. Milk, as you’re probably aware, goes sour pretty quickly. And keeping those important nutrients in an edible condition for a longer period of time would have been a key concern. However, it is likely that the first solution to this problem came about by accident.

Image credit: Flickr user Klearchos Kapoutsis

Early in the history of domestication, travelers, shepherd, and farmers started carrying around drinks in bottles made from sheep or goat skin. Besides water and alcoholic beverages, the other drink that would have been toted around in this way was milk. Left to sit in these containers, cream would have likely separated out on top. Combine this with a day or more of being shaken around in a hip flask and it’s easy to see how one of those workers might have opened his milk jug and inadvertently discovered butter. By 2000 B.C.E. this haphazard churning process had become more standardized. In Arabia and Syria, women poured milk into larger jugs made from the whole leg and thigh of a goat. Then they suspended this jug from beams in the family tent and swung it around until butter formed.

Although it had the same nutrients as milk, butter could sit around longer and still be usable. It quickly became both nutritionally and symbolically important, figuring into countless mythologies as a signifier of abundance and creation. In some areas like Tibet, fermented dairy products like butter tea (along with butter itself) are still a staple of the diet.

YOGURT

Like butter, yogurt is also likely an accidental food. Let’ go back to those original shepherds and farmers, carrying milk around in skin pouches. If they were to skim off the cream or, alternately, remove the lump of butter the cream had formed, they’d be left with “skimmed” milk. Without refrigeration and under the blazing Middle Eastern sun, it wouldn’t have taken long for this milk to turn acidic, ferment, and curdle. The result: yogurt.

Another great way to preserve the nutrients from milk, yogurt could then be sun-dried or stored fresh under a layer of oil. And, long before the health food craze hit the U.S., yogurt fans were already extolling its medicinal properties. A medical text dating to 633 C.E. dubbed yogurt therapeutic. In fact, yogurt was introduced to Europe by a Turkish doctor as a medical treatment, and it saved the life of French king Francis I (curing him of his stomach troubles) in the 16th century.

CHEESE

Image credit: Flickr user DJ Mitchell

Once you have yogurt, it’s easy to get cheese. All you have to do is drain the watery natural yogurt, separating solid curd from liquid whey. Then it’s just a matter of salting the curd. Although the method has been refined and increased in complexity since, this is basically how the earliest cheese was made.

By 2000 B.C.E. cheese had become a luxury item in Egypt, with the recipes heavily guarded by priests and manufacturing scenes appearing in murals decorating kingly burials. It’s no wonder the product only became more beloved from there. For the ancient Greeks, cheese was the food of athletes. Romans, picking up on Greek tradition, gave each of their soldiers a daily 1-ounce cheese ration. And in Europe, cheese-making branched into a thousand local specialties that incorporated regional products and production secrets. For instance, real mozzarella, i.e. mozzarella di bufala, is made in the Capagna region south of Rome from the milk supplied by the 100,000 descendants of a herd of buffalo brought to Italy in 700 C.E.

________________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss‘ book In the Beginning.

From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here’s a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss.

Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book!

Remember the cat who gave us thumbs up? What if all cats were to develop opposable thumbs? They’d be after us …for our breakfast cereal milk, according to this ad from a milk company. -via Laughing Squid

Last week, we told you about the battle to end the sale of adulterated milk. Part II is the story of the fight to pasteurize the U.S. milk supply. It’s an instructive tale. In spite of proof that pasteurization could save lives, Americans resisted it because it was a new idea… and because it “cost too much.”

SOLID PROGRESS

During the latter part of the 19th century, improvements were made in the quality of milk sold in the United States.

Bottles: In 1884, for example, Dr. Hervey G. Thatcher patented the first practical milk bottle with a sealable top. He got the idea while standing in line in the street for his own milk a year earlier. When the little girl ahead of him dropped her filthy rag doll into the milk dealer’s open milk can, the dealer just shook the doll off, handed it back to the little girl, then ladled Thatcher’s milk as if nothing happened.

Thatcher’s bottle wasn’t a solution to all of raw milk’s problems, but at least it kept impurities out of the milk after it left the dairy. Many dairies hated the bottles because they were expensive and broke relatively easily, but they caught on with the public and were soon in use all over the country.

The Lactometer: In the early 1890s, New York State began regulating the content of milk using a lactometer, a newly invented device that could measure the amount of milk solids in milk. For the first time, it was possible to compare pure milk with a test sample of a dairy’s milk to see if it had been watered down or adulterated. If the milk tested didn’t contain the same amount of milk solids as pure milk, the milk dealer could be fined or penalized.

BATTLING BACTERIA

But by far, the most important breakthroughs were scientific. The 1880s and 1890s were a period of great advancement in the understanding of bacteria and its role in causing disease.

In 1882, for example, A German scientist named Rupert Koch discovered that bovine tuberculosis, a form of tuberculosis found in cattle, could be spread to humans through diseased milk. This form of tuberculosis attacked the glands, intestines, and bones, frequently killing the afflicted or leaving them deformed for life.

“Children seem to be especially susceptible to bovine tuberculosis,” James Cross Gilbin writes in Milk: The Fight for Purity. “[Victims] often spent years trapped into spinal frames…designed to prevent deformity while the body slowly overcame the infection.”

Researchers discovered other diseases could be spread by milk as well. They found that if a cows udders weren’t cleaned before milking, bacteria from manure (or anything else on the udders) could fall into the milk. And if the person milking the cow was sick, their germs could infect the milk, too. There seemed to be no limit to the number of ways milk could be infected by disease.

PASTEURIZATION

As it turns out, the solution to the problem had already been found. In the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur invented the process of pasteurization, which uses heat to kill bacteria that cause liquids like milk and beer to spoil. But because his ideas were revolutionary, they spread slowly. The idea of pasteurizing milk didn’t arrive in the U.S. until the 1880s- and even then, it took more than 30 years to find wide acceptance! That acceptance came largely through the work of one man.

MILK MAN

In the 1890s, Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York, was already building a reputation as a philanthropist. In the winter of 1892, he distributed 1.5 million buckets of coal to impoverished New Yorkers so they could heat their homes. The following year, he organized a series of shelters that provided beds and breakfasts to the city’s homeless population. In 1893, he tackled the problem of unsafe milk.

Straus had been reading up on Pasteur’s work and the theoretical benefits of pasteurization. He knew that nearly 10% of all children born in New York City died by the age of five -and despite all the recent improvements in milk quality, he still suspected that milk was to blame for many of the deaths. His reasoning was simple: Milk spoiled quicker in the heat of the summer, and the city’s childhood mortality rate increased at the same time. He figured there had to be a connection between the two.

MILK BAR

In June 1893, Straus set up a milk-processing station in a neighborhood on East Third Street. The station pasteurized milk on the spot, then provided it at affordable prices to local families. The station also offered free medical exams for children and free hygiene advice for their mothers. Mothers who couldn’t afford 2¢  for a pint or 4¢ for a quart of milk (less than the price of unpasteurized milk) could get coupons for free milk from local doctors and charities.

(Image credit: The Library of Congress)

By the turn of the century, Straus had twelve pasteurized milk stations in different parts of the city, distributing hundreds of thousands of bottles of pasteurized milk every year. He also had several milk stands where people could taste pasteurized milk for a penny a glass, to see for themselves that pasteurization didn’t hurt the taste.

THE ORPHAN TEST

The final proof of the benefits of pasteurized milk came when Straus began providing milk to an orphanage that had seen death rates as high as 42% from tuberculosis and other milk-borne diseases. The orphanage was located on Randall’s Island in the East River. All the milk it used was provided by a single herd of cows kept on the island, so it was easy to control the milk the orphans drank.

Straus started pasteurizing the orphanage’s milk in 1898. Within a year, the mortality rate dropped to 28%, and continued downward in the years that followed.

AN UPHILL FIGHT

By the turn of the century, pasteurized milk stations like Straus’s had been set up in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other major cities. The programs were voluntary and set up by charities. Although philanthropists were getting into the pasteurized milk business, the dairy industry was staying out of it. Citing the added cost of pasteurization, they refused to pasteurize their own milk, and blocked efforts to require it by law.

Another huge barrier was public resistance: most people were used to “pure” raw milk, and didn’t understand science well enough to insist on pasteurization. The few dairies that had begun pasteurizing milk to increase shelf life and prevent spoiling did so mostly in secret, out of fear of losing sales to raw milk dairies.

Straus was instrumental in getting New York to create the post of inspector of dairy farms, making it one of the first cities in the nation to inspect the quality of milk at the source. In 1907, Straus tried to help pass a city ordinance requiring the pasteurization of all milk sold in New York. Many milk distributors, doctors, and even the city’s Health Department opposed him, arguing that the health benefits of “clean raw milk” outweighed the risks. The ordinance failed.

PRESIDENTIAL SEAL OF APPROVAL

In 1907, the reform-minded president Teddy Roosevelt ordered his Public Health Service to look into the pros and cons of pasteurized milk. In 1908 the Service issued its report: Pasteurization, they found, did not affect the taste, quality, nutrition or digestibility of milk, but it did “prevent much sickness and save many lives.”

Compulsory pasteurization was still many years away, though. A second attempt to require the pasteurization of New York City’s milk supply was defeated in 1909, and a similar ordinance that had passed in Chicago in 1908 was repealed in 1910 after the courts ruled the measure interfered with free trade.

Finally in 1911, the National Commission on Milk Standards issued a report arguing that “in the case of all milk not either certified or inspected, pasteurization should be compulsory.” The American Medical Association followed with similar advice a few months later. These reports and others like them ignited a groundswell of public support for compulsory pasteurization. In 1912, Chicago passed a second pasteurization ordinance; this one stuck. New York passed a similar ordinance, but milk distributors succeeded in delaying and then watering down the law.

THE FINAL STRAW

In 1913, a typhoid fever epidemic struck New York, claiming thousands of victims. By now there was proof that typhoid fever was carried by milk, and that it could be killed through pasteurization. New York City finally stopped dragging its feet. By the end of 1914, 95% of the city’s milk supply was pasteurized. By 1917, nearly all of the 50 largest cities in the nation required pasteurization; the rest of the country would follow over the next several years.

The impact of pasteurized milk on public health was nothing short of astounding. In 1885 the infant mortality rate in New York City was 273 per 1,000 live births -more than 27%. By 1915 the infant mortality rate was 94 per 1,000, a drop of two-thirds.

PASTEURIZATION TODAY

Today the most popular method of pasteurization is called “flash pasteurization” or “high-temperature, short-time” pasteurization (HTST). Raw milk is heated to 161° Fahrenheit and kept at that temperature for only 15 seconds, and then immediately cooled to 50° Fahrenheit.

Products like half-and-half and whipping cream, which are expected to remain refrigerated for longer periods of time, are processed by “ultra-high temperature” pasteurization at 280° Fahrenheit for two seconds.

See also: Part one of The Battle for Safe Milk: Swill Milk.

_____________________________

Reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – check ‘em out!

“Milk and kids” are virtually synonymous in our culture with “good health.” But that wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1900s, milk was often adulterated with foreign substances, taken from sick cows, or mis-handled during milking and storage. As a result, it was often host to tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, and other life-threatening diseases. But few people knew that the milk made them sick. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, when scientists began to understand germ theory, that they realized diseases were being transferred through milk -and that they could do something to eliminate the hazard. Here’s a fascinating but little-known story from American history.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

In the days before refrigeration, farmers who lived near towns delivered milk the old-fashioned way: they brought a cow into town and went door to door looking for customers. Anyone who wanted milk could step out into the street with a pitcher or a bucket, and watch the farmer milk the cow right before their eyes.

Since customers were standing only a few feet away, it paid for the farmer to take good care of his cows. Nobody wanted to buy milk from a beast that looked dirty, mistreated, or sick. So although there was a risk of buying bad milk, it was kept to a minimum.

City Slickers

But in cities, where door-to-door cow service wasn’t practical or possible, buying milk was another matter. “Milks sellers” acted as middlemen between farmers and townspeople. Like used car dealers today, they were widely mistrusted and said to possess “neither character, nor decency of manner, nor cleanliness.” Whether or not the reputation was deserved, they were notorious for diluting milk with water to increase profits. People said their milk came from “black cows,” the black cast iron pumps that provided towns with drinking water. And if the pump was broken, horse troughs were always a handy source of water.

Although it actually spread serious diseases, water-down milk was seen as more of an annoyance than a health hazard, and nothing much was done about it. It wasn’t until the 1840s that scandals in the liquor industry led to the first demands for milk reform.

THE SWILL MILK SCANDALS

In the mid-1800s, it was common for whiskey and other distillers to run dairy and beef businesses on the side. The manufacture of grain alcohol require huge amounts of corn, rye, and other fresh grains, which are cooked into a mash and then distilled. Once that distillation is complete, the remaining “swill” can be discarded… or, as the distiller discovered, it can be fed to cows.

Profit, not quality, was the priority with “swill herds.” As a result, conditions in many distillery-owned dairies were atrocious. The cows spent their entire lives tied up in tiny pens, which were rarely cleaned. They received no food other than the swill -and no fresh water at all, since distillers though there was already plenty of water in the swill.

Spoiled Milk

With no exercise, no real food, and no water, even the hardiest cattle sickened and died in about six months. The failing herds were milked daily until the very end; when a cow became too weak to stand on its own, it was hoisted upright with ropes so that it cold be milked until it died.

Milk produced by swill herds, as muckraking journalist Robert Hartley wrote in 1842, was “very thin, and of a pale bluish color,” the kind nobody in their right mind would buy. So distillers added flour, starch, chalk, plaster of Paris, or anything else they could get away with to make the milk look healthy. This adulteration only increased the amount of bacteria in milk that was already virtually undrinkable.

TAKING NOTICE

The toll that adulterated milk took on public health was severe: in New York City, where five million gallons of swill milk were produced and sold each year, the mortality rate for children under five tripled between 1843 and 1856.

No one knew for sure what was causing the child mortality rate to soar, and there was probably no single cause. But people began to suspect that bad milk was at least partially to blame. In May 1858, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, one of the most popular journals of the day, published a series of articles describing in graphic detail the conditions in some of New York’s swill dairies.

REFORMS

Public exposure had a devastating impact on the industry. Some distilleries got out of the milk business entirely; other cleaned up their act. Those that remained were forced out of business in 1862, when the state of New York outlawed “crowded or unhealthy conditions” in the dairy industry. Two years later, the state outlawed the industry outright, declaring that “any milk that is obtained from animals fed on distillery waste, usually called will, is hereby declared to be impure and unwholesome.”

Several other state followed suit, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. As they took action, the spiraling infant death rate in the U.S. leveled off -and even began to decline. But there was plenty of work left to be done to ensure that milk was safe.

See also: part two of The Fight for Safe Milk: Pasteurization.

_____________________________

Reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – check ‘em out!

One should not be intimidated by Tuscan Whole Milk. Nor should one prejudge, despite the fact that Tuscan is non-vintage and comes in such large containers. Do not be fooled: this is not a jug milk. I always find it important to taste milk using high-quality stemware — this is milk deserving of something better than a Flintstones plastic tumbler. One should pour just a small dollop and swirl it in the glass — note the coating and look for clots or discoloration. And the color — it should be opaque, and very, very white. Now, immerse your nose in the glass and take a whiff. Tuscan transports you instantly to scenic hill towns in central Italy (is that Montepulciano I detect?) — there is the loamy clay, the green grass of summer days, the towering cypress.

Of course, the attraction was the novelty of a mail-order vendor selling fresh milk -which they don’t do anymore, but the product is available from “other sellers”, starting at $48.09. And now there are 1,240 reviews! Don’t miss the eight-stanza poem one reviewer left, along with five stars. Link -Thanks, Joe Kooman!

Well, let’s just say they’re protecting the public from the dangers of … raw food:

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid’s target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can’t believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There’s a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they’re raiding us because we’re selling raw dairy products?"

Link

… almost 8,000 years after nomadic herders realized they could tug at the udders of slow-moving livestock, we still aren’t sure how much of the stuff we should be drinking. The USDA recommends three cups of dairy a day for all adults, but the science behind milk hasn’t been settled. "This is one of the most complicated and interesting areas of nutrition," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, "and we don’t have all of the answers."

Many high-profile nutritionists — often working with large research grants from the dairy industry — say that milk in great quantities is an essential part of the daily diet that can help prevent osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer and other illnesses. "Anything less than three glasses a day, and you won’t get all of the nutrients that you need," says Connie Weaver, head of food and nutrition at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Most of Weaver’s funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, but she’s also supported by the National Dairy Council.

On the other side, groups promoting animal rights and veganism — including PETA and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine — say that cow’s milk is a nutritional nightmare that doesn’t belong in the human diet. "It’s gross," says Dr. Neil Barnard, author and founder of the PCRM. "Milk is nutritionally perfect for one purpose: feeding a calf," he says. "The idea that we should be drinking milk from a cow is just bizarre."

Willett, one of the world’s most prominent nutrition experts, doesn’t belong to either camp. From his viewpoint, one or two cups of milk each day is a safe, reasonable and nutritious goal. "But beyond that," he says, "the benefits are unclear, and there may be some risk."

Chris Woolston did a special report for the Los Angeles Times: Link

David Wetzel, a former steel executive, told a conference of farmers in Linn that when he started a second career as a dairy farmer in 2002, he doused parts of his 320-acre farm with skim milk, which was a byproduct of his farm’s specialty butters and cheeses.

He soon discovered that his cattle preferred those fields. He called in an expert to figure out what was going on, and the result was a bit staggering: His milk-fed land yielded 1,100 more pounds of grass per acre than untreated land. [...]

Wetzel said he began making butters and cheeses that required only the fats from the milk that his cows produced, which left behind large quantities of skim milk as a waste product. To dispose of it, he would drive up and down a portion of his pasture with milk pouring out of a tank. He dumped up to 600 gallons of skim milk on the field every other day.
"I came from a background that has nothing to do with farming," Wetzel said. "So I don’t know the do’s and don’ts. I don’t have any relatives that would say, ‘You can’t do that.’ So I just kind of did what felt right."
One day, he noticed that his cows favored that patch of field. The grass felt more supple and looked healthier and more dense in that area.

Link

How do you drink from plastic bags? Sheryl from Pinc Stuff explains in this short YouTube video clip over at TYWKIWDBI: Link

Crazy, eh?

Previously on Neatorama: Beer in a bag

Vinegar and milk, together in one commercially-available drink in Japan. Only those who can read the Japanese label will see that it also contains grapefruit juice. Link -via Arbroath

Photo: Corrie White

No, that’s not the AOL Guy casting a cherry spell, it’s actually a drop of milk.  Corrie White discovered a talent for macro-photography  and prefers the dairy product due to its slower rate of descent.  Using dyes and little else, she creates some stunning, gorgeous images… she even shows her modest, kitchen-based studio!

Link Previously on Neatorama- Macrophotography of Dews

The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn’t enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

Link via Food & Think | Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture

The protest organizers, the European Milk Board, said that more than 1,000 tractors and 5,000 people took part on behalf of “more than 80,000 dairy farmers”.

The group said milk prices are below 75 percent of production costs. Another European farm union organization, Copa-Cogeca, says that milk prices have plummeted 30 percent in a year and that dairy producers will lose up to 14 billion euros before the end of the year if nothing is done.

See the awesome full version of this cropped picture at the New York Times. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Georges Gobet/Agence France-Presse)

A farm in Bjurholm, Sweden actually makes moose cheese. The lactation period of moose is short, lasting from about June to August, and the farm, owned by Christer and Ulla Johansson, keeps three moose that produce only 300 kilograms of cheese per year. The moose cheese sells for roughly US$1000 per kilogram.

Before you faint over the price, remember that a kilogram is more than two pounds! Link -via Unique Daily

I made these plastic milk bottle lights by embedding LEDs in the caps, hanging them from a bent section of pipe and hooking them up to an Arduino microcontroller.

Not happy with an on-off switch, I thought they might look mesmerising with a rotary control knob turning them on in sequence. It works! They make great low lighting to wind down for sleep, and they’re great to hang in the hall for parties too.

There are complete build instructions on Instructables.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Nachimir.

Sweet lovers like myself will love this brilliant concept on The Cupcake Project blog. It’s an Oreo cupcake with Oreo frosting, topped with home-made Oreos and served with a glass of milk built inside. This ingenious dessert marvel is made possible with the help of those delightful chocolate liqour cups. I totally want to make these myself, if you do as well, let me know how they turn out.

Link