Milk Read Online Free PDF Page A

bovine gene pool on earth, most of India’s Asian neighbors scorn the creatures’ milk. From Assam eastward into several Southeast Asian countries, wild bovine jungle species, including gaur, kouprey, and banteng, still survive along with some domesticated offshoots. But there is little local use of either the tame animals’ milk or that ofzebu cattle.
    YAK
    To the north, the picture is different. From the western Himalayas through and beyond Mongolia, people have been herding a towering, fur-draped bovine cousin, Bos grunniens, for about twenty-five hundred years. Americans usually call it “yak,” though Tibetan speakers protest that the correct word for the female is dri. In any case, not only is yak, or dri, milk famously cherished wherever the creature is raised, but it is traditional to exploit the phenomenon of “hybrid vigor” by crossbreedingyaks with both zebu and taurine cattle for, among other benefits, increased milk yields in female offspring. Western observers who have tasted dri milk report that it is a lovely golden color with an extraordinarily deep, rich flavor; some experiments with Western-style cheeses have been made in Nepal and elsewhere, and it isn’t out of the question that the few small yak-husbandry ventures that have recently started in North America may generate a bit of local interest in the milk.
    WATER BUFFALO
    None of these bovine cousins encroaches on the milk-giving role of the sacred zebu cow in India proper. But an entirely different creature does. Strange as it may seem to anyone else, Indians rely less on the milk of the sacred cow than on that of this nonbovine competitor, the fourth of the world’s leading dairy animals. More than half the nation’s milk supply actually comes from the “river” strain of the water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis.
    This formidable-looking ruminant is a long, massive, low-slung, splay-footed beast with a hide like a hippopotamus and a pair of fearsomeridged horns. Water buffaloes should not be confused with bison, which strictly speaking aren’t buffaloes at all. The true buffalo’s closest ancestors probably were staking out habitats in the wetlands of southern Asia at about the same time thataurochsen began roaming their own northern haunts.
    Like oxen elsewhere, domesticated buffaloes were the great facilitators of a certain staple crop—in this case rice, since they can pullplows through muddy or semi-flooded paddies that other animals could never negotiate. Their meat is considered at least equal to beef wherever both are eaten. But for some reason, only India showed any interest in their milk or developed a particular strain suitable for that purpose. All other Far Eastern regions bred large, thickset draft buffaloes of the “swamp” strain. TheIndian “river” buffalo is a rangier, bonier type that diverts a great deal of food energy into lactation. In fact, it may be the most remarkable of all milch animals.
    What sets river buffaloes apart from the rest of the crew is that they produce not only richer milk but more milk than nearly all the rest—and this with far less intensive breeding-and-feeding efforts than have gone into increasing the yields of Western dairy cows, the only higher-volume producers among the four major milch animals. Onlysheep give milk that is equally or more concentrated—but, as noted, there’s very little of it. A good milking ewe can, under favorable conditions, yield two or three quarts (four to six pounds) of milk a day, while two to three gallons (sixteen to twenty-four pounds) is by no means exceptional for a buffalo.
    Buffaloes’ milk has an odd glaucous appearance, suggesting that it shouldn’t be nearly as creamy as cows’ milk. In fact, it is much creamier. People who have tasted it fresh (I have not) say that it seems almost like a concentrated milk reduction. Judging from the buffalo yogurt and mozzarella that I have eaten, it seems to have some special earthy dimension of its own quite