Milk Read Online Free PDF

unlike the goaty-sheepy flavors of caprines’ milk. What’s more, the animals thrive and produce copiously on cheaper and coarser tropical forages than cows.
    Though reliable statistics are hard to come by, there are known to be many more zebu cows than buffaloes milked in India. But the latter account for more than 50 percent of the nation’s commercial milk supply. Why the animal itself never came to be revered is a mystery. Zebu cows in India became important as domestic livestock and sources of milk earlier than water buffaloes, and perhaps the quasi-divine status that they eventually acquired did not admit of diminishment by being shared with another beast.
    Paradoxically, the very fact that water buffaloes are not considered holy may have made Indian commercial milk producers willing to undertake more aggressive, systematic management measures; though millions of cows are left to wander the countryside without anyone trying to improve their milk yield, dairying interests apparently feel freer to intervene in buffalo destiny.
    GODS AND DEMONS PULL ALTERNATELY ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF A GIANT SERPENT TO ROTATE THE MIRACULOUS COSMIC “CHURN” OF HINDU MYTH.
    Western dairyists’ lack of interest in buffaloes’ milk is equally puzzling. When taken from the tropics, buffaloes are surprisingly good at adapting to other surroundings. They probably ranged as far north as southern Mesopotamia from ancient times, and since then have been successfully introduced into Egypt, the Levant, and parts of Italy and the Balkans. But only today are a handful of experimenters trying to see how well water buffaloes can tolerate more northerly temperate climates. Some British and American farmers have managed to generate a little publicity for swamp buffaloes’ meat as an alternative to beef, and a very few are trying to do the same for river buffaloes’–milk yogurt and mozzarella cheese.
    Possessing two milk sources of equal culinary importance makes India unique among the world’s dairying countries. (There is some use ofgoats’ milk in hilly northern regions, but nationally it ranks a very distant third.) Cows’ milk and buffaloes’ milk are used all but interchangeably for every kind of dairy product. But because buffaloes’ milk is more concentrated and gives higher yields of milkfat, protein, and virtually any other milk-derived product per original pound of milk, it is more commercially profitable. Cows’ milk enjoys higher prestige, undoubtedly because of its association with the sacred animal.
    Brahmins have long cherished an image of the cow as a crown jewel in a complex, prohibition-fenced scheme of beliefs about the ritual purity or pollution of food. In this worldview she is the wellspring of life in palpable form, inexhaustibly pouring forth the miracle of milk, a holy substance considered to have been purified by inner fires in the grass-transforming alembic that is the cow’s body. (In fact, aHindu creation myth describes a primordial sea of milk as the stuff from which many great gifts of the world were “churned” under the direction of Vishnu.) The cow-mother also gradually became a symbol ofMother India—originally, a benevolent symbol; now something more aggressive. Cow worship never used to have anything like the frankly militant Hinduist associations that it enjoys in today’s political-religious tinderbox. (Not only is there a national prohibition against beef slaughter, but people remarking too loudly that even Brahmins used to eat beef in Vedic times are likely to incur harassment if not death threats.) Not surprisingly, modern industrialized cow dairying has proceeded somewhat cautiously in India despite a good deal of entrepreneurial interest and expertise, and despite the fact that milk is more central to cooking there than in any other nation. It is no exaggeration to say that, without milk, the doctrine ofahimsa (the inviolability of animal as well as human life) could not have achieved its