Why we don't drink pigs milk

The food sucked this weekend in Bangkok (well all the places we went to anyway, mostly because everyone was on holiday). The only good thing to come out of our dining experiences was some cute hand drawn images that appeared on one the menus at one of the three restaurants that we wasted our money at. So I am back to stealing food related crap off the internet.


The B stands for Baht not BILLIONS of dollars

I have eaten donkey sausage but not horse sashimi like some. Again, sorry Packet Foodie.



Anyway that brings me to why we don't drink pigs milk (or make cheese from pigs milk etc.)

I am not sure if I mentioned here at GF before that I don't have a TV and that during quieter moments I find myself in obscure parts of the internet usually somehow food related.

Anyway the following is a writing from a website where the author Guy loves to write to companies asking bullshit questions (interestingly mostly written in the early 90's before the web went mainstream).

Guy writes:

Illinois Pork Producers' Association
6411 South 6th Street Rd
Springfield, IL 62707-8630

Gentlemen:
Each day as I sit in the diner opposite my house, eating my bacon and drinking my milk, I wonder: why don't we drink pig milk?Pork is such a natural and essential part of life. It gives us ham and bacon, spam and red-hots, pork chops and lard. But whereas cows give us so many delicious meat products, they also provide us with dairy. Pigs are mammals too. They lactate, don't they? Why don't we harvest it? Does their milk taste bad? It is toxic? Is it simply unattractive, perhaps an opalescent brown-green that blinds all to its delicious flavor? Is it hard to milk a pig? Do they produce enough milk to make it worthwhile? Is it too viscous or thin to be of any industrial or domestic use? Can you make cheese from pork milk? Or yogurt? Or butter? Can you cook with it? Make pasta sauce, or use the cream in fancy coffee drinks?

As you can see, I have lot of questions about pork dairy potential. It's a topic I don't know much about. But I want to, because I'm sure that there's a good reason for the way things are, and I'm curious about it.

Please write me back and let me know why such a potentially lucrative and delicious resource has not yet been tapped.

Thank you very much.

Guy Petzall.



Guy Petzall
1949 Henderson
Chicago, IL 60657

Dear Guy:
I was excited to hear that each day you sit down to a meal of bacon, because today's pork products are 31% leaner than they were ten years ago. Pork is delicious and very healthy as many physicians recognize it as a very important source of protein. But the opportunity they present to the dairy industry is very limited.

Porcine do lactate and their milk I will assume would taste great, because it is made of 8.5% fat in relation to the fat that makes up 3.5% of the components in cows milk. The other components such as lactose and water are found at nearly the same percentages in pig's milk. However, pigs will on average produce 13 lbs of milk in a day as compared to cows that produce 65 lbs of milk on average per day. Pigs unlike cows cannot become pregnant while lactating and therefore possess a severe economic problem to producers. whfle pigs consume less feed per day, economics does not allow pigs to be a viable source of dairy products.

The biggest challenge facing the porcine dairy industry is collecting the product. Pigs on average have fourteen teats as opposed to cows that have four teats. Pigs also differ from cows in their milk ejection time, a cows milk ejection is stimulated by the hoimone oxytocin and can last ten minutes, where as a pig's milk ejection time only last fifleen seconds as the suckling pigs stimulate the release of oxytoc in. The technology of a 14 cupped mechanized milking machine that can milk a pig in 15 seconds is not available to pork producers.

I hope I have answered your questions and I encourage you to think about developing a pig milking machine as you eat your bacon in the fixture.

Good Luck

Bradley Wolter

Pork Quality Assurance Intern

5 comments:

    1. those pictures are cool
    2. i ate horse meat sashimi once, i tried to be open minded about it but it made me want to retch. Undertones were quite gamey&pungent. Yuck.

    3. hahhaha gross, pig milk.....

     

    yeah, but when you think about it, why do we consider pigs milk gross and not cow's milk and goat's milk? there's no difference, it's just a culturally constructed notion of what is edible and what isn't. Having said that I don't think i would want to try it.

     

    but the point is why eat one animal and not another.....this is where we need Claude Levi Strauss and his book "The Raw and the Cooked" . It's on my reading list. One big geeky thumbs up.

     

    yep true... cows are cuter than pigs tho... so i should be looking to drink a nice pint of dog's milk
    yuck!
    i will check that book

     

    Go Vegan!! Lets porks free!! Animals are not on the earth to serve us!
    They are here like us, they should have the right to be free of suffering, safe, and not killed only for some egoists human's pleasure.

    Get conscient, stop living as a digestive tube--> Go vegan!!

     

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