Milk isn’t some instinctual thing, humans know where milk comes from, know the cow has to be pregnant, and know which baby animals milk is for, and chose to build an industry around ...

Neither is bread, beer, pizza or any other processed food. Think about it, how weird it is, that humans decided to take seeds, that they cannot digest well and isntead of letting the seeds just seed, they grind them with stones and then they add water and they let it spoil and then they take the spoiled bunch and put it over a fire. And of course it couldnt stop there no! they all started to make it in different ways and when they imagined some standarized symbols they added these symbols together to describe how to do it. And they learned how to breed the seeds so they get more of the white fluffy stuff and they started playing with the dirt to dirigate water to where the seeds grow. And then they noticed the seeds to grow better when they put animal shit on them, so they did that too. And then they used the little symbols they invented, to measure how much seeds each human is growing and how much seeds they need to give to the alpha-humans and some of these alpha humans got so rich with seeds, they built themselves giant gravestones, that are still among the largest buildings to this day.

You can describe anything that humans did since they stopped slapping bunnies with stone and collecting roots as being super weird. I share your criticism of industrialized farming, but not because it is less or more weird, but because it is detrimental to our survival and well being.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Breaking things down to their fundamentals isn't weird, the thing itself is weird.

No, the development of crops is not weird. Bread is likewise not weird. Capitalism, or the hoarding of resources, is more detrimental to humans than crops or bread, but not very weird.

Developing an industry around humans harvesting the non-essential lactation of other species meant for animal babies is much weirder than bread.

Bread - grind seeds, add flour, add water, add heat

Hunting rabbits - kill rabbit, process meat, add heat

Potatoes - grow potatoes, harvest potatoes, add heat

Milk - forcefully inseminate animals, confine the animals in filth, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, secure the cow lactation for the pleasure of the percentage of the human population that can digest cow milk instead of the animal babies it's intended for, boil the milk because it's dangerous for humans, kill the baby once it's born, ignore the bleating and stress of the cow, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, artificially inseminate the cow, repeat

Milk is definitely weirder.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You just arbitrarily define your level of detail.

Drinking milk also just started as:

try milk from lactating cow - realize you are able to digest it - get more milk from that cow.

All the rest that lead to most Europeans being lactose tolerant, which is an insane genetical success story and the subsequent refining of that process came later.

But maybe to help you with the seeds: A common way of breeding new seeds, that isnt specific GMO, is to radiate the seeds for random mutation. How is the following process not weird? "apply death ray to seed, get defeberated seed, see if it has any useful properties, crossbreed degenerated seed with less degenerated one until you get your right mix of degeneracy"

Or should we go about processing old dinosaur meat into transparent wrappings to buy our cow lactate in? Name it and i can tell you how it is weird. The process is just creative and the result is arbitrary.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You're literally doing what you're accusing others of in order to make inorganic sterile processes sound strange.

I'm not arbitrarily defining my level of detail, you can break down bread as much as you want and use as many dramatic or inaccurate terms as you like, but bread is never going to be as weird as artificially inseminating chemical hormone pumped eugenics cows so that we can steal their baby juice. I don't need to make euphemisms or make things sound more dramatic - that's actually what's happening.

You're pretending that radiation is weird when it's literally everywhere constantly, and using the word crossbreeds to falsely equivocate eugenics and hormonal manipulation in higher life forms with retaining the seeds of successful fruiting plants.

I understand you're upset that you can't make milk less weird, but pushing for grains to be weird is not a winning route for you.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your weirdness with milk stems from it being from a mammal and you seeing more similarity with a mammal. But the underlying processes are equally estranged from the perceived natural way. and for the natural way again the definition remains difficult, because humans 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10.000 and 50.000 years ago all had very different lifes in which very different things happened.

What you described with artifical hormones is something of the past 50 years. But what about the other 6.000 years of humans drinking milk already? What you describe isnt specific to milk.It is specific to modern industrialized countries.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The original weirdness comes from thousands of years that humans saw these other animals with their animal boobs dripping milk into the mouths of their babies, and decided that we need some of that non-essential nourishment at any cost.

That's why it's weird. And it only gets weirder when we have to build up industrialized processes to support an obviously unsustainable and harmful process because...the percentage of the population who can stomach the non-essential infant cow juice want it so badly?

That weirdness has been happening as long as we've been stealing milk from cow babies.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and decided that we need some of that non-essential nourishment at any cost.

But it was essential. Drinking cow milk was such an evolutionary edge that genetic analysis indicated every lactose tolerant person to have the same ancestor where it first occured some 6.000 years ago.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Drinking milk was not essential, as evidenced by your very mention of people being lactose intolerant to milk, a simple fact that proves milk is not essential.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

neither is hot water, having a non leaking roof or a functional health system. Do you want to skip on any of these as being weird? it was a huge advantage and quite dominant in human genetics.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

Yes, following you down this irrelevant tangent that literally nobody has argued against except yourself, stolen baby xenomilk can be a dietary advantage for humans. We are omnivores, after all.

I'm going to stick with the original point and maintain how strange it is.