What Your Food Ate by David R. Montgomery

Author:David R. Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Looking for milk at the grocery store got a lot more complicated in recent years. When our parents were young, the choice lay between a few brands—if, that is, one could find more than one option. Milk was just milk. It came from a local or regional dairy, and the cows mostly ate grass. When we were growing up in the 1970s, milk from cows still dominated the dairy cases of grocery stores, with options for different amounts of fat. Now, to find whole milk, cream, or half-and-half in the dairy section, you have to wade past all the other “milks”—soy, coconut, hemp, almond, and so on.

Faux dairy products represent the most recent step in a century-long shift away from milk made in cows that ate living plants in a pasture. What did we lose in pivoting away from grass-fed milk? More than advertised, as industrialized animal husbandry optimized production for efficiencies dependent on cheap grain and energy. But it needn’t be this way. It’s possible to both increase the nutritional quality of milk and meat and reduce the environmental footprint of animal agriculture. We’d just have to raise and feed animals really differently.

Ruminants—cows, sheep, and goats—are long-running mainstays of farming systems around the world. Their moniker comes from the rumen, an underappreciated part of their bodies crucial for their brand of herbivory. The rumen serves us well too, turning grass and leaves we can’t digest into meat and milk we can.

The rumen is not a stomach. Those dissolve things. A rumen is an ecosystem that houses most of a ruminant’s microbiome. As in any other ecosystem, physical terrain creates different habitats that sustain various inhabitants. Stout ridges of cartilage lend strength and form to the rumen, creating distinct compartments that facilitate the fermenting action and movement of trillions of microbes navigating a sea of gastric juices, saliva, and partially chewed plants. Disturb it or feed it differently, and its tiny inhabitants change what they do and make inside their host. And as goes the rumen, so goes the ruminant—and the nutritional profile of her milk.

The size of a rumen generally scales with the size of the animal. Consider cows. A standard-size beer keg holds about 15 gallons. Add a second keg, and you’d be up to the size of the rumen in a small cow, about 30 gallons. Add a third keg, top it up with a few growlers, and you get to the large end of the rumen range, around 50 gallons.

After a century poking around in the rumens of a wide variety of domestic livestock breeds, scientists still don’t fully understand this alive and dynamic place. It’s a challenge to study because of the perpetually shifting relationships between microbiota and a ruminant’s diet. Nothing stays exactly the same from one day, or season, to the next. How ruminants acquire a good deal of their protein illustrates some of this dynamism.

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