DailyDirt: Common Sense Ain't So Common

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mammals drink milk when they're young. Maybe there are some exceptions to that, but the examples of milk-drinking mammals are pretty easy to find. People are mammals, and so the cow milk industry is sizable: the US alone produced over 200,000,000,000 pounds of cow milk in 2013. In other parts of the world, goat milk is more popular (and there are a lot of other kinds of milk that people drink, too). Okay, so why doesn't anyone drink pig milk?

• The Illinois Pork Producers' Association has an answer. Basically, it's harder to milk a pig, and cows are so much better at it now that it would be hard for the pork industry to enter that market even if there was demand for pig milk. [url]
• Chef Edward Lee is actually trying to milk a pig. And if he succeeds, he's going to make some pig milk cheese with it. [url]
• An April Fool's joke claimed that a pig milking machine was ready to go and patented. No commercial pig milking machinery seems to exist, but there's at least one patent that covers a device for milking a miniature pig. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: cheese, dairy, food, mammals, milk, pigs