Milk
Milk is a nutrient-rich liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digest solid food.[1] Immune factors and immune-modulating components in milk contribute to milk immunity. Early-lactation milk, which is called colostrum, contains antibodies that strengthen the immune system, and thus reduces the risk of many diseases. Milk contains many nutrients, including protein and lactose.[2]
The US CDC recommends that children over the age of 12 months should have two servings of dairy milk products a day.[3]
As an agricultural product, dairy milk is collected from farm animals. In 2011, dairy farms produced around 730 million tonnes (800 million short tons) of milk[4] from 260 million dairy cows.[5] India is the world's largest producer of milk and the leading exporter of skimmed milk powder, but it exports few other milk products.[6][7] Because there is an ever-increasing demand for dairy products within India, it could eventually become a net importer of dairy products.[8] New Zealand, Germany and the Netherlands are the largest exporters of milk products.[9]
More than six billion people worldwide consume milk and milk products, and between 750 and 900 million people live in dairy-farming households.[10]
History of Milk
Humans first learned to consume the milk of other mammals regularly following the domestication of animals during the Neolithic Revolution or the development of agriculture. This development occurred independently in several global locations from as early as 9000–7000 BC in Mesopotamia[25] to 3500–3000 BC in the Americas.[26] People first domesticated the most important dairy animals – cattle, sheep and goats – in Southwest Asia, although domestic cattle had been independently derived from wild aurochs populations several times since.[27] Initially animals were kept for meat, and archaeologist Andrew Sherratt has suggested that dairying, along with the exploitation of domestic animals for hair and labor, began much later in a separate secondary products revolution in the fourth millennium BC.[28] Sherratt's model is not supported by recent findings, based on the analysis of lipid residue in prehistoric pottery, that shows that dairying was practiced in the early phases of agriculture in Southwest Asia, by at least the seventh millennium BC.[29][30]
From Southwest Asia domestic dairy animals spread to Europe (beginning around 7000 BC but did not reach Britain and Scandinavia until after 4000 BC)[31] and South Asia (7000–5500 BC).[32] The first farmers in central Europe[33] and Britain[34] milked their animals. Pastoral and pastoral nomadic economies, which rely predominantly or exclusively on domestic animals and their products rather than crop farming, were developed as European farmers moved into the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the fourth millennium BC, and subsequently spread across much of the Eurasian steppe.[35] Sheep and goats were introduced to Africa from Southwest Asia, but African cattle may have been around 7000–6000 BC.[36] Camels, domesticated in central Arabia in the fourth millennium BC, have also been used as dairy animals in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.[37] The earliest Egyptian records of burn treatments describe burn dressings using milk from mothers of male babies.[38] In the rest of the world (i.e., East and Southeast Asia, the Americas and Australia) milk and dairy products were historically not a large part of the diet, either because they remained populated by hunter-gatherers who did not keep animals or the local agricultural economies did not include domesticated dairy species. Milk consumption became common in these regions comparatively recently, as a consequence of European colonialism and political domination over much of the world in the last 500 years.
In the Middle Ages, milk was called the "virtuous white liquor" because alcoholic beverages were safer to consume than the water generally available.[39] James Rosier's record of the 1605 voyage made by George Weymouth to New England did report the Wabanaki people Weymouth captured in Maine did report milking "Rain-Deere and Fallo-Deere." But Journalist Avery Yale Kamila and food historians said Rosier "misinterpreted the evidence." Historians report the Wabanaki did not domesticate deer.[40][41] The tribes of the northern woodlands have historically been making milk.[42] Cows were imported to New England in 1624.[43]
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