Milk (4 page)

Cattle domestication had been established in the Near East by about 7000
to 6000
B.C.
As with
sheep and
goats, milking apparently did not follow for many centuries. By then, however, local societies had taken to
plowing with oxen or cows, a breakthrough comparable to the later invention of tractors. Before that, would-be farmers had had to dig with handheld sticks, and settled agriculture had been restricted to tiny plots with very light soil. Neither goats, sheep, nor humans were able to drag a larger, heavier version of a stick with enough force to penetrate dense clayey soil or well-rooted sod. Domesticated cattle were the plowers that literally broke the ground for the diffusion of grain farming beyond its Near Eastern cradle.

AN EGYPTIAN COW GIVING BIRTH

The spread of the animals didn’t necessarily go with a taste for their milk. To this day, cows’ milk is less dominant in the old Diverse Sources Belt countries than in other parts of the world. Though they have been milked there since antiquity—cows are depicted in scenes of milking activity on a third-millennium
B.C.
frieze from Tell el-Obeid in southern Iraq—they had to be carried into far southerly and northerly regions to become
the
milch animal par excellence. No reader of Homer, the Old Testament, or Virgil automatically thought of cows on hearing the word “milk”; the main association was with goats and sheep. Locales where cows came to be prime milk sources from early times were, and are, marked by very different ways of life and culinary preferences. The first of these places was
India.

As
Jared Diamond has pointed out in
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
Old World food crops and other resources had to overcome more obstacles in order to move north and south than east and west. The reason is that the all-important factor of temperature varies directly with latitude, not longitude.

Some plants and animals brought to new environments managed to cope with heat, cold, and other variables better than others.
Goats,
horses, and
sheep proved to be hardy under many conditions, but tended to be challenged by tropical humidity. Cattle were another story. As descendants of creatures that had flourished in glacial chill, they would have been thoroughly defeated by Torrid Zone heat and humidity had it not been for a timely genetic freak.

ZEBU COW AND CALF

People had been husbanding cattle for meat, draft purposes, and, to an extent, milk in ancient
Mesopotamia for centuries when a strange new type appeared, probably between 3000 and 2500
B.C.,
somewhere between southern Persia and the western Pakistan-Afghanistan fringes. The same aberration may (no one is sure) have occurred independently in another spot or two between the Middle East and Nilotic
Africa. In any case, the new creature—later christened
Bos indicus
by zoologists to distinguish it from
Bos taurus
—was the reason that milking and milk-based cuisine were able to penetrate throughout the
Indian subcontinent and much of Africa.

The most visible difference between ordinary cattle and the
indicus
variant was the latter’s pronounced neck or shoulder hump. Eventually naturalists started calling the humped cattle of India “zebus” and a similar race in Africa “sangas.” To sidestep learned debates about zebu-sanga classifications and whether
indicus
designates a subspecies or separate species, I have lumped together both humped kinds as “
zebu-type.”

The hump, which was larger on bulls than cows, went along with a pendulous dewlap, a narrow bony frame, thin skin, and many environmental advantages. Zebu-type animals can tolerate sweltering tropical heat, resist certain diseases and parasites, and subsist on more meager pasturage than other cows. Today the zebu-type
milch cows of Nilotic Africa at least as far south as Tanzania support the world’s most intensely cow-centered pastoral cultures, and those of India symbolize an entire nation—at least, as seen by militant patriots.

The
Indian milch-animal scene is riddled with strange complexities, puzzles, and paradoxes, one being that though the subcontinent is framed by regions representing the most diverse bovine gene pool on earth, most of India’s Asian neighbors scorn the creatures’ milk. From Assam eastward into several Southeast Asian countries, wild bovine jungle species, including gaur, kouprey, and banteng, still survive along with some domesticated offshoots. But there is little local use of either the tame animals’ milk or that of
zebu cattle.

YAK

To the north, the picture is different. From the western Himalayas through and beyond Mongolia, people have been herding a towering, fur-draped bovine cousin,
Bos grunniens,
for about twenty-five hundred years. Americans usually call it “yak,” though Tibetan speakers protest that the correct word for the female is
dri.
In any case, not only is yak, or
dri,
milk famously cherished wherever the creature is raised, but it is traditional to exploit the phenomenon of “hybrid vigor” by crossbreeding
yaks with both zebu and taurine cattle for, among other benefits, increased milk yields in female offspring. Western observers who have tasted
dri
milk report that it is a lovely golden color with an extraordinarily deep, rich flavor; some experiments with Western-style cheeses have been made in Nepal and elsewhere, and it isn’t out of the question that the few small yak-husbandry ventures that have recently started in North America may generate a bit of local interest in the milk.

WATER BUFFALO

None of these bovine cousins encroaches on the milk-giving role of the sacred zebu cow in India proper. But an entirely different creature does. Strange as it may seem to anyone else, Indians rely less on the milk of the sacred cow than on that of this nonbovine competitor, the fourth of the world’s leading dairy animals. More than half the nation’s milk supply actually comes from the “river” strain of the water buffalo,
Bubalus bubalis.

This formidable-looking ruminant is a long, massive, low-slung, splay-footed beast with a hide like a hippopotamus and a pair of fearsome
ridged horns. Water buffaloes should not be confused with bison, which strictly speaking aren’t buffaloes at all. The true buffalo’s closest ancestors probably were staking out habitats in the wetlands of southern Asia at about the same time that
aurochsen began roaming their own northern haunts.

Like oxen elsewhere, domesticated buffaloes were the great facilitators of a certain staple crop—in this case rice, since they can pull
plows through muddy or semi-flooded paddies that other animals could never negotiate. Their meat is considered at least equal to beef wherever both are eaten. But for some reason, only India showed any interest in their milk or developed a particular strain suitable for that purpose. All other Far Eastern regions bred large, thickset draft buffaloes of the “swamp” strain. The
Indian “river” buffalo is a rangier, bonier type that diverts a great deal of food energy into lactation. In fact, it may be the most remarkable of all milch animals.

What sets river buffaloes apart from the rest of the crew is that they produce not only richer milk but
more
milk than nearly all the rest—and this with far less intensive breeding-and-feeding efforts than have gone into increasing the yields of Western dairy cows, the only higher-volume producers among the four major milch animals. Only
sheep give milk that is equally or more concentrated—but, as noted, there’s very little of it. A good milking ewe can, under favorable conditions, yield two or three quarts (four to six pounds) of milk a day, while two to three
gallons
(sixteen to twenty-four pounds) is by no means exceptional for a buffalo.

Buffaloes’ milk has an odd glaucous appearance, suggesting that it shouldn’t be nearly as creamy as cows’ milk. In fact, it is much creamier. People who have tasted it fresh (I have not) say that it seems almost like a concentrated milk reduction. Judging from the buffalo yogurt and mozzarella that I have eaten, it seems to have some special earthy dimension of its own quite unlike the goaty-sheepy flavors of caprines’ milk. What’s more, the animals thrive and produce copiously on cheaper and coarser tropical forages than cows.

Though reliable statistics are hard to come by, there are known to be many more zebu cows than buffaloes milked in India. But the latter account for more than 50 percent of the nation’s commercial milk supply. Why the animal itself never came to be revered is a mystery. Zebu cows in India became important as domestic livestock and sources of milk earlier than water buffaloes, and perhaps the quasi-divine status that they eventually acquired did not admit of diminishment by being shared with another beast.

Paradoxically, the very fact that water buffaloes are
not
considered holy may have made Indian commercial milk producers willing to undertake more aggressive, systematic management measures; though millions of cows are left to wander the countryside without anyone trying to improve their milk yield, dairying interests apparently feel freer to intervene in buffalo destiny.

GODS AND DEMONS PULL ALTERNATELY ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF A GIANT SERPENT TO ROTATE THE MIRACULOUS COSMIC “CHURN” OF HINDU MYTH.