Or a rennet-like substance?
Ah, the things the boyfriend and I speculate about late at night…
Apparently yes. According to various cheese-making websites, rennet is an enzyme complex produced in the stomach of all mammals.
…Breastmilk cheese, anyone? Made with only the purest rennet from specially selected, organically grown free range babies.
But according to Chymosin | Encyclopedia.com
Now this is confusing. Only bovine and human infants? (the fact that the young of bison, camels, dolphins, elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, moose, rhinoceroses, whales, seals and yaks are also called calves doesn’t make this any clearer…)
I would think that all mammals have some way to break down the nutrients in their mother’s milk. As usual, it all seems to depend on one’s definitions of this enzyme cocktail.
So, is that how those evil Dutch make baby Gouda? I’m never eating it again!
An observation:
When changing a not-too-heinous diaper for one kid or the other, I realized that it looked an awful lot like welsh rarebit (a cheese/beer concoction)… and smelled an awful lot like generic Cheddar cheese.
Which, now that you think of it, is basically what it was! Cheese is milk treated with digestive enzymes… and the baby in question was fully breastfed… i.e. was pooping out milk treated with digestive enzymes…
No, I have not eaten welsh rarebit since that day, why do you ask?
What I have seen is that rennet is present only in the young of herbivores. Humans have an enzyme, pepsin, which is in our stomach lining in the inactive form of pepsinogen and then is activiated by hydrochloric acid into the active pepsin enzyme. This enzyme is said to coagulate milk in a fashion similar to rennet.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe you had a magical baby that was excreting Welsh rarebit? Kind of like the goose that laid golden eggs (as scientifically explained by Isaac Asimov)