Browsing in grocery stores, I’ve only ever seen ice cream made from cow’s milk, and I’ve only ever seen cheeses made from cow/goat/sheep milk.
There are a lot of other mammals out there. Is anybody making/selling dairy products from them? I would guess most of the wild mammals aren’t amenable to being milked, but what about all the domesticated/semi-domesticated ones?
Pigs?
Horses?
Llama/Alpaca/Guanaco/Vicuna?
ISTR that camel milk is consumed by people, but do they also make cheese and ice cream out of it?
Do they do anything with reindeer milk in Finland?
Products made from horse milk are popular in Central Asia, and products make from camel milk are consumed in Africa. I think the milk tends to be drunk as-is, or fermented, or made into yogurt. Making cheese, at least for camel milk, isn’t so easy due to its resistance to coagulation.
Horse milk is a central Asian thing - there is an item called kumiss, as an example.
To obtain milk that’s useful as a food source for humans an animal not only needs to be a mammal, but one that produces a lot of milk on a predictable basis. Some animals suckle their young for only a very short period of time. Some produce more milk than others. Not to mention that we’ve bred specific animal types for dairy - dairy cattle and goats produce far more milk than their fellow cattle and goats that aren’t specialized for such production.
There is also the matter of how easy it is to get the milk out of an animal. Ruminants - cows, goats, sheep, etc. - have udders to store milk and teats that are apparently fairly easy to use to access it. A pig, on the other hand (more specifically a sow) doesn’t have udders to store milk so would probably have to be milked more often than a cow (which does fine twice a day), and a lot more teats of a different size which might be harder to manipulate, and I have no idea how amenable a sow is going to be to the entire process.
A quick google informs me that in addition to cows, sheep, and goats other animals used as a source for human used dairy include water buffalo, camels, yaks, horse, donkey, and yes, reindeer. Possibly moose?
People have probably experienced with using llamas, alpacas, and all sorts of other potential dairy animals but I haven’t heard of any success. I’m not aware of any definite obstacle, though.
So the comment about the relative resistance of camel milk to traditional rennet got me wondering why. And that got me to this asinine article that might interest a few here.
Still not sure what about camel milk makes it resistant to calf chymosin though.
Elephant milk? I am given to understand that it’s not particularly digestible by humans, due to high fat content. It’s apparently extremely high in glucosamine also, to help build strong elephant bones, perhaps.
Aside from cattle, many kinds of livestock provide milk used by humans for dairy products. These animals include water buffalo, goat, sheep, camel, donkey, horse, reindeer and yak. The first four respectively produced about 11%, 2%, 1.4% and 0.2% of all milk worldwide in 2011.[60]
According to the U.S. National Bison Association, American bison (also called American buffalo) are not milked commercially;[63] however, various sources report cows resulting from cross-breeding bison and domestic cattle are good milk producers, and have been used both during the European settlement of North America[64] and during the development of commercial Beefalo in the 1970s and 1980s.[65]
Swine are almost never milked, even though their milk is similar to cow’s milk and perfectly suitable for human consumption. The main reasons for this are that milking a sow’s numerous small teats is very cumbersome, and that sows can not store their milk as cows can.[66] A few pig farms do sell pig cheese as a novelty item; these cheeses are exceedingly expensive.[67]
A minority of people, including restaurateurs Hans Lochen of Switzerland and Daniel Angerer of Austria, who operates a restaurant in New York City, have used human breast milk, or at least advocated its use, as a substitute for cow’s milk in dairy products and food recipes.[91][92] An Icecreamist in London’s Covent Garden started selling an ice cream named Baby Gaga in February 2011. Each serving cost £14. All the milk was donated by a Mrs Hiley who earned £15 for every 10 ounces and called it a “great recession beater”.[93] The ice cream sold out on its first day. Despite the success of the new flavour, the Westminster Council officers removed the product from the menu to make sure that it was, as they said, “fit for human consumption.”[94] Tammy Frissell-Deppe, a family counsellor specialized in attachment parenting, published a book, titled A Breastfeeding Mother’s Secret Recipes , providing a lengthy compilation of detailed food and beverage recipes containing human breast milk.[95] Human breast milk is not produced or distributed industrially or commercially, because the use of human breast milk as an adult food is considered unusual to the majority of cultures around the world, and most disapprove of such a practice.[96]
In Costa Rica, there have been trials to produce human cheese, and custard from human milk, as an alternative to weaning.[97]
In the third season of Superstore, one of the characters tries to start a “human cheese” business. I wonder if the writers got the idea from that Costa Rican website? … Nah.
