I have a 3 week old daughter and was pumping breastmilk last night and started to wonder why most mammal milk is white? Is any mammal milk any other colour than white?
Thanks in advance.
You obviously haven’t been eating enough chocolate.
Calcium is the reason for your milk’s milkiness.
Oh, wait…
It seems the above cite contains fallacies… myths… mistakes… falsehoods, even… well, only partly.
Milk is white because…
The answer I was going to give coincides pretty well with the second link that gluteus maximus posted, so I think he has a winner.
FWIW, Mammals are the only animals that give milk – one of the defining characteristics. So I think “mammal milk” is redunant.
True, but the use of “milk” for any white fluid is widespread and as old as the hills.
Soy milk, rice milk, nut milk, coconut milk, milk of magnesia.
Going to dictionary.com I see a bunch of other uses even I was not familiar with:
Same with butter, used to denote any thick spreadable edible, as in peanut butter, apple butter, etc.
Distinguishing mammal milk from these is not necessarily a bad idea even if the term itself is redundant.
Mix some baby oil with some water in a blender. Turns white!
(Vegetable oil, cod liver oil, …baby oil.)
Not quite; some birds produce ‘crop milk’ to feed their chicks, admittedly by a completely different process to mammalian milk.
First hit on Google for crop milk.
Even as a nitpick, I think this is stretching it.
I retract my previous response. I had just read David Attenborough’s excellent “Life of Mammals” where it (along with body hair) were cited… I couldn’t contain myself! 