
Tale of Tasteless Tomatoes: Why Vegetables Do Not Taste Good Anymore - kafkaesq
http://calmscience.net/2015/12/11/tale-of-tasteless-tomatoes-why-vegetables-do-not-taste-good-anymore/
======
SigmundA
Wild tomatoes are small and unpleasant tasting, doesn't that kinda blow the
premise?

The modern tomatoes we eat are genetically modified by humans through breeding
which we like to call domestication. This genetic modification caused them to
be bigger and taste pleasant.

My understanding was there was push to breed them to be uniformly red when
ripe but this also caused a mutation to make them more bland, this occurred in
the 1940's before "modern" genetic engineering, which incidentally no tomatoes
currently on the market are engineered that I am aware of.

I always think it ironic to blame modern techniques like genetic engineering
for all sorts of issues like somehow a cow, chicken, pig, tomato, corn or
wheat are somehow "natural", these are all genetically modified organisms that
would not exist without human tampering.

We have twisted nature for thousands of years to have higher yields and more
desirable characteristics, if tomatoes are bland I would imagine we will twist
them some more to make them flavorful again if the market demands it, but
their "natural" "wild" cousins have never been tasty.

~~~
noam87
It's a shame that so many people fall for the trope of the anti-science hippie
when it comes to criticism of modern farming.

Believe it or not, most of us who criticize industrialized farming techniques
are not tinfoil-hat antivaxers, and understand very well what you describe.
Thing is, there's no reason why modern techniques can't be used to produce
foods that are more varied, nutritious and flavourful.

Instead we're getting bland produce, all the same two or three varieties, and
increasingly devoid of any nutritional value because our backwards practices
are destroying the very soil we use
([http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-
and...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-
nutrition-loss/)).

It's like in terms of food, we're moving towards an "everybody wears a silver
onesie" future... scientific progress doesn't _have_ to mean monotony.

In fact it's not progress. It's laziness on an industrial scale, and it's
costing us our health (and one of life's greatest pleasures: food with real
friggen flavour). So many of us have _never_ tasted a real vegetable or piece
of meat. (Ironically, in poorer, less industrialized countries like in South
America, the meat is absolutely delicious -- visited last year with some
friends; it was like they had never tasted meat before. Then I realised...
they really hadn't!)

For a glimpse into what is possible using modern techniques, while still
embracing flavour and variety, I highly recommend the _Chef 's Table_ episode
on Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture.

I believe it's the second episode of the first season (available on NetFlix
right now... the whole series is worth watching really).

~~~
maerF0x0
Its no surprise, most people pay by the lb. If there was some way to price by
nutrition maybe people would optimize that way. Eg: 20c per 1000mg Vit C .

~~~
tiglionabbit
Some words and standards can indicate quality. "Pasture Eggs" for example, are
more expensive but also a better product. Also, going to a farmer's market and
buying from producers directly instead of a supermarket is one way to shop for
quality.

I wouldn't want to use nutritionism as the definition of quality, because so
far nutritionism has been too reductionist to capture the full picture.
There's a wide variety of micronutrients that turn out to be useful, but are
easily depleted from the soil in a monoculture. Are you getting your Vitamin
K12? Selenium? Zinc? Copper? Choline? Are the animals you eat getting theirs?

~~~
maerF0x0
While I agree with the idea that nutritionism is reductionist of complex
systems, I see price per nutrition to be an improved model over price per lb.
Maybe once upon a time price per lb made sense because not everyone could get
enough lbs. But now we can get plenty of lbs, but not everyone can get enough
nutrition.

On the nutritionism note, I also think we'll increasingly improve the model to
a point where something like Soylent v315 will actually be superior
nutritionally to any complex diet that a human could eat. Right now its so
simple that you can do better with a chicken salad, but someday soylent may
encompass phytonutrients, chemical supplements, nanorobots, pre/probiotics,
factors based on your genetics, medicines prescribed etc etc... IMO the
complexity of nutrition will eventually outstrip the typical human's ability
(or will) to eat very complex "meals".

------
jofer
In addition to being bred for yield, there's shippability.

One of the biggest reasons tomatoes from the store taste so bad is that
they're picked completely green. The second is that the commercial varieties
are bred to have a pastier texture and be tougher to stand up to shipping. The
third is that tomatoes don't stand up to refrigeration without a change in
texture.

My uncle grows tomatoes commercially in southeast Tennessee. If you actually
let the commercial varieties ripen all the way and don't refridgerate them,
they're pretty good. They're better than the anything you can buy at a fancy
grocery store. They're not as good as homegrown brandywines, but they're on
par some of the popular hybrid varieties, and will beat out any store-bought
heirloom (e.g. a store-bought brandywine).

However, when any tomato is picked to sell in bulk, they have to be picked
completely green. Otherwise they'll be too badly bruised to sell. The "vine
ripened" tomatoes you buy in the store just means that they cut off some of
the vine along with the green tomatoes.

The site is down, so forgive me if I'm pointing out something that's mentioned
there. At any rate, in my opinion, commercial tomatoes suffer more from being
picked completely green so they'll survive shipping than anything else.

~~~
tgb
Do you know about canned tomatoes?

~~~
bkmartin
Canned tomatoes are picked ripe from the field and shipped directly to the
canning facilities via large semi trucks and trailers. My dad used to work at
one of these facilities to which one of my best friends growing up is the son
of then President of the company. His older brother now runs the plant.

~~~
weaksauce
if it's s&w brand I hope they go back to selling the large cans of peeled
whole tomatoes. I used to love making pasta/pizza/enchilada sauce using their
6lb can of whole tomatoes from costco for around $2.50 a can.(had a really
nice tart and sweet taste) I haven't found a decent alternative since they
stopped making those that isn't the San Marzano super sweet tomatoes and that
don't cost an arm and a leg.

~~~
bkmartin
Unfortunately it is not that company. Good luck finding a replacement though.

------
lfam
I grew up in South Florida which is not a good growing climate for many
"classic" North American fruits and vegetables.

I didn't understand the popularity of tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries,
peaches, or pears until I moved north and tried them at farmer's markets or
from wild growth. I didn't even understand the relationship between the actual
foods and the artificial "candy flavor" versions until I tasted the real
things. That's how far the commercial varieties have diverged.

On the other hand, I miss a lot of the tropical fruits and vegetables that I
had growing in my neighborhood down there.

~~~
Loughla
Peaches. Peaches fresh from the tree. Picked when they're fully ripe and
ready. Peaches from Southern Illinois. Oh my god. They are, quite literally,
the best things you will ever eat.

Calhoun County, Illinois. I suggest you go in August/September just to
purchase peaches. It is a backwards, hillbilly part of the country.

But god-damn are they good.

------
scrumper
Well this is prima facie bad, but actually we're not in such a terrible spot
as a society: the bulk of supermarket chicken and beef might be corn-fed,
bland, watery mush these days, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than it ever
used to be, and that means that a wider segment of the population can afford
reasonably good meat on a regular basis. Better nutrition means healthier kids
who can do better in school, and you know the rest. The stuff isn't _bad_ ,
it's just not as good as it used to be. But neither is it as exclusive as it
used to be either.

Those of us with more money still have the option to buy tasty, grass-fed beef
steaks from niche producers. It takes more effort of course. Quite often I
find that arguments against bland, cheap, tasteless food are really about
unrealistic people expecting cheapness, high quality, and great convenience.
You can't have all three!

~~~
mirekrusin
It's true but it still means we could do better by trying to optimise for
nutrition value as well - which seems to somehow hidden from us. You often
don't taste or see nutrition value.

Also what does it mean for food recommendation if one strawberry has
completely different vitamins/minerals/etc than the other one? Eating
strawberry A and B means completely different things now. "One fruit a day" or
"One cheap fruit a day + supplement pill"?

~~~
scrumper
Well, we've optimized for yield (=> cost) exclusively. Taste and nutritional
value are other axes. In a way you're saying the same thing as the article -
that it's a shame to focus only on yield.

To answer your question, I think its important to first understand whether the
nutritional gap between zero strawberries and modern strawberries is much
greater than that between modern strawberries and old-fashioned low yield
tasty strawberries. My opinion (worth nothing of course) is that it's better
to have some fruit than no fruit, and high yield, cheap produce allows that.

------
Eric_WVGG
Unless tomatoes are in season and I’m in some sort of hipster farm-to-table
restaurant, I’ll always hold the tomatoes or put them to the side, and
inevitably a companion will ask why I don't like tomatoes and I wind up in an
argument over whether or not tomatoes are supposed to taste like water.

It's dismaying. Do Americans think that the flavor of tomato sauce is an
additive?

Alton Brown had a good layperson-friendly bit about this in Good Eats but I
can't find the episode on YouTube… anyway it worths.

~~~
a3n
> Do Americans think that the flavor of tomato sauce is an additive?

Yes. Everything here is an additive. Tomato sauce is "tomato flavored sauce."
Butter is "butter spread." Etc. A bit of an exaggeration, but when you buy
packaged food, look at what it's calling itself. If you think you're buying
NOUN, but the label says NOUN OTHER, then you're buying OTHER, with flavor or
other essential attribute added that may or may not be based on NOUN.

Enjoy your cheese spread.

~~~
bcook
lol. Regarding the tenuous connection between tomatoes & ketchup, a friend of
mine once posed me the question: "have you ever tasted a tomato that tasted
anything like ketchup?".

Nope.

~~~
dragontamer
Ketchup is a combination of tomato paste, vinegar, and sugar however.

Tomato paste is where you go if you need a pure tomato taste.

~~~
zeveb
> Ketchup is a combination of tomato paste, vinegar, and sugar however.

And clove! Can't forget that.

------
sandworm101
The OP makes many assumption about food, chief among them being that flavor is
always a good thing. I also wonder which type of tomato he is buying. Some are
designed for size alone. Others (roma+cherry) have much more taste, especially
those grown all year in local greenhouses rather than those picked green and
shipped in. Even in the depths of a canadian winter, the tomatoes I buy at
costco were picked the previous day at a facility a few miles down the road.
They taste great.

>> Plain yogurt is tasteless.

Yogurt's lack of flavor is nothing to do with the milk. "Plain" yogurt is
meant to taste as plain as possible so that flavors can be added to it. It's
like vodka. The goal is consistency rather than amount of flavor. It's the
difference between tasting a food and tasting an ingredient.

~~~
azinman2
Very high quality dairy has a very nice flavor of its own, as does vodka. I've
had very small production half and half in the San Juan islands that tasted
exactly like vanilla ice cream. Butter often tastes different in France. I've
also been told the Greek yogurt in Greece is completely unlike anything sold
in the US and much much better.

Edit: I'm in SF and routinely buy local, organic, blahblahblah. I've still had
better dairy elsewhere.

~~~
henrikschroder
Yoghurt in the US has been completely destroyed by the "non-fat" movement.
It's the fat that _makes it_ yoghurt. Low-fat or non-fat yoghurt is a
contradiction in terms!

The "yoghurt" you can buy in supermarkets here is sugared milk with artificial
thickeners, it's madness.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Yoghurt in the US has been completely destroyed by the "non-fat" movement.

No, it hasn't, because you can still get other-than-nonfat yogurt, both full
fat (sometimes labeled as 4% fat, which is certainly a response to the anti-
fat movement) and low-fat (2%); I have yet to see even a poor-quality
supermarket that doesn't have full-fat yogurts (though the most common
offering and the one with the greatest variety of choices seems to be low-fat,
but still not non-fat.)

------
manachar
It's always interesting to see what happens when something is optimized for
the "wrong" metric.

No consumer would actually say they want worse tasting tomatoes, but consumers
as a whole clearly made that choice by buying only cheap and firm tomatoes.
Same with farmers, they didn't want bad tasting tomatoes, they just wanted to
make a profit and knew that the market responded positively to tomatoes that
were red, firm, ship well, and stayed "good" long enough for the retailers.

~~~
jrochkind1
So one of the things going on there is that firmness and redness used to be
signs of a good-tasting tomato -- because it was just the right amount of
ripe, not under or over. Customers don't normally get to taste tomatoes before
they buy them, they have to use firmness and color as a proxy.

So they bred tomatoes that can be very firm and very red with almost no
relationship to actual ripeness, and taste terrible.

In that case, it's more of a trick than customers showing a preference for
firmness or color over taste.

But you're right, I think, that customers will generally choose cost over
taste, or over almost anything else, in the aggregate over the long-term
anyway.

~~~
manachar
Another example is the yellow in cheddar cheese.

Apparently the yellow-ish color was originally a mark of high-quality milk
from grass-fed Jersey and Guernsey cow. Now they use annatto and other
spices/dyes to add color to the cheese.

Essentially, when the consumer doesn't have complete information they will
have to make purchasing decisions based on proxy information. As you note,
this can lead trickery from the person selling the product.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
That's really funny, considering how in my family, white cheddar was always
the "realer", more high-quality kind, whereas we assumed yellow cheddar to be
highly-processed and made of whatever.

------
zzzcpan
Related: How Tomatoes Lost Their Taste (2012)
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/how-tomatoes-lost-
the...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/how-tomatoes-lost-their-taste)

------
vanilla-almond
A lot of tomatoes grown and sold in Europe are also tasteless.

In the UK, most supermarket tomatoes are imported from The Netherlands or
Spain (two of the largert exporters of tomatoes in Europe). The tomatoes are
mostly tasteless, regardless of the variety. Even the organic ones have only a
little bit more flavour.

So tasteless tomatoes aren't just an American phenomenon, they are common in
Europe too. That's what modern, mass-procuded agriculture gives us: tasteless,
low-cost produce all-year round (because price mostly trumps other factors for
many, if not most, consumers)

------
dekhn
I used to live in Berkeley, CA, and both "alt" groceries (Monterey Market and
Berkeley Bowl) sourced wonderfully flavored tomatos- many different kinds,
from juicy salad tomatos to beefy paste tomatos. The prices were not higher
than the supermarket, and they tasted far better.

------
phil248
People told me farmer's market tomatoes were better. So I bought them several
times and sometimes they were better, sometimes not. Then, I discovered "early
girl" tomatoes and they blew my mind. Very limited growing season though.

~~~
amluto
Food snob mode: there are some growers in some areas that grow "dry-farmed"
early girls. It pushes the season much later in the year. The best I've ever
tried, by far, are in Palo Alto at the downtown farmer's market. They're
available for a fairly long season in the fall.

~~~
fallinghawks
This past summer, the local real-estate company dropped off a tomato plant,
which they do every year. I planted it and largely forgot about it throughout
this dry year, just watering it enough to keep it alive. It grew small (about
2" diameter), very firm, amazingly flavorful tomatoes. I have no doubt the RE
company picked whatever plants were cheap and I have no idea what breed it
actually was, but the unintentional dry farming made it awesome.

------
alohahacker
Having lived in Japan more than 10 years ago, that's the first thing I
commented coming back. Why fruits and vegetables were way more delicious there
than here. I loved fruits in japan where here its more of a chore when I ate
them because I already assumed the bland taste before even biting info it.

This makes total sense.

------
draw_down
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IzBeeuE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IzBeeuECSlIJ:calmscience.net/2015/12/11/tale-
of-tasteless-tomatoes-why-vegetables-do-not-taste-good-
anymore/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
utternerd
I prefer my science to be anecdotal, don't you?

~~~
nappy-doo
I've heard most people do.

------
GnarfGnarf
Supermarket carrots and other vegetables are also bred to withstand rough
mechanical harvesting and not bruise, at the expense of flavour. The solution
is to pick tasty breeds of carrots directly at the farm, and store them in a
root cellar over winter.

------
ry_ry
This may already be a thing, but rather than focusing on organic-ness or
price, I wonder if there is a market for vegetables developing and
deliberately focusing their promotion on enhanced nutritional content?

~~~
godshatter
I would like to see the same thing for beef, eggs, milk, butter, and other
dairy products specifically focused on "grass-fed" vs. "grain-fed". I've seen
a handful of imported products that make this distinction, but not as many as
I thought I would find when I searched for it locally.

------
khattam
What is this calm science bullshit that keeps popping up here?

This is yet another retarded opinion post with nothing to back their claims.

So fertilisers are bad? And lack of nutrients in food is bad too? If there is
not much nutrient in the fruits, it only shows that enough fertilisation was
NOT done to the soil.

It is absolutely possible to increase yield while maintaining nutrient
contents. It is done by fertilisation with increasing yields. Unfortunately,
people don't check the nutrient contents while purchasing fruits and
vegetables. So, investing in more fertilisation does not give them return of
investment.

The ONLY thing customers care about is looks. So, the producers are optimising
for looks and looks alone.

It is possible to optimise for taste and nutrition. But when there are more
easy and more retarded ways to sell products like calling them "natural" or
"organic" or "non-GMO". As long as retarded cuntards like the author are alive
and purchasing such products, this is not going to change. The world will just
have to wait for these imbeciles to die out and new generations of intelligent
people replace them.

------
unexpand
I always wondered why tomatoes and onions tasted different in some other
country. I specially remember the tiny little tomatoes and the tiny little
onions. Nothing looked perfect, but it all tasted amazing and I realized when
I had the very first bite of my sandwich and salad, it was all flavorful. Glad
I know why.

------
softyeti
100 years ago, calories and yield were more important than nutrition. In some
areas, just getting enough calories is obviously more important.

General nutrition information is getting better every year, and I think in the
next 5-10 years, there will be a mainstream discussion over this issue.

------
ry_ry
Sadly the site is dead, but the gist of it was that modern produce production
demands have increased yield and reduced cost dramatically, at the cost of
flavour and nutrition - the anecdotal example being watery flavourless
tomatoes.

Or 'garnish' as they are otherwise known.

~~~
maxerickson
_at the cost of flavour and nutrition_

The good news is that it isn't necessarily a trade off, it's just that
commercial breeders have ignored flavor and nutrition and focused on
productivity and suitability for transport. So we might get vegetables that
still work well for modern supermarkets while tasting better.

~~~
greeneggs
However, there likely is a tradeoff between taste and nutrition. Nutritious
compounds can often have a bitter taste, while sugar is often said to be
unhealthy.

~~~
tanker
I enjoyed your phrase "often said to be unhealthy."

I'm glad the nutrition field is willing to admit errors and update guidance.
I'm a little disappointed with the high frequency.

I did 30 seconds of research, and found out dietitian and nutritionist are not
synonyms. Dietitians seem to use nutrition to achieve specific medical or
performance outcomes. In that context, it makes sense to have lots of changes
as the bleeding edge advances.

------
varelse
Dry-farmed tomatoes (of any variety) are my personal favorite.

[http://www.thekitchn.com/what-are-dryfarmed-
tomatoes-126811](http://www.thekitchn.com/what-are-dryfarmed-tomatoes-126811)

------
Vivtek
American yogurt is bland because if you let it ferment _all the way_ it's got
a kick that Americans tend not to like. Has very little to do with the milk,
and everything to do with lactic acid.

------
notalaser
So around here, in Elbonia, it's still pretty common for people to grow their
own stuff in the countryside. My grandmother still grows her own vegetables
and still raises chicken.

She doesn't use fertilizer, but the conditions are quite ideal for a lot of
vegetables, including -- yes -- tomatoes.

The difference is astounding. Simply slicing one or two tomatoes is enough to
make my whole kitchen _smell_ like tomatoes. My palate is so accustomed to
supermarket chicken that I literally cannot eat the ones she raises. I have to
drown the meat in spices -- the flavour is so strong (and pretty different
from that of "mass-produced" chicken) that it makes me vomit. Fortunately, I
don't have that trouble with her tomatoes.

The catch is, indeed, that the yield is fairly low. There's no such thing as
more than one crop per year, either -- she has tomatoes throughout the summer,
but that's it. The only exception are cherry tomatoes, which will sometimes
grow another generation of fruit in early autumn, and they ripen pretty fast,
but that's it. Also, the ripening process is fairly slow; by mid-autumn or so,
there are still enough unripe tomatoes for her to pickle a few jars.

(What, you don't pickle tomatoes when they're green in the States? You have no
idea what you're missing!)

That being said, their color is pretty uniform. I don't have a picture right
now, since they're out of season, but they really look OK, most of them are no
different, in terms of look, from what you can see in supermarkets. Sometimes
they grow in a somewhat weird shape (e.g. some of them get rather bulgy, but
maybe that's a distinct cultivar, I don't know; others look perfectly round)
but, if you allow them to ripen, they're pretty uniformly red. However, at
that stage they're basically impossible to sell in supermarkets or even at
farmers' markets, they'll go bad within days of being picked, even if you
refrigerate them. People basically pick them right before a meal (worst case
scenario, they'll pick a bunch in the morning so that they can chill in the
fridge for an hour or two -- summers are pretty hot here, so if you pick them
before lunch, you'll be eating really warm tomatoes).

Edit: I've seen someone here claiming that plain yogurt is _supposed_ to be
plain.

Fuck no. Plain yogurt is so thick, soury and flavourful that, unless you've
grown up with it, it's an acquired taste. My grandmother never raised cattle
-- I first tasted plain, home-made yogurt at one of her relatives in a remote-
ish village when I was 14 or so. I hated it, despite having eaten plain yogurt
from the supermarket before, and it took me a whole summer to get accustomed
to the taste. It's also _incredibly_ filling, you can't eat more than a bowl.

~~~
ddingus
>>(What, you don't pickle tomatoes when they're green in the States? You have
no idea what you're missing!)

I am SO doing this. I love pickled things, and have never seen this in the
States. Thanks for the mention. I look forward to a tasty treat.

~~~
notalaser
Enjoy!

------
kumarski
Of the 600,000 food items currently in the American grocery store, 80% of them
have added sugar, the statistics get worse as you look at restaurant menus.

------
edw519
The delta between a great tomato and a good tomato is nontrivial but
insignificant compared to the delta between any tomato and a Coca Cola.

------
marshray
Perhaps this is an inevitable result of commoditization, i.e., futures
contracts on bushels of corn on commodity markets.

------
cfcef
It always astonishes me to see graphs of yields for all these different plants
and animals skyrocketing upwards under the pressure of selection on additive
genetic variation, despite their totally different biologies, lifecycles, and
even optimizing for different things (egg vs milk vs muscle).

------
rdlecler1
To be clear, the author pins this on GMO, but the article he cites mentions no
such thing.

------
rorykoehler
Not entirely related to this pretty spot on article but I have also heard
another hypothesis, that, as we get older our taste buds diminish which makes
us think things don't taste as good as they used to.

~~~
sosuke
Hmm, I don't think I'd buy that our taste buds diminish that much. I picked up
one of those "small farm" tomatoes and it was incredible. Now if you've been a
smoker then your taste buds absolutely suffer for it.

------
kchoudhu
There was a book about this: Tomatoland.

It's depressing in the extreme.

------
Willson50
"In the 1940s, a cow produced over 16 pounds of milk per day."

~~~
acveilleux
A relation of my wife is a canadian dairy farmer. He spends almost more of his
time poring over the genetics of his cows, their productivity and exactly
which sperm he will buy for her next calves.

It's a major upset when a male is born (they're killed after a few days and
sold for rendering, probably for dog food.) Any sperm will get a cow pregnant,
a 400$ insemination is only worth it for the potential cow sale...

That's cause his biggest source of revenue isn't the milk, it's the cows that
produce more, fatter milk than any of his neighbors' on less feed per pound of
milk.

And so they're inbred as hell with a handful of bulls (if that) fathering all
of his cows and their mothers for multiple generations. But they sure produce
a lot.

~~~
michael_h
I feel like drinking milk from a herd of consistently inbred cows is one of
those things that will seem obviously dumb looking back when something
catastrophic happens[0].

[0]I don't know - nationwide distribution of spongiform-milk slurry, aka
zombie serum.

~~~
moskie
Drinking cow's milk at all, inbred or otherwise, will most likely be viewed as
a completely ridiculous notion one day.

~~~
DiabloD3
Some people already view it as a ridiculous notion, so you're not far off.

~~~
clock_tower
This is going to sound like trolling, but it isn't meant to be: Why are some
people passionately averse to milk?

Personally, I've always seen cow's milk as the quintessential drink of Western
Christendom: something that Germans, Scots, Englishmen, Scandinavians, Celts
(from the Hebrides all the way to Navarre and Galicia), and provincial
Frenchmen consume, but that's all but unknown among foreigners -- including
the predatory, Viking-descended aristocracies in London and, especially,
Paris. (The English upper class proverbially never trusted an adult who drank
milk; the French upper class hardly even remembered that it existed, except as
a precursor to cheese.)

My theory is that those who hate milk see it in the same way as I do, but
don't share my fondness for Western Christendom. The old-money "Northeastern
establishment" in the United States never quite forgave God for how His Book
is fine with slavery; Jews and Germans always did feud, but these days the
Jews have very good reason to be frightened when they hear talk of traditional
voelkisch German-ness (which in any case never did like them); eastern and
southern peoples, not all of whom can consume milk in the first place, might
reasonably regard milk as a symbol of a society that was as rich as it was
xenophobic. And people born into the old Western order but seeking to escape
it -- including most Americans, to some extent or other -- might want to
escape its symbols, too.

Does this sound about right, or are there other reasons for disliking milk? I
can understand personally not drinking it, if you don't have mature lactose
tolerance; I can see excellent reasons for disliking industrial dairying with
battery farms of miserable, inbred, inadvertently-cannibal cows (I don't touch
milk unless it's organic and from humanely-raised cows); but if it isn't for
the reasons above, I don't know why people dislike -- indeed, passionately
shun and repudiate -- the very idea of drinking milk.

~~~
moskie
(Sorry for the late reply)

I'm confused. When you say "but if it isn't for the reasons above, I don't
know why people dislike [milk]," how do you know that these complaints you've
heard _aren 't_ for one of those stated reasons? If you know someone who
advocates against dairy for reasons aside from what you listed.... you should
ask them. (Sorry if that sounds flippant.)

I've been vegan for about 4 years, for ethical reasons, so I fall into one of
the camps you've listed. So I guess I can't answer your question.

~~~
clock_tower
> When you say "but if it isn't for the reasons above, I don't know why people
> dislike [milk]," how do you know that these complaints you've heard aren't
> for one of those stated reasons?

I think that those are the main reasons, but I don't want to rule out that
there are others -- and I don't want to rule out that I'm paranoid and over-
thinking things, either. (I also don't want to sound condescending.) Don't
worry in the slightest about sounding flippant.

And congratulations on being vegan and sticking to it! I've thought about
vegetarianism for the same reasons; I'm fine with humanely-raised milk and
eggs (as you've probably already guessed...), but I definitely see the merits
of not killing in order to eat. Treating animals humanely before you kill them
is better than treating them inhumanely first, but it still has a certain note
of absurdity to it...

