my professor for thermodynamics has a knack for somehow introducing random but interesting facts into his lectures. like today, while we were trying to figure out the entropy produced in a heat exchanger used to cool milk, he asked us if we knew why we didn't drink pig-milk! when none of our haphazard guesses seemed to hit the mark, he proceeded to explain. Apparently piglets need all the milk they can get. So if the pig farmer wants the piglets to survive, he has to let them suckle all they need. And piglets grow up to be pork and bacon, so it is in the pig-farmer's interest that they thrive. There is little or no milk left for commercial purposes after the little ones are done suckling. Interesting.
then a while ago, i sat and started googling to see how much truth there is to it. and i found many people puzzled by the same question. i found a good response in a "collection of letters - industry". i'll post an extract from the letter:
Pigs will on average produce 13 lbs of milk in a day as compared to cows that produce 65 lbs of milk on average per day. Pigs unlike cows cannot become pregnant while lactating and therefore possess a severe economic problem to producers. while pigs consume less feed per day, economics does not allow pigs to be a viable source of dairy products.
The biggest challenge facing the porcine dairy industry is collecting the product. Pigs on average have fourteen teats as opposed to cows that have four teats. Pigs also differ from cows in their milk ejection time, a cows milk ejection is stimulated by the hoimone oxytocin and can last ten minutes, where as a pig's milk ejection time only last fifteen seconds as the suckling pigs stimulate the release of oxytocin. The technology of a 14 cupped mechanized milking machine that can milk a pig in 15 seconds is not available to pork producers.
so it seems like my professor was somewhat right in his explanation. pigs do not produce enough milk to be a viable economic option and the piglets' suckling only simulates milk production for 15 extra seconds. but apparently it has also do with the difficulty of actually obtaining the milk.
good to know! order has finally been restored. take that, entropy! :)
2 comments:
I find this story strangely interesting. It never occured to me that there could be another brand of milk on the market (I know there is goat milk), because cow milk has been 'the' milk like forever. If pigs could produce enough milk for the market, would we want to drink it? It's already said that pig meat really isn't healthy for you (these days what is?), but I love bacon. Would pork milk be good for us? Would it taste like bacon? Somehow I'm glad I don't have to find out. :)
I love bacon too! But I doubt pig milk would smell like bacon. Cow milk definitely doesn't taste like beef! :D
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