“I don’t think dairy is an essential nutrient at all. Cows don’t drink milk, and they make bones. The calcium story is complicated.”
— New York University Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, and Food Politics author Marion Nestle
We’re typically not ones to quibble with minor details, but excuse us? According to Nestle, cows don’t drink milk. That’s certainly news to us.
We know Marion’s a city girl and all, but here’s a newsflash: Newborn calves don’t enjoy tall soy-chai-lattes and wheat grass shots from their mothers’ udders.
This is hardly the first time Nestle — a food cop of the first rate and an advocate of fat taxes — has dispensed an odd bit of wisdom. To take just one example of many, when The New York Times reported that college students were “consuming cereal as if their grade-point averages depended on it,” Nestle interjected this bit of wisdom: “It’s asking far too much of late adolescents to exercise that kind of choice.” So 19-year-olds can go to war, but can’t choose their own cereal. Makes about as much sense as saying cows don’t drink milk.
Obviously Doctor Nestle won’t be teaching Animal Husbandry 101 any time soon.
