As a kid, whenever I finished a bowl of cereal, I made sure to drink all of the remaining milk. My parents always told me that milk made your bones grow strong and healthy, and I believed it. I wanted to be tall. I’m five foot three inches. That is not a good look for milk, but I still drink it. Though, is cow’s milk really all it’s cracked up to be? I think so.

Let’s start from the beginning: why do humans drink cow’s milk? It’s weird if you think about it. About 10,000 years ago, humans began working with and domesticating animals. They looked at their cows and thought, “That juice coming out of those udders is mighty fine!” Well, that’s my guess. No factual source I looked at confirmed this, but a girl can dream. The farmers who lived with cows began drinking milk once cows became a staple, but at first, they couldn’t actually digest it.

Milk contains a type of sugar — lactose — distinct from other sugars in fruits and sweets. As babies, we produce a special enzyme — lactase — to digest the lactose in our mother’s milk. As we age, we lose the ability to digest lactose, causing lactose intolerance, or what scientists call “lactase nonpersistence.” If an adult who can’t produce lactase drinks a lot of milk, they’ll most likely experience a variety of stomach issues, including flatulence, diarrhea  and cramps. We can safely assume that some early milk-drinking Europeans experienced many gastrointestinal problems.

A few thousand years after milk drinking began, certain Europeans began keeping their lactose-digesting enzymes into adulthood, allowing them to drink milk without the painful side effects. The first instance of lactase persistence that scientists have found happened about 5,000 years ago in southern Europe and 3,000 years ago in central Europe.

Now, let’s talk about milk itself. Cow’s milk has a plethora of nutritional benefits. It’s rich in amino acids, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, iron, protein and various vitamins, including vitamins A, C and E. Milk also provides a healthier alternative to water in areas where access to clean water is not guaranteed. In times of famine, hungry and malnourished people would have been more likely to drink fresh milk. Thus, individuals who could tolerate lactose would survive these famines and go on to pass the gene to their offspring. Milk also has specific antimicrobial, antioxidant and anticancer properties, which would have helped people with cows protect themselves from livestock-related diseases.

Unfortunately, while cow’s milk is healthy, the way cows are treated is not. Cows produce milk to feed their young, so factory operators often artificially inseminate the female cows to harvest their milk. Calves are ripped from their mothers almost immediately after birth, causing extreme distress. Female calves are destined to the same fate as their mothers, while male calves are often shipped away to be fattened and then slaughtered. The natural life span of a cow is up to 20 years, but the bodies of cows used by the dairy industry are usually worn out after three to four years.

In addition to the horrors of the dairy industry, America’s 1.5 billion cows alone emit at least 231 billion pounds of methane into the atmosphere each year. That being said, scientists are researching ways to curb the carbon emissions of cows. A type of red seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, shows potential to one day lower methane emissions by 98% in cattle. Other seaweeds mixed into cow feed have already been proven to reduce methane emissions in dairy cows by 67%.

While the idea of seaweed is terrific, it could potentially be years before dairy farms can incorporate it into their daily operations. Until then, some people have begun leaning towards other milk options, like almond, rice and even pea milk. Nevertheless, these allegedly more sustainable options are not as eco-friendly as one might think.

For example, almond milk has taken the world by storm. Since 2013, almond milk has been the most popular plant-based milk in the United States. It is low in calories, carbs and fat and it has no naturally-occurring sugars. At face value, these numbers seem wonderful. However, almond milk takes an incredible amount of water to produce, more than most types of plant based milk. It takes 371 liters of water to produce one liter of almond milk, which is still less than the 628 liters of water it takes to produce one liter of cow’s milk, but at least cow milk has significant nutritional value. In a time of global warming and climate change, we should devote water to producing nutritionally-rich milk.

If you want truly environmentally-friendly milk, you should start with pea milk. It doesn’t emit much carbon dioxide, it can fix nitrogen levels in the soil, which reduces the need for fertilizers and it requires less water than most other crops. The downside of pea milk is that it tastes less like milk and more like peas, but for Earth, that’s a small price to pay.

I will continue drinking cow’s milk because the nutritional benefits of this type of milk are undeniable. That being said, deciding on the kind of milk to drink is a personal decision, and hopefully this article helps you make the right choice.

Emma Kelner, FCLC, ’29, is an undeclared major from Staten Island, New York.