Popping out to get a pint of milk today runs the risk of wading into a fraught culture war. The furore over the Arla Foods announcement of its Bovaer feed supplement trial at UK farms has revealed how easily something that could have been heralded as a technological advancement can be hijacked by far right conspiracy theories spreading misinformation about climate change and falling birth rates. Meanwhile in America, Donald Trump’s incumbent Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is agitating to make raw milk — unpasteurised dairy teeming with dangerous bacteria — legal for human consumption. Simultaneously, oat milk and other alternative products have become the villain, after fears about their nutritional values ripped through social media. How did our relationship with milk go so sour?
The Bovaer trials should have come as welcome news. Its active ingredient, 3-nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP), inhibits methane production in dairy cows. By suppressing an enzyme in the cows’ stomachs it can reduce methane emissions by up to 30 per cent, claims Dutch company DSM, which produces Boevar. Burping cows from beef and dairy production accounts for almost a third of human-caused methane emissions, and methane is a greenhouse gas far more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our planet’s atmosphere.
