mooblog

Let’s face it – kids just love those effervescent drinks so why should milk be left behind in the fuddy-duddy non-fizzy zone? The idea has been around for a few decades, ever since fizzy drinks became so popular with kids all over the world. What changed a few years ago was that fizzy did not mean just fun anymore. Fizziness went beyond the artificially flavoured drinks to drinks with real fruit concentrate as well. So why should the wholesome goodness of milk be left behind? 

What makes a drink bubbly?  The drink is infused with carbon dioxide which is released when the container is opened. Of course, one didn’t think that it was possible to make milk fizzy till very recently but using the same principle with the right equipment can go a long way to making this happen. It looks like the huge beverage brand Coca Cola is the umbrella under which it will be launched. The news is that there has already been a soft launch in – where else but the Big Apple? It’s a mix of milk, fruit and cane sugar to sweeten.  

This direction is obviously the route to younger consumers and with the milk being offered in many flavours – who knows? They might just have a whopping runaway success on their hands. Flavoured milk with fizz might just become very fashionable!

Transgenesis is the modification of an animal’s genome deliberately to change its DNA characteristics. This would mean that any animal – or for that matter any living creature could incorporate the genes from any other living creature into its genome. Now why would anyone want to do that? To play God of course! And, right now, ostensibly, to see if certain traits could be incorporated into the animals being used for research so it could benefit mankind.

Today, there have been experiments that have succeeded in producing transgenic cows. What began with a mouse becoming a mighty mouse being able to help in human cancers has today gone way beyond that to experiments with other animals as well. Introducing a gene that does not belong to the animal’s genetic make up is not usually successful but there are instances where it has been possible and most animals undergo gene transfer through the process of microinjection.

Why do this at all? There are advantages, no doubt. These animals can be used for medical research and for better health. They can be programmed to produce more – in the case of cows, a breed could be raised that is extremely disease-resistant as well as high yielding. There can be breeds that are modified to yield more meat or more milk – whatever the farmer is breeding them for. They could also yield milk sooner than they have before. In the medical field, there could be animals that are reared specifically to produce products like mediums to make healthy cells grow, organs for transplant, etc.

The question remains: Can we play God? Are we really the only ones that matter in the world? Or in the universe? Man has always thought so. Nature might not. Interfering with natural processes when it comes to the weather has resulted in catastrophes like global warming. Will this interfering in the process of evolution also be the same? Will mankind end up like something out of a gruesome Hollywood movie where the plot goes through callousness or carelessness in experiments that end up with monsters populating and taking over the world? Most important, is it right to do so? We didn’t invent Life or its myriad life forms. What right have we to mutate them and change them beyond recognition?

So is it ethical? I think not. Will it happen? With a company like Dupont having acquired the sole rights for this process, of course it will. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

I was reading about the way milk prices had jumped in the last seven years. Did you know that while oil prices have been increasing at 13% in the last seven years, milk has been shooting up at 14%? Considering that the world drinks 1.9 billion liters of milk every day, it means that every land seems to be flowing or rather overflowing with milk! If you were to look at the average, I read, it would mean that every year, there were 13 billion liters more being drunk and that is approximately what a country like New Zealand produces in one year.

Why this sudden milk madness? Is everyone drinking more milk suddenly? In these days of people tending to find everything about dairy objectionable, how come there’s more and more milk and milk products being consumed? One major reason is the emergence of new markets and therefore a lot more money being spent on what till now could have been luxuries. The rise in disposable incomes now puts milk into a lot of people’s necessity bracket in countries like China, Brazil, India and Russia and there are many more drinking milk there like it were going out of fashion.

Well, that contributes to the prices of milk going up. It really is a result of demand and supply – the demand just cannot be met by the farmers no matter how hard they try. When the combined billions of China and India chasing the white stuff, one can only expect milk prices to rise, not fall.