Without rules, you are powerless and lost, whether you are a human being, an animal or even the earth itself. Without agreements, you cannot trust other people. Suddenly changing agreements makes you an unreliable fellow human being or government. Rules are nothing more than boundaries that are necessary to keep a complex society running, to protect people, animals, but also food and nature. The question is from what point of view are the rules made? The American idea of freedom is and always has been “building your own business in freedom” and “making money”. Many rules and laws are geared towards this. At what cost? Maready (2025) wrote a beautiful book about the business of breast milk and cow’s milk over the past two centuries; raw of course.

Draf (or BSG)

Brewer’s spent grain or draf is a grain waste product from the beer brewing process. Barley is fermented as crushed or coarsely ground grain by yeasts with the aim of producing alcohol. This is a centuries-old process, for which all kinds of grains were used. Potatoes and plums were also distilled.

In the early 19th century, rum imports to the United States came to a standstill. Given the high demand for alcohol, distilleries were established in cities and people switched to a gin-like spirit. Large quantities of grain waste became available in the cities, but instead of feeding it to pigs, dairy cows were housed in stables under or near the alcohol distilleries. There was money to be made here. However, cows are not monogastric animals (like humans, pigs and chickens) and can only digest this mountain of grain waste if they are given sufficient roughage. However, this was not available. Too expensive, too much work.

Far away from normal daylight, sick cows were milked by sick people in sick stables. Cows usually did not live longer than a year, until they dropped dead or were slaughtered just in time. Severely emaciated, hooves with long claws full of sole ulcers due to the excess of sugars and lack of fibre. Poor people did the hard work, but could spread diseases such as tuberculosis through the open milk buckets. Not only the men worked, but also the women and their children. There was no time to breastfeed your own baby, and babies died like flies, often in their first year of life. Diarrhoea and dehydration were the leading causes of death among babies in the summer.

Freedom for what and whom?

The end of the 19th century was a time of industrialisation and urbanisation. Many mothers from poor backgrounds could not feed their babies because they worked 12 hours a day, and mothers from wealthy backgrounds did not want to feed their babies because breastfeeding had been portrayed to them as too “animalistic” and inhuman. The diet of workers was meagre, poor and unbalanced. Vitamins, minerals and trace elements were still unknown. There was still a lack of knowledge about bacteria in milk, in sick cows and humans, or about overcrowded and poorly ventilated houses and stables. There was no electricity, let alone a refrigerator.

Without any understanding of the true significance of breast milk and the alternative raw cow’s milk, traders offered their substitute products. Not to really feed the babies, but to make (big) money, to have a business. There was outright fraud, not only by cutting and diluting cow’s milk, but also in cities like New York by promoting “swill milk” from cows that lived next to and below distilleries as milk from cows that grazed outdoors. There were hardly any rules in “free America”, the land of opportunity. Cow’s milk was diluted with lime, mixed with chicken protein and then offered as “cow’s milk as nutritious as mother’s own milk” or even “better than giving your baby to another mother”, a wet nurse that gave or sold her own breast milk to a second or third (strange) baby. Regulation was urgently needed, not only to control the supply of cow’s milk, but also to put an end to the sad lives of cows that ended their days in dark stables.

Although it is now widely accepted that breastfeeding for at least six months is very important for the health of the baby, manufacturers of formula milk continue to aggressively promote their product, especially in developing countries (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2023). The milk business has grown into a billion-pound industry consisting of artificial baby and toddler food.

The worth of everything

‘We know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. Podcast creators Marianne Thieme and Ewald Engelen turn this around: ….the value of everything…. But do we really know the value of the things around us? How do you find a relationship with your fellow human beings and farm animals?

Purely price- and profit-driven developments without any attribution of value end up in the deepest cesspool of humanity: neglect, an undignified existence, lack of prevention, lack of quality, passing the buck or elsewhere and later, falsification, but also ghettoisation, exclusion, or a dull animal life focused solely on eating, eating, eating and the highest production and growth per day, the shortest life in closed stables. In a project at the Louis Bolk Institute (The Netherlands), the concept of integrity or self-worth, or “value in itself”, was introduced as a thought experiment to look at our food and our farm animals. Not the utility value for humans (what do I get out of it?), but the value because of being an animal (what does it mean for the animal itself or for the species?) .

By assigning an animal a value on its own, it follows that you do not want to mutilate the animal (tails, beaks, horns), you want a cow to be able to graze (ruminant), you want calves with the cow in the herd (mammal mother), you want natural mating, etc. Some also no longer want to kill animals (respect for life). A cow is a ruminant and foregut fermenter that thrives on fresh grass and roughage. It does not want to and cannot be fed like a pig, as in the swill-milk era. It is a rethinking, a revaluation, giving rights to an animal (Verhoog et al., 2007). These are moral boundaries that you set for your actions as a human being, which you as a society must not cross.

Freedom versus brotherhood

If you look at society from the perspective of self-esteem, then the American image of ‘economic freedom’ does not hold true. The free economy only leads to the super-rich, who need a broad underclass to work for them as wage slaves, but also exploit and destroy nature in order to amass their wealth. Freedom, however, is something that belongs in our minds, in our thinking. ‘Die Gedanken sind frei’, a German song about the freedom of thought. I want to be able to decide for myself what I think. There is place for brotherhood (fratenity) in the economy; as a farmer, I produce milk to satisfy someone else’s needs and thereby create a dependency on the other person. Equality must prevail in the question of right and wrong. Equality for every fellow human being, regardless of color or believe. The principle of liberty, equality, and brotherhood must be properly allocated and applied.

This then becomes a matter of personal conviction, which rights you want to grant to our farm animals. It is now clear that animals have much more consciousness and communicate with each other much more than we ever thought. This gives us, as humans, moral obligations towards animals.

Literature

• Maready F. (2025). The Germ In The Dairy Pail: The 200-Year War on the World’s Most Amazing Food: Milk (book or ebook).
• Pérez-Escamilla, R., Tomori, C., Hernández-Cordero, S., Baker, P., Barros, A. J., Bégin, F., … & Richter, L. (2023). Breastfeeding: crucially important, but increasingly challenged in a market-driven world. The Lancet, 401(10375), 472-485.
• Verhoog, H., Matze, M., Van Bueren, E. L., & Baars, T. (2003). The role of the concept of the natural (naturalness) in organic farming. Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics, 16(1), 29-49.