Welcome back to the Twisted blog! Today, we are talking about a massive biological misunderstanding that almost all of us grew up believing.
If you ask the average adult where milk comes from, they’ll say, “Well, cows! They just have milk.” We tend to view cows like magical, infinite milk fountains that need to be emptied like an overflowing water balloon.
If this is what you always thought, you are actually in the majority! A major consumer poll by The Harris Poll found that a staggering 75% of adults don’t realize that a cow must give birth to produce milk. Across the pond, a YouGov survey found that over 50% of people in the UK miss this basic biological fact, too.
Our modern food system is so clinical and disconnected from nature that millions of us grow up with this massive cultural blind spot. But if we take a step back and look at the actual science, the reality is much more relatable.
The Mammal Club
Here is the big, beautiful truth: cows are mammals. And just like dogs, cats, whales, and humans, female mammals only produce milk for one specific reason: to feed their newborn babies.
A cow doesn’t just wake up and produce milk by default. She has to go through a nine-month pregnancy (just like a human!) and give birth. Her body then triggers lactation to nurse her calf. It sounds incredibly obvious when you say it out loud, but our food system has completely hidden the reality. Cows aren’t milk-making machines; they are mothers.
The Ultimate Food Swap
Because a cow’s milk is biologically designed to turn an 80-pound calf into a 1,000-pound animal, the dairy industry requires a bit of a shell game. To get that milk into grocery store cartons (and traditional cake batters), the baby calf is moved off the milk supply so humans can drink it instead.
In fact, that same YouGov study found that 83% of consumers are completely unaware that dairy calves are routinely separated from their mothers within 24 hours of birth. When you look at it that way, dairy isn’t just a standard ingredient—it’s essentially borrowed food meant for a baby.
Baking Without the Drama
At Twisted, we realized we didn’t want to borrow food from a mother and her baby just to make a delicious pastry. Especially when plants do the job so beautifully! Oats, almonds, coconuts, soy, hemp, hazelnuts and many more plant options don’t have babies to feed. They just yield incredibly rich, creamy milks that make our treats taste amazing, without any of the mammalian drama.
So next time you enjoy a plant-based treat, you can smile knowing that somewhere out there, a mom and her calf are just doing their normal animal thing—and your tastebuds aren’t missing a single beat.
