So many questions. How does one go about milking a whale? How do you make cheese from milk with a thickness similar to No. 4 Fuel Oil? Who was the first person to attempt to milk a whale? Who is buying up all these whale dairy products? Is there such a thing as a whale milk cheesecake?
Nothing is found when searching for their names. There's not a thing out there about "Chief Scientist" Mark Linneaus, although he claims to have had an academic career. If he in fact "dedicated more than 20 years to investigating how diet and environment shape mammalian milk production", it is surprising that his name is nowhere to be found on Google Scholar.
Not to get started on the pictures of their alleged cheeses. There's red flags all over the website. At least they don't accept orders, so it looks more like a joke than a scam.
It's a shame though, I would love to try sustainably produced whale cheese.
That’d be my bet. I’d bet they aren’t even “milked”. The probably just take it out of the body manually. I assume whales probably carry a lot of milk though, so if someone is killing whales I guess it’s good it’s being used for something… although that gives more profit to the whalers so maybe not.
The pics of the team seem a bit AI to me, also when googling their names there are no clear links connecting those names to whale dairy besides that website. This (and how unrealistic the process sounds) leads me to believe that this is not real.
they look like stock photos. the address at the bottom (Pismo beach CA) seems real enough. (at least the address comes back to deep sea.)
Dunno if the process is real. It seems… not likely to produce a whole lot of cheese, really. I’m a little curious as to the actual prices, though. If it’s like… insane-per-pound… maybe there is enough interest in it. But given how many whales get taken to commercial fishing; I imagine there’s likely to be some on the market.
Well the reviews are from the Oculus marketing lead, a, Simian Field Reseacher (sic) and an independent shoe salesman. Two of them even have the same picture. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this isn’t real.
Plus they’re touting it as the new sustainable future of dairy. That alone is an insane thing to claim. There are fewer than thirty thousand gray whales in the world. They produce eighty gallons of milk a day. That’s about twelve cows worth if you ignore that most of it is going to be drunk by the whale’s calf.
Plus cow dairy requires constant breeding in order to keep the cows milk supply up. Just like humans, they only produce milk after giving birth and for a limited time.
Breeding cows in captivity is pretty standard fare these days.
I’m not sure whale breeding is an industry that currently exists. Nor is whale sperm harvester. As if milking a female whale is complicated enough.
That earthly address does not exist. Pismo Beach is just that, a beach. (You can successfully dig for clams there, or you could when I was a kid.) And there’s no street by that name anywhere in the vicinity. Looks like an elaborate April Fools joke.
100% that someone has tasted/drunk/chewed whale milk. In fact I don’t think there would be many species that haven’t been milk tasted by a human at this point
There have been studies on rat milk, which itself suggests that someone has developed a process to extract it. I think if you spend sufficient time thinking about how to extract milk from rats, and you have no interest in drinking it, it’d be weirder than the alternative.
It’s a bit thin and watery, and the taste isn’t very strong. But it is slightly sweet.
Source: used to breed pet rats, and mama rats leak sometimes. No reason to not taste it when that happens.
Wasn’t yummy, but it wasn’t bad either.
And, yes, I’m certain it was milk and not urine.
Hell, our neighborhood had a cat back when I was a kid. Not a stray, but not anyone’s cat either. She was super sweet, loved kids, but did not love being in houses. But she did love our back porch for birthing. And she was perfectly fine with any of us handling the kittens, and loved belly rubs while producing milk. So, it was inevitable to end up tasting it if you were an adventurous kid that knew where the milk in the fridge came from because you’d milked cows before.
Most milk tastes roughly the same tbh. We’ve bred cows and some goats to where they’re different, but the taste varies more by diet than animal. Mind you, I haven’t gone around sampling everything, but I don’t have an artificial mental block about tasting it either, and I’ve been around a lot of livestock and pets that were lactating over the years.
Fat content is the real, major factor after diet.
Carnivores, or omnivores that eat a lot of meat, tend to be a little “gamy” compared to herbivores. Goats are an exception, but the ones I’ve had “from the tap” so to speak, were bred for milk, so weren’t as gamy as it can get.
Horse milk is pretty funky. Not bad, but I wouldn’t pour a glass either.
Trying to think of anything that stood out from the herd, so to speak, but nothing comes to mind beyond that.
Plus side for squick thoughts, probably not that warm. The ocean is quite cold and things lose heat 25 times faster in water than air, so it would likely cool down considerably between being…… extruded…? And consumed.
Then again, I don’t know a whales body temp to start with, so there might be a lot of heat to lose. Idk if that’s better or worse…
Apparently whales are ~36°, about the same as humans. I’m not a biologist or anything, but I wonder why they maintain such a high body temperature, considering how difficult that is in the ocean lol.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if the milk is quite a bit colder by the time it gets to the baby.
Here’s, uh… definitely the strangest youtube video I’ve watched this week, but I thought it was interesting. ¯\(ツ)/¯
So I’m not a biologist either but I’m going to speculate on the temp thing. (Somewhat educated speculation - science of all varieties is my jam)
Basically my hypothesis is that between insulation and size, they aren’t capable of losing heat fast enough to fall below their baseline temp, but any old temp would probably have worked fine, as long as their fats stay liquid (and for all I know that’s 36C, but that seems highly unlikely - you’d want to be several degrees warmer in case of emergency, else you’d get stiff and die for sure).
They have a nice layer of fat for insulation and that’s all well and good, but they are massively huge and a lot more spherical than most animals. So, they have a small surface area to volume ratio, and lose heat slower as a result. And because they are huge, and muscle twitch is heat generating (to say nothing of leaky heat-producing brown fat, idk if they have this, but most mammals seem to for thermoregulation), they likely produce a gob of heat internally just existing. Much like we believe the larger dinosaurs were endothermic due to sheer size (and some evidence from their bone structure).
Side note - Imagine how many calories it would take to maintain basal metabolic rate when you are losing that heat to 4C water at literally all times. It takes us about 1500-2000 calories for this function and we only lose heat to air that’s relatively close to our body temp.
I did a super quick scan of melting points of various fats, and while without knowing exact compositions of whale blubber idk the melting point, a surprising amount of the animal fats we use for cooking melt around 25-40C, with most large terrestrial animals (cow, pig, deer, etc.) falling between 32-40C (goose fat was the 25C).
If their composition hadn’t worked, though, they could have evolved a polyunsaturated fat (like fish oil) with a lower melting point.
cheese is traditionally not fresh in the slightest.
Oh, but it can be. Farmer’s cheese and other fresh milk cheese types curdle the milk proteins using an acid reaction to citrus or vinegar rather than fermentation.
If whales are smart enough to debate that, they probably have cultural memory of almost getting whaled to extinction. Which would make them like us less, but on the other hand, might make them afraid to get us too upset at them
Perhaps it’ll make your day better to know that Pacific nations have passed legislation recognising legal personhood for whales and dolphins, granting them rights against being hunted?
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