“Is it okay to suddenly stop giving your child meat and dairy?”

Patricia van Liemt is a radio host, writer and mother of Maria (12) and Phaedra (9). Every Friday she writes accurate, honest, funny and above all recognizable columns about her life and motherhood.

Is it okay to suddenly stop giving your child meat and dairy after twelve years?

That’s the big question I’ve been wrestling with for the past few days. After listening to a podcast about bio-industry, I’m currently making another attempt to become a vegetarian.

Meat and dairy renounced

I’m ashamed. In the podcast Frederiek Schouten of ‘Varkens in Nood’ explained that cows can only give milk if they have had calves. YES DUH-HUH. But in my head a cow always gave milk. Ordinary. Always. But that is of course not the case at all. And because that is not the case, calves are a by-product of our glass of milk.

This fact hit me so hard that I immediately renounced dairy.

Wailing calves

The podcast also told that calves are taken away from their mothers immediately after birth, because otherwise they become too attached. Yet they are still for days in a pen next to their mother howling. And their ‘howling’ is actually a good thing, because it gets the milk flow going even better. If this doesn’t break your mother’s heart, I don’t know what will.

“I only have one small ‘problem’: my sprouts like to drink milk”

So you understand, I can’t eat dairy anymore. I only have one small ‘problem’ and that is that I am also a mother of two young girls. And these sprouts like to drink milk. And a lot too. In the morning with the cornflakes, in the afternoon when they get home from school and in the evening before going to bed. So we already have a lot of leftover calves to our name.

Also read – Eat less meat? You can give this to your child >

Big milk replacer test

This is going to be a long agony at our home, but not nearly as bad as that of the cows and calves. And so last week I did the big milk replacer test at home.

“In the back of my mind I hear all those tens of thousands of calves bellowing to their mother”

Unfortunately, they all died. According to the children, the rice milk was downright ‘gross’. Oat milk was ‘unpumpable’ and almond milk was ‘really super weird’. “Mom?” my daughter asks. “Yes honey,” I reply. “Can we never have a hamburger from McDonalds again?” she asks in a small voice. My mother’s heart is breaking again and I want to drive to the Mac with squeaky tires and order her a Happy Meal, but in the back of my mind I hear all those tens of thousands of calves bellowing at their mother.

Try month

“Shall we try it for at least a month?” I suggest. A feeling of weakness comes over me. I feel my vigor waning and I’m looking for a way to regain my strength and so I bring in the pigs. ‘Did you know that 98% of pigs in the Netherlands have their tails burned off without anaesthesia?’ My youngest daughter of nine has now also joined us. She looks at me wide-eyed and I see her tears welling up.

shit. Have I gone too far?

She asks why the tails are being burned off and I answer that pigs are so close together and so frustrated that they bite each other’s tails off.

There is a silence.

“Okay mom, let’s try it for a month…”

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