I’ve always disliked the taste of milk and never drank much of it, which many close family and distant relatives alike have attributed to my short stature. My dad, on the other hand, gulps down a tall mug of boiled milk every morning and night. However, yesterday morning there was no more gallon milk in the fridge as we haven’t gone outside for grocery shopping in two weeks.

This is when my mom brought up the news that dairy farmers all over the country were dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of milk--pumping them down sewers, into lakes, and other waste management facilities--due to the recent coronavirus pandemic. With the food services industry shut down in every city and schools closed, milk producers and distributors have nowhere to store a product that so easily spoils. The US produces 218 billion pounds of milk a year, the most in the world. Someone like my dad consumes around 276 pounds of dairy per year--the average amount for someone living in America.

But where does all this milk come from? Of course, I understood that they come from cows. However, what does this mean and how exactly does this process look like? From what I saw in the milk dumping videos, white liquid streamed itself out of a mechanical steel pipe--what I assumed to be a mechanical tank that holds processed milk in the back of a truck. But how did it even get there?

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