Questioner: It is said specifically that butter, milk, and ghee is good for health, and this is what our mother cow gave to us as an offering. What would you say about that?
Acharya Prashant: You see, these are very basic things. To be a believer in the Vedas is to believe in God, and to believe in God is to surrender to God. To surrender to God is to say that one lives by the wishes, by the mechanisms of existence itself. One does not try to fabricate his own artificial ways.
Does the cow go and drink the camel’s milk? If one is really being religious, then one has to live as per the wishes of nature. God has given you your own mother and her breast milk. Which species drinks the milk of some other species? And if you had really needed milk even at the age of twenty or forty, then that milk would have been made available to your mother’s body.
On one hand, you are saying that you are religious. On the other hand, you are claiming that God has not sufficiently provided for you. Now, what kind of religiosity is this? You are saying that “God made a mistake. He gave milk to my mother’s breast only for six months, whereas I actually needed it for sixty years. So, God has made a huge blunder, so now I will correct God’s mistake by turning the cow into the mother cow and milking her.”
If God really wanted you to drink the cow’s milk, then you would have been born out of a cow. Why not try that? Man is already so fond of all kinds of medical acrobatics. And if one is so fond of cow’s milk, why not try this? Some kind of a scientific method of insemination, whereby human babies are born from cows! And designer cows that can keep providing milk for the baby even when the baby is sixty years old! And actually, if you are sixty years old and still surviving on milk and ghee and butter, then you are still a baby—mentally you have not gone beyond six months.
Do you see a mature lion still sucking on milk? Do you see that? Or do you see even the little rabbit doing that beyond a few weeks? Man is the only one who even at the age of eighty craves for milk. That only proves how infantile we are from within. The mind has not really been able to get rid of the mother’s breast. Freud will have something to say about that. So, milk, milk, more milk! Of course, if you go into the psychology of it, you will only find sexual perversion there, nothing else.
I am not convinced that a man’s body needs milk after a particular age. That age might be six months, one year, or two years—nature knows best. And according to her own innate intelligence, nature provides milk to the mother exactly as long as the baby needs milk. After that, if still the baby or the man or the family insists that milk must be fed to the human being, then it is a deviation from the course of nature—then it is an ugly aberration.
Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/vedas-and-milk-on-veganism-1_afb6c5b