SavorThese large, long-haired cousins to cattle make life a lot easier (and more buttery) in their frigid highland environments. Anney and Lauren yak about the history, biology, and many products of yaks.
Hell no, And welcome to Saber Protection of iHeartRadio.
I'm any rec and I'm Lauren Voblbaum and today we have an episode for you about YAX.
Yes, yas. Yeah, I've heard that correctly. Wow, Lauren, was there any reason this was on your mind? You know? Yaks are cool? I did.
This is one of those where I did an episode about them over on one of my other shows, brain Stuff, and I was like, you know, I want to read more about.
YAX and more was rich. A lot was read about YAX. Yeah. So sometimes with these, sometimes with.
Like agricultural related episodes, like I feel like like we are almost ready to go open a ranch.
Yeah, from how having done this episode reading, Oh, savor ranch retirement idea, We'll put that in the backpacket. Oh man, oh no, that would be great.
Okay, all right, all right, I'm not made for ranching, that's I'm I'm a city girl.
But but we'll put it in the back pocket. That's a nice place to visit anyway. Yes, yes, I do not have any stories to share about YACK. I feel like I've seen them, but I have not tasted any of the products me neither.
Yeah, Yes, I'm pretty sure that I have not. Now I'm really curious though, so.
I have as well. And I have to say this was this was a tricky one in terms of there are a lot of yack products to go down rabbit holes about. One of my very favorite things I found about this when doing the research is this quote from a research paper following this review of Yack dung energetics. Yeah, and we will talk about that a little bit more. But I was like, Okay, wow, not where I thought this was going. But I'm really having to expand my brain and take some things in that I wasn't expected. And you're reading for a food show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is nice. Yeah, it's nice and sometimes a little complicated, but nice. Well, we have done similar episodes to Yack, but YAK it's pretty specific, it is in some ways.
Yeah, and we haven't gone too deep into cattle the animals, So.
No, we have not. That's futures. Oh yeah, we'll deal with that. But in the meantime, I guess this brings us to our question yas what are they?
Well, yax are large, long haired bovines in the same genus as cattle that are also raised for their milk, meat, and lots of non food products. Their milk is creamy yellow in color, high in fats and protein, and used fresh or to make butter and cheeses. Their meat is lean and nutritious, and every part of the animal can be used in crafting things like textiles, tools, and art. They're like big and sturdy and useful as work animals, and they're also essentially amenable to being herded and doing work, which helps one of the reasons why like zebras are not a hurt animal because they're not nice.
They're impolite.
Yeah, Yaks are like big, shaggy cattle that kind of look like the Henson company designed them. Yeah, like a broad face, like a very broad cattlely face.
Snuffle uf. I guess I can feel yeah, something like that.
Yeah, but okay, so there are wild yaks, but domesticated yacts is what we're mostly talking about today. A tax nomical name boss Grunnians. Sure it means grunting ox because they do not move. They start a grunt and squeak. They can grow up to two meters or about six and a half feet tall at the shoulder, which is their the highest point on their body. They've got like a hump on their upper back near the neck. They can weigh easily over one thousand pounds, with male bowls about twice as heavy as the female cows. And this is all a little bit bigger than like the biggest cattle can get. They grow long horns. The bulls horns curve back and under, whereas the cows horns curve upward and are smaller. Their fur can come in shades from black to brown to gray to white, and in different patterns in bowls. That fur can get so long that it sort of swings around their legs like fringe on a shawl. They reproduce in the boring old mammal way, typically with only one calf per pregnancy and a gestation period a tiny bit shorter than humans. But calves are capable of walking within like ten minutes instead of two years, so that must be convenient. Yeah, And yaks are just really well adapted to their cold, high altitude native environment, which is around the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain regions. They can live in altitudes of up to twenty thousand feet above sea level. That's six thousand meters. That's higher than any point in North America aside from the Summit of Dnale in Alaska. So yeah, to cope with that, they evolved to produce more red blood cells than other bovines. And also these extra large lungs that are so big that they also evolved an extra pair of ribs to support them. Like cattle have thirteen pair, yaks have fourteen pair. That's metal so cool, and that long, multi layered fur keeps them warm, and temperatures that can get down to negative forty degrees, which is so dang cold that it's the same in celsius and fahrenheit.
Both. Yeah, yaks are YACs are cool. They are.
Uh it's kind of a pun because we just talked about how they live in chili environments and then note that those environments are extremes like most domesticated yaks will hang out and like slightly more forgiving climates because most humans want to hang out and slightly more forgiving climates.
So yeah, yaks.
Grays on fresh grass and other forage in the summers, and in the winter they'll use their horns to like dig into the snow and find shrubs and a withered forage stuff like that. We are ostensibly a food show a note here at the top like, while yaks are not very widely raised around the world, the cultures that do have like ranching and or herding traditions around yaks are super varied, like over forty different ethnic communities in ten countries around Central Asia, and these cultures are not a monolith culinarily or otherwise. That being said, yeah, so, yak milk can be consumed fresh by itself or more often in a hot milk tea, or fermented into alcoholic drinks or further distilled into neutral spirits. It's also used in cooking and made into butter and many, many, many varieties of cheese after summer grazing. Yac milk can reach up to twelve percent fat content. Under more like constrained dietary circumstances, it's like merely around six percent, and also it's got like five percent each protein and sugar, and all of that is nearly twice as much fat and protein as cow milk contains on the low end. So this gives yac milk a rich yellow color and slightly sweet flavor. However, one like up the cattle have is that they can produce larger quantities of milk Yac dairy is basically never going to be like an industrial level production the way that cattle dairy is. Where yak products are commercially available, It's a specialty product. The butter nice and thick and yellow used. However you like to use butter mixed with black tea and salt, it creates pocha, sometimes known as Tibetan butter tea, which is a big part of the culture in some areas. It can also be mixed in small amounts with a flour like maybe barley or oat flour to form a staple grain product, and is also used to fuel lamps, sometimes ceremonially, to bring like a buffed shine to fur coats, and to create a base for traditional butter sculptures yep sculpting. Butter is probably more widespread than you think, and I love.
That me too.
The cheeses, you know, you get everything from like fresh cottage style cheeses to hard like Swiss type cheeses, to smoked and or dried cheeses, which can be stored for much longer. YACs can also be slaughtered for their meat. Yak meat is leaner than beef, with a similar but perhaps more mild flavor from what I understand, And it's more efficient to rear YACs for meat than cattle because yacks only consume like a third to half of the food that cattle do, and they produce less methane. The meat can be used anyway that you like, preparing meat, from fresh steaks to sausages to jerky yack bone marrow is also a thing, and now I need that. Hope that's not too creepy. I'm like, look at this majestic animal. I definitely want to crack open its bones.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yacks are also used for transportation and for moving supplies around, plowing of the other work.
Yeah.
The hide and hair are used to make all kinds of things. They've got this coarse outer fur that's good for making like tents and ropes, mid coat that might go to things like coats or rugs, and then this soft undercoat that's like cashmere that they shed every spring.
Well, what about the nutrition.
Right back to the food, Yeah, uh. Compared with other dairy and meat, yak products generally carry heavier punches of both macro and micronutrients. So it's pretty cool.
Yes, yes, indeed, and we do have some numbers for you, we do, okay.
So there are an estimated sixteen million ish yaks in the world, about ninety percent in China, but a solid million or so in Mongolia, the rest mostly scattered around nearby highland areas. There are small numbers in North America, maybe like five hundred animals. Total production of yak meat per year is a bit less than four hundred thousand tons, around sixty percent of which is consumed locally.
Okay.
There is a Guinness record for the longest horns on a yak, don't. I don't know how far they looked to find competitors, but this record was awarded in twenty twenty one to this beautiful brown colored buddy named Jericho that lives on a farm in Minnesota. His horns are curved in the spiral and if you could stretch them out and lay them end to end, they would measure a little over eleven feet that's like three and a half meters. He is so handsome.
Look up pictures.
And there are a number of yak festivals around the regions that heard or ranch yaks. The ones around Mongolia, for example, tend to occur in July or August and have events like agricultural demonstrations, yak parades, yak polo, yak lassoing, music and dance that, as far as I'm aware, the YACs don't particularly participate in yack milking competitions, yak dairy product competitions, fashion shows with yak fiber garments on humans, and I specify on humans because there's also a competition for the most beautiful and or best bedecked yak. Sometimes this is referred to as the nice yak competition. Oh, I love this so much. And then there's yak racing, which is the slowest event of any given festival because most of the yaks kind of saunter casually across the finish line, assuming that they have not gotten distracted and wandered off.
Oh that's the best. That makes it so much more fun, right, fun for us and fun for the X. Yeah, the yaks are having a nice time. I don't want a fast yak race. No, The fun is what are they gonna wander off? Will they ever get back on track? That's the best, that's the best part. Okay, Well, we do have quite a history for you, we do, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from a quick break for a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsors, Yes, thank you. So all right. The yaks ancient ancestors, are believed to go back to at least two million years ago or ish. The estimated range is very very wide, but you know, probably long time ago. However, researchers have uncovered fossils what we would more modernly recognize as yaks in Mongolia, estimated to be at least ten thousand years old. They are indigenous to that area. The current theory is that the yak was domesticated in Tibet by the Chiang people around two thousand, five hundred years ago, though the process has been in motion for much longer, like seven five hundred years. Based on currently available evidence, yak products were fairly important in Mongolia beginning sometime around two hundred BCE to two hundred CE art and the appearance of yas on belt buckles recovered in this area suggests that the yak was really respected. So there's a lot of that stuff if you want to look it up, which we always recommend. Oh yeah, And yaks were useful in this area in a whole lot of ways. For their meat, their milk, their leather, their fiber, their dung. As few as a beast of burden. Their meat was preserved, perhaps dried for later or turned into sausage, sometimes in combination with yac blood. Some parts were incorporated into animal feed. They were really beneficial too in terms of their ability to survive in the Himalayas in this area, and researchers often discuss how they were one piece of how people in this region adapted to these high altitudes where it was cold with a lot of snow. We've got this creature, this animal that can really handle that. It is hard to overstate how important yaks were for the people in this environment. They provided sustenance, labor and fiber for warmer clothing, heating elements, and fertilizer when it came to butter, fat or dung. The horns were useful, as were the bones. Just all around.
Yeah, and that fuel thing is serious. Like the Tibetan plateaus tend to not have trees, so you know, no firewood. And furthermore, luckily, yak dung has little to no smell. As long as the animal has enough water and forage, it can be used as a construction material as well.
Yes, and so here's the thing what I was talking about with the multiple paths here or here some of those paths. So yack milk was probably being consumed by around twelve seventy CE, and likely before that. That's when the written record indicates it. However, the scientific and historical record is lacking when it comes to the evidence around this. Researchers suspect the later date might be because the milk of other animals was the preference, or just wasn't recorded yep. Or I read in some sources that in most places with ready access to it, yack milk went to butter. At some point, yak butter ended up in tea. As mentioned, it was generally viewed as somewhat medicinal, especially at high altitude and as special occasion tea, and probably early on, yak milk was used to make cheese. It was and remains a fairly intensive process. It involves hours of churning or at least in some traditional cases. On the plus side, though a lot of this cheese lasts for months or longer. So it was another excellent option for those who were working in these harsh climates. Taking all of that into consideration. Yak products were fairly popular in pockets of Asia during the twelve hundreds, and.
Butter sculpture aside. All right, So Tibetan practices around butter sculpture might have developed in like the fourteen hundreds or thereabouts during the Ming dynasty. So the tradition today is that for Tibetan Buddhist New Year celebrations, which happen in late winter like February March, some people sculpt and pigment butter into these elaborate, elaborate pieces depicting the Buddha and you know, religious scenes and symbols, architecture, animals, mythical creatures, a lot of flowers. It's an offering slash decoration at temples and monasteries, and they are very bright and intricate and can range in size from something handheld to like a few meters tall, like maybe like twenty feet, like a couple of stories high. And it's thought to have developed due to not having fresh flowers to use its offerings in the dead of winter.
Butter sculpture always recommend look it up, look it up.
Oh yeah no, And these truly they are gorgeous and I don't understand physically how they work.
They're super cool, Yes, yes, indeed, okay. The written record indicates that a handful of yak were sent to Europe in the early eighteen hundreds. In the early nineteen hundred, some yaks were sent to North American Zoos. People also did a couple of tests around hybridization that was centered around meat production and the cold climates of Canada and the northern United States.
Nepal established a yac cheese industry in the nineteen fifties, and they were apparently the only country in the world with one until around about the nineteen eighties.
Wild yak were believed to be on the verge of extinction in the nineteen seventies. Yeah, they're still.
They're currently listed as vulnerable, with a fewer than ten thousand left in the world wild and these days climate change is impacting some of the traditional herding and ranching regions. However, in expanded regions, yaks are being looked at as a way to offset some of the harms of the global cattle industry. You know, they produce that high quality dairy and meat on less feed and with less greenhouse gas emissions. There's there's research into like how to keep the genetic stock good, how to keep the animals healthier during long lean winters, and how to encourage people to adopt yack agriculture and yak products on a larger scale. This might be the first time that we have a future date in our timeline, but twenty twenty six is going to be the United Nations International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. So A, that's brad B. Hopefully that that will help, you know, like prod along further research in po to help out yaks and their humans.
Yeah, hopefully. I mean they seem very well loved. Obviously we're fans, but of course they're facing these issues, but you know they're kind of limited and where people can get them access them.
Yeah, yeah, because they do not tolerate warm weather. They're like, nope, I don't like that. Unhappy So no, So we're going to have to travel somewhere.
I'm what I'm hearing.
Yes, if I if I achieve what I really want to do now, which is hug a yack, we're gonna have to take a field trip. It's not gonna happen around.
All right, Okay, if.
Anyone knows how if anyone can facilitate me hugging a yack.
Yes, and if any of you listen do have experience with yak products, please let me.
Oh yes, yes, I'm so curious. I'm so curious about it. But yeah, that that is what we have to say about.
Yaks for now.
And we do already have some listener mail for you, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from another quick break for a word from our sponsors.
We're back, Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you, and we're back with Snooth. Yeah was that snuffle off? I guess like, was that? You know? Maybe I kept thinking of Kung Fu Banda, But okay, in Kung Fu Panda it's master Ox. It is not a yak. Oh all right, Yeah I double checked because I'm may that mistake in the show before. Actually not Kung Fu Panda mistakes. I've made a Kung Fu pan A mistake before, so I was like, not again, good looking out, good looking out? Yeah yeah, yeah, just a fun creature until it's storming at you.
Oh, especially is what I was going for. Yeah, there you go, there you go share.
Yeah, okay, Sheldon wrote, listening to the Chilula episode, and I couldn't help thinking about my granddaughter, Florence, or as I call her Flow Flow Annie. She's someone you'd love to meet, a girl after your own heart, and maybe you will when you are up this way for the Cheese Curd Festival. Flow is only seven, almost eight years old, and she loves hot sauce. I find that age kind of young for liking hot sauces. I was in my late teens before I developed a taste for them. Flow likes Chilula bottle but says that it's not hot enough. That's her biggest complaint about most things I make for her. They're not hot enough. She started liking hot sauces at the age of six and has wanted them hotter and hotter. She likes a sauce that is too hot for her sister and mother, and she's always trying to trick my wife into using some on whatever. My wife has a hard time with pepper, but Flow always seems to be able to trick her. She also likes impressing her friends by eating something that they can't handle at all. Take a tiny taste, they say it's too hot, then she takes a big taste and they are amazed. She doesn't speak much English, speaks French, but one of the few English words she can say is hot sauce. For Christmas, she gave me a T shirt that says, I put hot sauce on my hot sauce. Wow. Oh that's wonderful. I feel connected here.
Yeah, and it's seven years old. That's that's precocious, that's terrific.
That is that is that reminds me of my niece who did something similar to that but really sour thing. Oh sure, yeah, she just would like eat a whole lemon and I was taken aback by it. But hey, good for you. Oh yeah, right, I do.
I do feel like that is a good age for like that kind of stunt, eating that kind of Yeah. I want to be impressive by how like mildly abusive if I can beat to my own taste buds.
Yes, yes, uh, because I don't know. I don't know at that age. I think I liked very mildly spicy things. I don't think I had branched out to even chilula at that point. Yeah. Hey, yeah, I don't.
I don't think so, I can't even remember. So the answer is probably no. The answer is I probably did not branch into that kind of stuff. I don't think I really encountered that much very spicy food until I was a little bit older. But yeah, mine was supposed to be at Mexican restaurants in my small town, where you put like maybe mildly spicy hot sauce on your on your dish.
But I love this. I think this is amazing, and also I love that she gave you this shirt. I put hot sauce on my hot sauce. Yes, yes, yeah, that's great. Oh wonderful.
Kate wrote, you have finally done episodes about both of my favorite at aliens, Meet the Fruit Ninjas, Mango and Guava, and attached is a photograph of two cats. One is orange, that one is mango, and one is gray, and that one is guava. Kate continues, I am admittedly a couple of months late. Their supervillain origin story is long and squiggly, but the short version is that in June of twenty twenty one, a heartbroken, newly cat free me found Mango at fur Kids Atlanta thanks to some serious Facebook kismet. I'm from Alabama for distance reference, and when I emailed about Margo. They told me he came bonded to his sister Coconut flakes. Spoiler, his sister was actually his brother, And obviously, either way that name needed to be something else. I suggested Papaya, but the other half suggested Guafa. And since he needed convincing that we even needed one cat much less too, he got the win. Been waiting a long time to tell you about them. Funnily enough, I don't prefer mangos, and I can't say I've ever tried Guava.
Well, they're so cute. The pictures, the pictures attached are very very adorable.
Yeah, yeah, Mango. There's a photo of Mango like on top of a bookshelf, just with both of his front pause just hanging hanging down like he's clearly just belly flopping on top of that bookshelf and surveying his domain in the way that only a very orange cat can. And yes, and Glava seems a tiny bit more contained as gray tabbies tend to be. But but both look so cuddly and sweet.
They do, they do. And you know, we love getting pet pictures and we love if they have food names. Any any will do? Oh yeah, yeah, but food names are great. Yeah, the food names are great. I love that you don't particularly have any experience with these fruits, but I think they are excellent names and they fit.
Oh yeah, Now mango is a high quality orange cat name. Yes, yeah, oh absolutely, Guadala is great as well. I'm just I'm also slightly biased towards orange cats because blessed like, just like, what.
Are they up to? Which? Behind the scenes, listeners, I have gotten to witness some of Lauren's kittens chaos lately, and I have to say it's a lot of chaos and it's been entertaining for me. Yeah.
Yeah, so bonus story, all right, so it is food related. I was carrying my lunch upstairs to my office a few days ago, and the kitten ran up behind me and slapped it out of my hands like she was stealing a dribble.
Okay, And it was curry.
And the plate goes flying, and there's curry on the walls, there's curry on the cat. She had one little yellow paw from the turmeric for days.
I still don't know why. I can't. There is no why.
Only chaos, just purs and murder. Murder, that's what that one is made of yep, that's it's it's been fun.
We were talking about horror movies and there was a terrible sound and it turns out the kitten was behind it.
Oh yeah, I figured that the kitten was behind it. But there was a big like clang and like yeah, like like clutter noise, and I was like.
I'm just gonna I'm just gonna go check that out.
And Annie absolutely thought I was about to die.
I was like, that's well, that's the end of savor.
Fun. She had somehow knocked over the dish. The dish rack I.
Pushing over books. She has an interesting character.
She's very special mm hmm. I love her unconditionally and and.
And it's yeah, yes, that'sous well listeners, thanks to both of these listeners for writing it. If you have bet stories you want to share, yeah, we would love to have them. You can email us at hello at savorpod dot com. We're also on social media.
You can find us on blue Sky and Instagram at saver pod and we do hope to hear from you.
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