Is horn milk a product of the past or the future?
Humanity has been using ice in its business for thousands of years. The stems are a great source of fibre, unique in their properties, and the seeds were mainly used for food.
And it’s natural because horn seeds contain 18-25% protein and 30-39% valuable vegetable oil! Its value lies in the high content of unsaturated fatty acids omega-3 and omega-6 and their proportions, which are ideal for human synthesis. And the content of intoxicants in horn seeds is zero. However, this seed can be eaten and cured – our ancestors used it to treat many ailments.
Many national cuisines have food using hemp seeds, but here we will talk about vegetable horn milk. The seeds are fried in a pan, washed with hot water and slowly added to the water with the sugar in a mortar. It then remains only to look for the remnants of the seeds, and these are the horn milk ready for use. For different flavours, available berry and fruit juices are added to the milk.
For the inhabitants of Russia, horn milk was one of the best alternatives to animal milk during fasting. Used by both children and adults, it is especially effective in strengthening the sick and hard-working people. Cannabis seed milk was used as a digestive, diuretic, therapeutic treatment of digestive diseases, genitourinary system, tuberculosis, nervous fatigue, gout.
The introduction of strict restrictions on horn cultivation contributes to the exit of products from flax seeds from our tables; unfortunately, the taste of this healthy vegetable milk is unknown to many.
Over time, however, attitudes towards technological flax have become more and more prevalent in many countries (and deserved, but this is a separate interesting topic). On the shelves of European and North American markets, you can gradually find all kinds of shell products, including milk. The size is serious: The turnover of horn milk producing companies in the United States and Canada is in the millions of dollars, and they are increasing year by year. In Soviet-northern countries, unfortunately, only enthusiasts can try making cannabis milk themselves (fortunately, in internet recipes) – there will be mass, desire and raw material…). After all, this useful product is not available in the market.
In recent years, however, horn breeding has been intensively developed in Russia and Ukraine – legislation has been amended to allow the cultivation of technological shells, and hemp has become drug-free! Yes, the horns are already growing in the fields of Ukraine, absolutely tetrahydrocannabinol and the like. Naturally, plants’ beneficial properties such as biomass yield, fibre content, seed productivity, fatty acids, and seed protein combinations are preserved.
The amount of cultivation is still small, and hemp milk is still not available in the range of food given to the consumer. But hopefully, milk for us from horn seeds will not be an interesting fact from the lives of our ancestors, but a real product on the table, a product of our future.