2014-08-01
Explanation
The Joke
A woman enthusiastically offers something to a crowd: "Now then, who wants some bovine mammary fluid, curdled by stomach enzymes, and infected with mold?" The crowd eagerly shouts "Me! Me!" Then the comic cuts to "A moment ago" where the same crowd is shown being disgusted ("Ew!") when told that a tribe drinks "a mixture of goat urine and blood."
The Humor
The joke highlights the hypocrisy of cultural food disgust. The "bovine mammary fluid, curdled by stomach enzymes, and infected with mold" is simply a technically accurate but unappetizing description of cheese — cow's milk curdled with rennet (from stomachs) and aged with mold cultures. People love cheese but find it gross when other cultures consume things like blood or urine mixtures.
The comic points out that if you describe familiar Western foods in clinical, biological terms, they sound just as disgusting as the "exotic" foods that people from Western cultures reflexively find revolting. The humor is in the double standard: cultural familiarity determines what we consider normal versus disgusting, not the actual nature of the food itself.
References
The description matches cheese-making: milk (bovine mammary fluid) is curdled using rennet (stomach enzymes), and many cheeses are aged using mold (such as Penicillium in blue cheese, brie, and camembert). Some traditional cultures, such as the Maasai of East Africa, do consume mixtures of cattle blood and milk.