MILK!: A Ten Thousand Year Food Fracas
Mark Kurlansky’s first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic, and culinary story of milk and all things dairy–with recipes throughout.
According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera’s breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother’s milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself.
Before the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. But during the nineteenth century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. And today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement, and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization.
Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid’s diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.
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Hardcover
Bloomsbury USA, 2018
ISBN: 978-1632863829
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Reviews
The author of Salt (2002) and Cod (1997) tackles another staple food in this chatty history of milk and some of the many products made from it. He makes a convincing case that milk, both that produced by human mothers and that supplied by a surprising array of other mammals, is one of the most controversial foodstuffs around. On the human front, he discusses thousands of years of debate as to whether breastfeeding or formula is preferable, sidetracking into the role of wet nurses over the ages. In the animal kingdom, he explores why cows have become the preferred source of milk and ventures into more recent controversies, such as whether organic milk is superior. Cheese, yogurt, and ice cream receive rapt attention, and Kurlansky indulges in dozens of recipes, both palatable (Jamaican banana ice cream) and less so (“pudding in wine and guts” and Richard Nixon’s infamous “recipe” for cottage cheese mixed with ketchup). Kurlansky’s wide-ranging curiosity makes a familiar topic seem exotic.
Margaret Quamme