Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky

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.

Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. 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. 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.īefore the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. Kurlansky’s charming history of milk brims with excellent stories and great details.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.Īccording 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. He ranges over the history of making milk safe, the ongoing debate between the benefits of raw milk versus pasteurized milk, and the growth of large, industrialized dairy farms.

By the 16th century, the Netherlands had become the dairying center of Europe the Dutch and others brought cows with them to America, and by 1629 cows outnumbered people in the Virginia colony. Kurlansky points out that every milk-drinking culture searched for the animals that provided the best source of milk-mares, pigs, reindeer, donkeys, camels-but that the most important issue for each culture was finding which milk-producing animals could be domesticated easiest. Many Sumerian stories involve the search for a reliable milking animal, and Hindu creation myths tell of the god Vishnu creating the universe by churning a sea of milk. He shares a series of anecdotes on the evolution of milk’s production and consumption, as well as on its roles in various cultures, such as in ancient Greece-according to Greek mythology, the goddess Hera formed the Milky Way galaxy when she spilled milk while breastfeeding Heracles, and each drop became a star. Kurlansky’s entertaining, fast-paced history of milk exhibits his usual knack for plumbing the depths of a single subject ( Cod, Salt).

Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky