Millennia of milk history make for tasty reading
Milk has been useful and controversial for millennia. An entire class of the animal kingdom, mammalia, is defined by its members’ ability to produce it. Most mammals use milk to nurse their own young, and that’s about it.
Humans, though, are an entirely different story.
“People who can drink milk are genetic mutants,” food historian Mark Kurlansky says in no uncertain terms. His latest book, “Milk!,” is a sprawling, informative and highly entertaining cultural study of the protein-packed liquid once known as “white blood.” Its subtitle, “A 10,000-Year Food Fracas,” only hints at the trouble milk has caused throughout the ages.
Furthermore, “none of the controversies were ever resolved, and they keep adding new ones,” Kurlansky says. “In the 19th century, the argument over pasteurized versus raw milk was added (and) has still never been resolved. Now we have GMOs and animal welfare; I guess animal welfare could have come up at any time, but it didn’t very much until recently.
“More and more things keep getting added without anything being decided or solved,” he adds.
It’s hard to imagine a food with a more complicated relationship to humans, and Kurlansky would know. “Milk!” follows in the footsteps of “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” (1997), which won a James Beard Award for food writing; and “Salt: A World History” (2002), two of the more food-centered books among the dozens Kurlansky has written.
“One of the few things that I’ve ever done that I intended to do,” he says with a chuckle about his vocation as a food historian.
The first issue “Milk!” addresses is why people drink it at all. A gene that shuts off production of lactase, the enzyme that permits easy digestion of milk, is not present in most of the world’s population, particularly those of sub-Saharan African or Native American descent. Because most cultures who do have it — Northern European, Middle Eastern and North African, the Indian subcontinent — have traditionally been dominant, milk digestion “got the reputation of being normal, and lactose intolerance tends to be regarded as a disease,” Kurlansky explains. “It’s actually the reverse of that.”
Beyond simple genetics, milk drinking has historically been problematic for other reasons.
Kurlansky conjures the following prehistoric scenario: “Nobody knows exactly when this was, but I would have loved to had been there,” he says. “A mother had died and couldn’t produce milk. You have this baby who needs milk, and what to do? You can’t find a wet nurse, and somebody says, ‘Oh, what about that goat over there?’ ”
Soon enough people began developing a taste for the milk of other animals, which was often reflected in the livestock they tended. Whether on a small family farm or one of the large-scale dairies that arose after the Industrial Revolution, the production of milk — an essential element in the fields of child development, nutrition and agriculture, to name just a few — has always been a tough business, Kurlansky explains.
“Having looked at 10,000 years of it, I’d say there never was a good time to be in the dairy business,” he says.
It’s not getting any easier either. In China, milk consumption had been on the rise until the late 2000s, when hundreds of thousands of babies fell ill because of contaminated powdered milk. A handful died. Meanwhile, driven by doctor’s warnings, scandalous headlines and everything in between, Americans’ overall dairy consumption has been on the decline for a while. Kurlansky says a day when demand drops to almost nothing isn’t hard to imagine. The days when coach Vince Lombardi proclaimed his Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers to be a team of proud milk drinkers are fading fast.
“People are losing their taste for milk, in this country, anyway,” he says. “The federally recommended milk price in every region is based on consumption, and the price is going down and down because the consumption is going down and down.
“For example, here where I live in New York, it’s a huge problem because New Yorkers are drinking less and less milk, and the price gets lower and lower,” Kurlansky adds. “More and more farmers are just going out of business.”
But that day isn’t here just yet. Milk may be the only readyto-eat foodstuff naturally produced by the human body, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Unless one happened to live on a farm, the practice of drinking fresh milk did not become widespread until easy access to refrigeration became available in the late 19th century. (Those conditions also helped bring about ice cream’s explosion in popularity; this frozen delight merits its own chapter, “Everyone’s Favorite Milk.”)
Much more common, and creative, were the byproducts created from milk once it has started to curdle. The earliest cheesemakers were probably nomadic tribes who took to storing their milk in animal organs, usually stomachs, and discovered that a membrane known as rennet had turned the milk solid, or semi-solid. (Tasty, too.)
Easy to make in equatorial, subtropical and Mediterranean climates, yogurt-based dishes were favored by the ancient Greeks and Persians, and have been a staple of Indian cuisine for centuries. In Tibet, Kurlansky notes, “yak yogurt is great.” Whey, the protein-rich liquid left over from cheesemaking, has been used to make everything from a type of beer known as “milk stout” to Velveeta; it’s also beloved by pigs. And in Iceland, a similar sheep’s-milk derivative called skyr is sometimes fermented into the alcoholic beverage syra.
Such culinary ingenuity did not always impress other cultures, though. The colonial-era Japanese sneered at European explorers with the epithet “butter stinkers.” Long before that — until their civilizations were sacked by these bearded invaders, anyway — the Romans looked down at their unruly northern neighbors and their milk-drinking ways.
“In Rome, the only people who drank milk were people who lived on farms (and) drank it immediately after milking,” Kurlansky says. “And then they went to Northern Europe and saw a lot of people drinking milk, and for some reason people always associated anything that farmers do with backwardsness.”
Kurlansky supplements “Milk!” with dozens of relevant recipes, emphasizing he chose them for their historical significance rather than gastronomic value. A few, such as Cato’s cheesecake, are all but unknowable, he adds: “Exactly what it’s supposed to turn out to be is up for debate.”
But whenever possible, he tried to make the recipes appetizing.
“My cod book has some pretty awful recipes, but they’re interesting,” Kurlansky says. “In the case of the milk book, I had so many dairy recipes to choose from that I tried to pick things that were good.”
Out of mercy, one imagines, he omits Richard Nixon’s infamous cottage cheese recipe. The 37th president was fond of mixing it with ketchup.
On the 1968 campaign, “(the recipe) was one of the things his publicity people did to try to show that Nixon was human,” Kurlansky says. “Every time they tried to show that Nixon was human it always failed.”
Kurlansky sounds like he came away from writing the book with plenty of practical advice — sheep’s milk is best for cheesemaking; goat’s for drinking; and, among cattle breeds, “a grass-fed Jersey’s fresh milk is really delicious.”
Just tread lightly around camels, he advises.
“In Dubai, I had some ice cream made with camel milk that was really great,” Kurlansky says. “But camels, I hate to give them any credit … I once crossed the Sinai on a camel named Bob Marley; it was owned by this Bedouin guy who was really into reggae.
“Bob kept trying to turn around and bite my foot,” he adds. “We didn’t really get along at all.”