Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas
(Bloomsbury, $29) “The story of dairy is really the story of civilization,” said Joshua Kim in InsideHigherEd .com. That’s the lesson you’ll take from the latest book by Mark Kurlansky, the best-selling author of Salt, Cod, and other entertaining works that have made far-reaching claims for the historical importance of individual food staples we generally take for granted. Humans have been milking animals for as long as we’ve domesticated them, and dairy products have been central to the diet and economy of cultures ranging from India to Wisconsin. “It may be a stretch to say that by understanding the history of milk one can understand the history of the world, but maybe not that much of a stretch.”
“Kurlansky begins by observing how strange it is that humans ingest milk at all,” said Elaine Khosrova in The Wall Street Journal. Though all mammals produce
their own milk to nurse their young, we are the only ones who consume milk after infancy—and, worldwide, only 40 percent of us possess the genetic mutation that makes that possible. Milk has also always generated argument. Can a mother trust breastfeeding to another woman? Can she trust animal milk instead? In 19th-century American cities, she couldn’t. Many dairy cows were kept near breweries and fed only brewery slop, producing a watery product called “swill milk” that spread tuberculosis, especially among children. Kurlansky can be breezy, though, too, sharing with us George Washington’s love of ice cream, the role of yak butter in the Tibetan diet, and plenty of other trivia “well worth nursing.”
He should have left out some of the book’s 126 recipes, said Nancy Gilson in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. Some date back two millennia, and they’re not easily reproduced today. But it’s still fun to learn that the Roman statesman Cato the Elder promoted a recipe for a flat sheep’s-milk cheesecake unappetizingly nicknamed “placenta,” said Laurence Marschall in Natural History magazine. So, settle down in a good chair with a glass of your favorite donkey or goat milk and bring this book with you. “Its enthusiasm and wit are sure to charm even the most lactose-intolerant among us.”