Kurlansky’s ‘Milk!’ goes down smoothly
Is milk good for you or not? Is untreated milk safe? Should mothers breastfeed?
These are the key questions posed in the book “Milk! A 10,000Year Food Fracas” (Bloomsbury, 333 pp., ★★★☆), a history of one of the oldest drinks on Earth. They remain as hotly debated today as they did millennia ago.
Author Mark Kurlansky is best known for his two food-history masterpieces, “Salt” and “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.” Both treated readers to a global timeline walkabout that also dipped into economics, sociology and politics, fascinat- ing analyses that belied the boredom one might expect from the titles.
The first 70 pages of “Milk!” are a slog (too many recipes and factoids), but keep going and you’ll strike calciumheavy gold. Milk remains a significant component of the diets of most of the planet’s inhabitants, and how and why we consume it offers the scaffolding for a tasty tale.
Among the fascinating nuggets in “Milk!”:
❚ In the Middle Ages, Christians were prohibited from drinking milk on meatless holy days because they believed it was blood that had turned white.
❚ The Persian equivalent of “mind your own business” was “Go beat your own yogurt.”
❚ Buddhists in ancient Japan called Westerners “butter-stinkers.” In medieval Europe, the Dutch were mocked for their love of dairy and called kaaskoppen, which means cheese heads – until they became a global superpower.
❚ Several cultures thought wet nurses passed their personality traits along to the babies they breastfed.
❚ To avoid milk going bad, some babies were held to animals’ udders to suckle. Milk for other people was delivered in open pails and often had sticks and dirt in it.
❚ The ice cream soda was invented in Philadelphia in 1874.
❚ In the mid-1880s, urban babies died at an alarming rate, many after drinking so-called swill milk from cows fed with leftovers from breweries and tethered in filthy barns. State laws forced some clean-up of the industry, but the big safety overhaul came via Louis Pasteur, today memorialized by the word “pasteurized.”
❚ Rudimentary refrigerators were invented at the turn of the 19th century to keep butter fresh.
❚ The word bottle in “bottle-feeding” originally referred to milk that was delivered in a sealed bottle, replacing the term “artificial feeding.”
As “Milk!” slowly churns from a laundry list in those opening pages to a faster-paced history, Kurlansky returns to his trademark style — well-ordered sentences jam-packed with big ideas and trivia tidbits. And then, the fine cream of the book rises to the top.