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Milk! : a 10,000-year food fracas / Mark Kurlansky.

by Kurlansky, Mark.

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Bloomsbury, 2018.

Dairy products -- History.

Dairy products industry -- History.

Milk -- History.

9781632863829 (hc.)

xiv, 385 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 347-357) and indexes.

Part one. The safety of curds -- The first taste of sweetness -- Going sour in the fertile crescent -- Cheesy civilization -- Buttery barbarians -- Desert milk -- The days of milk and beer -- The cheese heads -- To make pudding -- Everyone's favorite milk -- Part two. Drinking dangerously -- Dying for some milk -- The first safe milk -- A new and endless fight -- Industrial cows -- Modern cuisines -- Part three. Cows and truth -- The buttering of Tibet -- China's growing tolerance -- Trouble in cow paradise -- Raw craftsmanship -- The search for consensus -- Risky initializations.

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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