"Milk" by Mark Kurlansky

Another food-themed book following Kurlansky's phenomenal Salt and Cod. As with Cod, I found the endless recipes rather tedious; the interest in the book lies with the fascinating stories that he tells.

Our drinking of milk is abnormal:

• “Lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. ... As most babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk. But something went wrong with Europeans - as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.” (C 1)

Kurlansky moves from here to consider the history of milk:

• “The Sumerian culture ... was among the first to milk domesticated animals.” (C 1)
• “ Archaeological finds suggest that humans have been herding animals for ten thousand years, and they must have been living close to them for at least that long because animal pathogens started mutating into animal human diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis ten thousand years ago. Was it then that milking started?” (C 1)
• “Records dating back to the beginnings of civilizations reveal that even back then there were many formulas and medicines for ‘failed’ mothers.” (C 2)

He then considers milk products such as yoghurt, butter and cheese

• In Persian “there is an expression for mind your own business ... that translates into go beat your own yoghurt.”(C 2)
• “The solid cheese that remains after the whey is removed can then be preserved through brining to produce a cheese like the Greek feta, which is one of the oldest cheeses in the world.” (C 3)
• “More sophisticated variations of cheese were developed in Europe, where damp, cool cellars were available for aging.” (C 3)
• “Like the Greeks, the Romans made rennet from figs. They also made it from artichokes.” (C 3)
• “French butter makes better pastry the American butter because it contains more fat and less water.”  (C 4)
• “When the Romans first came to the Dutch lands in 57 BCE, according to Julius Caesar, they found a cheese-eating people.” (C 7)
• “Roquefort-sur-Soulzon has fewer than two hundred inhabitants ... only cheese that matures in the natural caves under the village ... can be called Roquefort. ... the circulation of air and the humidity trapped in the rocks creates a unique mold-growing environment.” (C 18)

He particularly considers milk and milk products in India where cows have been sacred for millennia and China which has very little dairy tradition.

• “Krishna is said to have originally been a cowherd. He also goes by the names Govinda and Gopala which literally mean ‘friend and protector of cows’.”(C 17)

Finally he considers aspects of the modern debates over milk: hormones, GMO and organic:

• “GMO grains, less expensive than non-GMO grains as well as insect-resistant, have literally saved the struggling family farm.” (C 20)
• Organic dairy farms must “refuse antibiotics to a cow with an infection” (C 20)
• “You could not feed the world organically.” (C 20)

Other fascinating facts

• “Christians in the Middle Ages thought that milk was blood that had turned white when it travelled to the breast, which is why milk was banned on meatless holy days.” (C 1)
• ”Young whales have to build a layer of fat quickly in order to survive, and so whale milk is 34.8 per cent fat, as opposed to human milk, which is only 4.5 per cent fat.” (C 1)
• “Before sugar cane and beet sugar became ubiquitous, honey was the number one sweet available. Milk was a close second, though, which is why the two are often grouped together. ... In the Old Testament, there are twenty references to milk and honey.” (C 1)
• “The last aurochs died in a seventeenth-century Poland.” (C 1)
• "the left breast ... was thought to contain the best milk because it was closest to the heart.” (C 2)
• “Many animals, especially cats, are great yoghurt lovers.”
• “Animals lactate in the spring and summer, the worst possible time in the hot climate of the Middle East.” (C 2)
• In early Christian communions, “the sip that represented the blood of Christ was often taken from a goblet of milk.”
• “The Turks also had iced fruit beverages, which they called sorbet. Persians called it sharbate” (C 9)
• “At the end of the eighteenth century, a Dublin hospital had a 99.6 percent infant mortality rate.” (C 10)
• “In the sixteenth century ... the Dutch, through the use of carotene, developed the first orange carrot. Previously, carrots were either pale yellow or purple.” (C 17)
• “The word ‘punch’ is derived from the Sanskrit for ‘five’, so called because it had five ingredients.” (C 17)
• “Desi is a Sanskrit word that denotes native to the subcontinent.” (C 17)
• “Italy does not have indigenous buffalo - they were brought in Roman times, probably as draft animals.” (C 17)
• “Cows are the leading source of hamburger meat in America.” (C 19)
• “The milking parlor of choice is a rotary milker ... In most milking parlors, cows grow restless, stamp their feet, and defecate, but this is not so on their rotating trip, which they thoroughly enjoy. When they get back to the starting point and have to step off, they clearly show their disappointment at leaving.” (C 19)
• “A dairy cow burps and farts between 300 and 400 pounds of methane gas every day. And that figure does not include the roughly equal amount that emanates from her manure.” (C 19)

As with his other books, Milk is interesting in its own right, but the little sidefacts make it fascinating.

January 2019. Thank you Lucy for buying me this book for Christmas.