Milk! : A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Mark Kurlansky’s first world meals historical past because the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, financial, and culinary story of milk and all issues dairy–with recipes all through.

In line with the Greek creation delusion, we’re a lot spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera’s breast milk grew to become our galaxy, the Milky Means. However whereas mom’s milk will be the essence of nourishment, it’s the milk of different mammals that people have cultivated ever because the domestication of animals greater than 10,000 years in the past, initially as a supply of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all method of edible improvements that rendered lactose digestible, after which, when genetic mutation made a few of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself.

Earlier than the commercial revolution, it was frequent for households to maintain dairy cows and produce their very own milk. However through the nineteenth century mass manufacturing and urbanization made milk security a number one situation of the day, with milk-borne sicknesses a standard explanation for dying. Pasteurization slowly grew to become a legislative matter. And right this moment milk is a check case in essentially the most urgent points in meals politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore motion, and advocates for uncooked milk, who controversially reject pasteurization.

Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly world story to inform, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the proper particular person to inform it. Tracing the liquid’s numerous historical past from antiquity to the current, he particulars its curious and essential position in cultural evolution, faith, diet, politics, and economics.