Cultures of Milk
Cultures of Milk

Author: Andrea S. Wiley

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-06-09

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 067436970X

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Milk is the only food mammals produce naturally to feed their offspring. The human species is the only one that takes milk from other animals and consumes it beyond weaning age. Cultures of Milk contrasts the practices of the world’s two leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, Andrea Wiley reveals that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value. Shifting socioeconomic and political factors influence how people perceive the importance of milk and how much they consume. In India, where milk is out of reach for many, consumption is rising rapidly among the urban middle class. But milk drinking is declining in America, despite the strength of the dairy industry. Milk is bound up in discussions of food scarcity in India and food abundance in the United States. Promotion of milk as a means to enhance child growth boosted consumption in twentieth-century America and is currently doing the same in India, where average height is low. Wiley considers how variation among populations in the ability to digest lactose and ideas about how milk affects digestion influence the type of milk and milk products consumed. In India, most milk comes from buffalo, but cows have sacred status for Hindus. In the United States, cow’s milk has long been a privileged food, but is now facing competition from plant-based milk.

Re-imagining Milk
Re-imagining Milk

Author: Andrea S. Wiley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1317403045

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Milk is a fascinating food: it is produced by mothers of each mammalian species for consumption by nursing infants of that species, yet many humans drink the milk of another species (mostly cows) and they drink it throughout life. Thus we might expect that this dietary practice has some effects on human biology that are different from other foods. In Re-imagining Milk Wiley considers these, but also puts milk-drinking into a broader historical and cross-cultural context. In particular, she asks how dietary policies promoting milk came into being in the U.S., how they intersect with biological variation in milk digestion, how milk consumption is related to child growth, and how milk is currently undergoing globalizing processes that contribute to its status as a normative food for children (using India and China as examples). Wiley challenges the reader to re-evaluate their assumptions about cows' milk as a food for humans. Informed by both biological and social theory and data, Re-imagining Milk provides a biocultural analysis of this complex food and illustrates how a focus on a single commodity can illuminate aspects of human biology and culture.

Moral Foods
Moral Foods

Author: Angela Ki Che Leung

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0824876709

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Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia investigates how foods came to be established as moral entities, how moral food regimes reveal emerging systems of knowledge and enforcement, and how these developments have contributed to new Asian nutritional knowledge regimes. The collection’s focus on cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons across Asia brings into view a broad spectrum of modern Asia that extends from East Asia, Southeast Asia, to South Asia, as well as into global communities of Western knowledge, practice, and power outside Asia. The first section, “Good Foods,” focuses on how food norms and rules have been established in modern Asia. Ideas about good foods and good bodies shift at different moments, in some cases privileging local foods and knowledge systems, and in other cases privileging foreign foods and knowledge systems. The second section, “Bad Foods,” focuses on what makes foods bad and even dangerous. Bad foods are not simply unpleasant or undesirable for aesthetic or sensory reasons, but they can hinder the stability and development of persons and societies. Bad foods are symbolically polluting, as in the case of foreign foods that threaten not only traditional foods, but also the stability and strength of the nation and its people. The third section, “Moral Foods,” focuses on how themes of good versus bad are embedded in projects to make modern persons, subjects, and states, with specific attention to the ambiguities and malleability of foods and health. The malleability of moral foods provides unique opportunities for understanding Asian societies’ dynamic position within larger global flows, connections, and disconnections. Collectively, the chapters raise intriguing questions about how foods and the bodies that consume them have been valued politically, economically, culturally, and morally, and about how those values originated and evolved. Consumers in modern Asia are not simply eating to satisfy personal desires or physiological needs, but they are also conscripted into national and global statemaking projects through acts of ingestion. Eating, then, has become about fortifying both the person and the nation.

Milk
Milk

Author: Deborah Valenze

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-06-28

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0300175396

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The illuminating history of milk, from ancient myth to modern grocery store. How did an animal product that spoils easily, carries disease, and causes digestive trouble for many of its consumers become a near-universal symbol of modern nutrition? In the first cultural history of milk, historian Deborah Valenze traces the rituals and beliefs that have governed milk production and consumption since its use in the earliest societies. Covering the long span of human history, Milk reveals how developments in technology, public health, and nutritional science made this once-rare elixir a modern-day staple. The book looks at the religious meanings of milk, along with its association with pastoral life, which made it an object of mystery and suspicion during medieval times and the Renaissance. As early modern societies refined agricultural techniques, cow's milk became crucial to improving diets and economies, launching milk production and consumption into a more modern phase. Yet as business and science transformed the product in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commercial milk became not only a common and widely available commodity but also a source of uncertainty when used in place of human breast milk for infant feeding. Valenze also examines the dairy culture of the developing world, looking at the example of India, currently the world's largest milk producer. Ultimately, milk’s surprising history teaches us how to think about our relationship to food in the present, as well as in the past. It reveals that although milk is a product of nature, it has always been an artifact of culture.

Milk-- Beyond the Dairy
Milk-- Beyond the Dairy

Author: Harlan Walker

Publisher: Oxford Symposium

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1903018064

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This is the seventeenth volume of the ongoing series of papers and submissions to the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, the longest running food history conference in the world.

Milk!
Milk!

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1632863847

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Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic, and culinary story of milk and all things dairy--with recipes throughout. 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.

Milk Culture in Eurasia
Milk Culture in Eurasia

Author: Masahiro Hirata

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 9789811517662

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The invention of milking and milk use created a new mode of subsistence called pastoralism. On rangelands across Eurasia, pastoralists subsist by extensive animal husbandry and by processing their animals' milk. Based on the author's fieldwork over more than two decades, this book details the processing systems and uses of milk observed in pastoralist and farm households in West Asia, South Asia, North Asia, Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau, and Europe and the Caucasus. Milk culture in each region is characterized by its processing technology and use of milk, and characteristics common to wider geographical spheres are identified. Inclusion of case studies from the literature expands the continent-wide perspective and provides further indications of how milk culture developed and diffused historically. The inferences drawn are expressed in the author's monogenesisƯ-bipolarization hypothesis of Eurasian milk culture, that milking and milk processing had a single center of origin in West Asia, and that the technology involved the spread from there across the continent, developing distinct characteristics in northern and southern spheres. Finally, because milk culture underpins pastoralism as a mode of subsistence, the typology and theory of pastoralism are re-examined from the standpoint of milk culture.