Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas
Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas book cover

Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Hardcover – May 8, 2018

by
Price
$27.84
Format
Hardcover
Pages
400
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1632863829
Dimensions
6.34 x 1.35 x 9.57 inches
Weight
1.63 pounds

Description

"Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas is a feat of investigation, compilation and organization . . . Altogether a complex and rich survey, “Milk!” is a book well worth nursing." - Wall Street Journal "The sort of book that Proust might have written had Proust become distracted by the madeleine . . . you step away from this book with a new vantage on history, a working knowledge of exotic milk and cheese, acceptance of your mom, a sense of what makes Mark Kurlansky tick and a weird craving for buffalo mozzarella." - Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review "[A] readable and almost unreasonably fascinating book." - The Times of London "Kurlansky’s entertaining, fast-paced history of milk exhibits his usual knack for plumbing the depths of a single subject . . . Kurlansky’s charming history brims with excellent stories and great details" - Publishers Weekly "Cod, salt, paper, oysters, 1968, and Havana―Kurlansky always picks a singular subject, then runs with it as he provides historical and cultural context. Here he examines our relationship to milk since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago. That relationship shifted with the Industrial Revolution, which meant out with the family cow and in with pasteurization and, eventually, food fights over industrial farming, animal rights, and GMOs. Pour a glass and get out the cookies before reading." - Library Journal’s Nonfiction Picks, May 2018 "The author of Salt (2002) and Cod (1997) tackles another staple food in this chatty history of milk andsome of the many products made from it . . . Kurlansky's wide-ranging curiosity makes a familiar topic seem exotic." - Booklist "A wide-ranging history of a surprisingly controversial form of nourishment . . . Chock-full of fascinating details." - Kirkus "A fascinating and comprehensive book that will keep readers engaged and entertained . . . Will appeal to both foodies and readers of world history." - Library Journal "Fascinating . . . Every chapter of Milk! entrances with I-did-not-know-that facts and observations." - BookPage "As with Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Salt , I wish I had written Milk! Never would I have thought that so elementary a liquid food had such an intriguing history, one that includes science, politics, economics, and gourmandize. A great read on a great subject!" - Mimi Sheraton "Mark Kurlansky, the best-selling author of Cod and Salt , traces the 10,000-year-old cultural, economic, and culinary trajectory of this dietary staple, packing in dairy-centric recipes both ancient and modern." - Modern Farmer, "Seven of the Season's Best New Books" "Calcium-heavy gold . . . the fine cream of the book rises to the top." - USA Today "A prolific and spirited explicator of the the world, Kurlansky has written on subjects as varied as 1968, Cuba, and European Jewry, but his sweet spot is literature on single forms of nutrition and sustenance, with books such as Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History . He now turns his attention to the mother of all subjects--milk--which he sees as the most argued-over food of the past 10,000 years. In this entertaining and constantly surprising book, he chronicles debates and disputes over milk (breast or bottle, pasteurized or homogenized, genetically modified or raw) and even finds that fierce disagreements over wet nurses involved not whether to use one, but whether brunettes or blondes were better ." - The National Book Review, "Five Hot Books" "Food historian Mark Kurlansky is famous for his deep dives on singular subjects, which range from salt to cod to oysters, and his latest work is everything one expects from this obsessive researcher . Milk! delves into the world’s most complex cultural, economic and culinary stories centered around milk, from Greek creation myths to modern pasteurization." - Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best Books about Food of the Year "Something to enjoy with a cold class of (what else) milk and a warm cookie." - Popular Science "Rich and interesting, stocked full of recipes and facts. It’s an immensely rewarding reading experience." - BookRiot, 50 Must-Read Microhistories "Compelling." - The Columbus Dispatch "Best-selling author Mark Kurlansky follows up Cod (1997) and Salt (2002) with another zestful exploration of one foodstuff ― milk ― through history and a range of lenses . . . Kurlansky keeps up a cracking pace on a tour that covers classical geographer Strabo griping about the Celts’ milk consumption; the disease-generating dairies of nineteenth-century New York City; lactose intolerance in China; and 126 recipes for everything from ghee to syllabub." - Nature "From the first page of this book, you’ll be fascinated by how much milk, and its relatives like cheese, whey, and ice cream, have infiltrated our lives over thousands of years. If you’ve ever found yourself in a debate about what milk is the best milk--goat, cow, human?!--this book will equip you with all the random tidbits to strengthen your rebuttal." - Bon Appétit, "8 Non-Cookbook Food Books to Read This Summer" "It may be a stretch to say that by understanding the history of milk that one can understand the history of the world, but maybe not that much of a stretch . . . As Kurlansky shows throughout Milk! , the story of dairy is really the story of civilization . . . What Milk! does particularly well is elucidate the history of conflict around all things milk." - Inside Higher Ed "Fascinating stuff . . . [Kurlansky] has a keen eye for odd facts and natural detail." - The Wall Street Journal on THE BIG OYSTER "Magnificent . . . a towering accomplishment." - Associated Press on THE BIG OYSTER "Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish." - David McCullough on COD "Kurlansky finds the world in a grain of salt." - The New York Times Book Review on SALT "Kurlansky approaches Havana like an Impressionist painter, building the image of this metropolis of 2 million inhabitants with subtle brushstrokes." - Washington Post on HAVANA "An early favorite . . . Everybody can learn, and everybody will eat." - Washington Post on INTERNATIONAL NIGHT Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Milk! , Havana , Paper , The Big Oyster , 1968 , Salt , The Basque History of the World , Cod , and Salmon, among other titles. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appétit 's Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City. www.markkurlansky.com

Features & Highlights

  • 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.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(118)
★★★★
25%
(98)
★★★
15%
(59)
★★
7%
(27)
★
23%
(90)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Good writing, bad research

Kurlansky's book may be better described as a how milk was USED in history, rather than as a history of milk. The book is well written, but it is confounding to have so many errors in the book, and so many conclusions that are simply wrong. For example, Kurlansky speculates on why we always see images in art of women breast feeding from the left. Well, the reason, if you ask a breast feeding mother, is that if you're right handed, you need the right hand to take care of everything else. He states as well, that cows produce 50-70 pounds of methane PER DAY. Think about that: 50-70 pounds PER DAY. Multiply that. That's a lot of gas (a pound of methane is just under a cubic gallon of volume) per year, and the number is wrong: the numbe is 70-120kg per YEAR. He has a substantial chapter on dairy product use in Asia. I checked with an expert in the field. Her assessment "good writing, bad facts." "Plumb pudding" is not named because "raisins were once called plums." "Plumb" is short for the Latin word for lead, because there was a lead toy placed in "Plumb pudding, " and sometimes still is. Bottom line is: people who read this book are in fact going to know something about the subject, but not everything. They, like me, are going to look at the new information and think "I didn't know that," and there's a reason: it's wrong. The 3 stars are because of the quality of the writing, and the interesting recipes.
74 people found this helpful
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Skip the Recipes; Stay for the History

Mr. Kurlansky has a special skill with taking a small slice of the world—cod, salt, paper, the Basques—and showing how that small slice has had a huge impact on history, often in ways that is not immediately obvious. This time around he takes on milk and, as usual, does an excellent job.

There is much to learn here. Mammals are not biologically designed to drink milk beyond babyhood. Sometime over the past millennia, however, some humans have essentially bred themselves to be able to digest milk as an adult. (And some have not; thus, the lactose-intolerant.) Throughout that time to the present day, arguments about milk have raged. Is milk actually good for you? If so, which milk is best? (Cow? Goat? Sheep? Camel? Horse?...)

In point of fact, for most of history, milk has been comparatively unsafe to drink. It is easily contaminated and spoils quickly; thus, the development of cheeses and other dairy products. It is only in the past 100 years or so that pasteurization and other methods of purifying milk have made it safe enough to be generally sought after. Even then, people complained that safe milk was not as wholesome and tasty as raw milk. Milk, it seems, has always fights an uphill battle.

But what made milk desirable in the first place? Mr. Kurlansky reminds us that, until wide-scale production of sugar cane and sugar beets, milk was the sweetest food available to humans, apart from honey. That is why, in the Bible, the land of Canaan is referred to as a “land of milk and honey”—sweetness upon sweetness. In a world saturated with sugary foods and drinks, it is easy to forget this.

The main weakness in this book is the number of recipes scattered throughout the text. He notes that these are recipes worth trying at home; however, I would doubt that. I found most of them to be difficult to follow. Granted, I am not much of a cook but from what little I could gather, but they didn’t seem appetizing to me either. Many of them have some historical interest but not enough to justify how many he provides. Maybe a real cook would feel otherwise.

Milk is so common in the United States today that it is difficult to remember that this is only a recent phenomenon. Mr. Kurlansky takes us back through the history and shows us the huge impact the development of this foodstuff has had on us. It is definitely worth a read, even if you skip the recipes.
17 people found this helpful
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Missed the mark.

I am a big fan of Kurlansky's books on "micro-history". I have read Cod, Paper and Salt and loved how he weaved each of those topics into the bigger picture in history. Milk has missed the mark. Too many recipes interrupting the history and facts. It's as much a cookbook with some history as it is a history book with some recipes. I found myself bored and wishing he had left a few recipes out or put them in the end in an appendix. If you are fascinated with recipes, including arcane measurements, by all means read it.
12 people found this helpful
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Factual errors and strange statements

If only I could trust the information in this book! Unfortunately, the author's discussion of a topic I know well (animal domestication and the origins of milking) contains both factual errors and a few flat-out weird statements. (e.g., gazelles being dairy animals if domesticated into goats? That's both bizarre and scientifically illiterate).
These errors lead me to assume the possibility of similar mistakes in the material I don't know as well.
For a far better book on the same topic please see Anne Mendelson's _Milk: The Surprising Story of MIlk Through The Ages_.
12 people found this helpful
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A Messy Read

This tome promises to bring forth so many different aspects of the consumption of milk and its byproducts; why people drink it, what was the first animal used for milking, the health controversies that have always surrounded it, the different kinds of milk carried by various animals (cow vs. goat vs. sheep vs horse vs donkey vs human!), etc.
However there is no rhyme or reason in Kurlansky's rendering of the facts; he's all over the place. Some fact will be noted perfunctorily on page#, then taken up again on page*, and the two mentions might totally contradict one another... or they might not. You will need an astounding sense of recall to figure out what 's consistent and what isn't.
Besides that complaint, at one point Kurlansky states that cheese is made possible because the ingredient rennet is used to break down the "opposing negative charges carried by milk proteins", allowing them to combine.
But if you investigate further this "fact", you will find out that milk proteins are not necessarily "negatively charged" They can also be positively charged or, in fact, they can be both! (Don't ask me for further details... it's complicated enough)
9 people found this helpful
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Not So Impressive

A book review of Mark Kurlansky's Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas.

I enjoyed reading the author's book Salt: A World History. I never imagined a humble thing like salt would have such an impact on humanity and I enjoyed learning about the Basques as well in that book. When I heard that the author had written a book about humble milk, I thought maybe it would be an enjoyable 'foodie' read as well. After checking out reviews on the internet the consensus by readers seemed lukewarm. It was not their favorite book by this author. I decided to give the book a chance based mostly on my enjoyment of the previously mentioned Salt book.

I generally read a few hours each night, so I do a fair amount of reading of many different types of books, fiction and non fiction, both. The first night reading Milk I became disappointed because over and over again their were little 'political correctness' jabs thrown into the body of the book. These jabs did not add to the body of the story which was supposed to be about the history of milk. I tried to ignore them at first and then they just kept appearing in the book. The author blamed Columbus for starting the slave trade (which I was interested in learning about, and found was not true after doing a 15 minute internet search on the start of slavery, and reading articles from different sources saying the slave trade was in existence, by Arabs, Portuguese and other Europeans, about 50 years before Columbus ever thought to bring a boat load of Africans over to the Americas). There were also jabs about feminism, blaming evil men for trying to manipulate woman's bodies by controlling who is the wet nurse for the King's child and the author used this as an analogy for men trying to control women with abortion issues. (The author does spend a bunch of time discussing breast milk, too). I was confused because I thought I was reading a book about the white stuff that many people, other than infants, drink which comes from mostly from cows and goats, and for some cultures even camels and yaks. This political posturing detracted from the professionalism of the writing. It also made me distrustful of editors who feel it is acceptable to tout political ideology in a history that is supposed to be about something non-political like a food commodity, but such is the world in 2018, I guess.

The rest of the book was a lot of not so interesting trivia about milk in India, China, rambling about cheese making, a bit about dairy farming, old recipes that would be difficult to make now a days, and different breeds of cows, all sprinkled about with odd little drawings of types of cows, and I had to force myself to finish reading it, (because I hate not finishing books I start), there really did not seem to be enough for a whole book about the subject. Not recommended, you can find other more interesting things to read. I am disappointed because I don't think I will ever bother to read another book by this author again, it will not be worth my time.
5 people found this helpful
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Padded and sloppily written.

Borrowed my copy from the public library. While the book is informative, it has an unconscionable amount of filler, as well as numerous errors.

1. It seems Kurlansky has to include material from his research, whether or not it is relevant, and he insists on reproducing it verbatim rather than paraphrasing or summarizing it. A quote from a book by Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stove's sister, to the effect that bad/rancid butter will ruin a dinner - duh - goes on for the better part of a page. (And many of the ancient recipes he lists, again verbatim and indiscriminately would barely be considered usable or even edible today, apart from the fact that the practice of specifying quantities of different recipe ingredients is relatively modern.)

2. Among the factual errors: Goats did not evolve from gazelles (which are related to antelopes). Lactose is not milk it's a component of milk. The weekly rations supposedly provided to crew by the 16th century Dutch Navy (1/2 lb cheese, 1/2 lb butter, 5 lb bread), would provide about 8000 calories total - try this calculation exercise yourself using online calorie information per unit weight. These quantities would make physically active male sailors (daily caloric requirement- 2700 cals approx - lose weight drastically. And these are the errors in only the first third of the book.

In an era where information can be readily fact-checked via Wikipedia (not to mention classic works like Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking") such errors would be unacceptable in a high-school essay. Kurlansky has written quality books earlier, so these lapses are mysterious. But the publishers definitely needed to have a content expert vet it.
5 people found this helpful
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Got Milk?

As a food historian, I am always on the lookout for a new book--and since I love Kurlansky's work, I jumped at this one. It is a fabulous telling of how important milk is in many cultures. Kurlansky puts in recipes, some are odd--but that is not the main focus. It reads like a novel--well paced and interesting.
4 people found this helpful
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Entertaining, but poorly cited (no footnotes).

Very entertaining history of milk (and dairy in general). Very readable, not at all dry or pedantic. Seemed very well researched, with an extensive bibliography. Poorly cited, though, since the author chose not to do footnotes. While I understand this was probably in the interests of keeping the book accessible for the general reading public, I found that to be a flaw. A bibliography isn't enough for me in a book of this nature -- I like to know where exactly where a particular claim or quote or fact comes from. That's what footnotes are for. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anybody who enjoys a good pop history.

This review was based on an ARC ebook received by the publisher in return for an honest, unbiased review.
3 people found this helpful
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Odd mix of history and cookbook

_Milk_ looked to have a very interesting concept, but it grew sluggish and muddled in the delivery. One might even say it curdled.

The history of the human use and consumption of milk and our ingenious ways of preserving that fresh product is quite well done. Where the book falters is in presenting all the recipes for various milk and cheese preparations within the text itself. Mention of differing and innovative techniques is surely necessary, but we don't need thorough, complete recipes. They quickly become boulders in the path of the narrative. A better plan would be to include the full recipes in an appendix so that the cooks among us can peruse them at leisure. But this non-chef, not needing the details of some 16th century pudding, quickly began jumping past the cookbook sections to resume the history. And that grew tiresome and somewhat frustrating, as in the e-book, the formatting of the recipe sections was no different from the rest of the text, so that it took multiple skips and samplings to determine when the intruding cooking-lesson stuff was done and we could get back to the adulteration scandals or whatever.

This review is of a digital version supplied by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
2 people found this helpful

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