Purchase
Milk, July 2011
Hardcover
A Local and Global History
Yale University Press
July 2011
On Sale: June 28, 2011
369 pages ISBN: 0300117248 EAN: 9780300117240 Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
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.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|