I have been known to prefer single topic books, so when I came across a book entitled Milk by the same chap who wrote Cod and, one of my favorites, Salt, I went for it even though it was in hardback and despite not getting even a few pages into his book Paper. Yes, the author is Mark Kurlansky. The book is entitled Milk: A Ten Thousand Year Food Fracas. And I have finally finished the darn thing.
Here's what's what. On the one hand, I love single topic books that expand out into other things. I loved Curry -- for example -- by Lizzie Collingham. Subtitled A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Collingham's book was a wonderfully well written romp through history and the globe with clarity of thesis and more.
And, I loved Kurlansky's book Salt. And, I even like single topic cookbooks on occasion like those on corn or bacon.
And yet, this book kind of . . . failed for me. I had trouble reading it. In some ways and at some moments, it was wonderful and delightful. I loved it. At other times and in other ways, it was simply disappointing. What I liked were some of the unusual facts, the learning that I undertook, and the ways the topic was global. Frankly, I liked thinking through milk -- both about milk and through milk to other themes. And yet, I kept thinking this not a narrative or a book but a list or an unedited set of materials held together merely by the word milk. It felt like free association pretending to be something more. Once in a while the notion that there were various tensions around the topic of milk that are transhistorical and cross cultural poked its little head above the waters. But mainly, the notion that there was something holding this all together other than the word milk. . . failed for me. The flood of details would overwhelm any coherence at all. Put another way: the relation of forest and trees was not right -- the balance was off. The book was a great idea and the delivery was not as great.
Let me elaborate and illustrate and witter on for a while on themes that come to me as a result of Milk:
*Breast milk matters. And, of course, everything that we think of as milk -- well, no, not nut milks -- are breast milks. Human, cow, goat, buffalo, donkey, mare, etcetera. And, one theme that appears in multiple chapters of Kurlansky's book has to do with the yes/no to women breast feeding -- or substituting formula (defined in various ways in diverse times and places) or others' milk -- whether wet nurse or animal. From the notion that a whole new industry arose with the rise of great pumping backwards in time to bottles used to nurse in ancient Egypt and forward to controversies about the relative healthiness (or horror) of other means of feeding infants, well, you get the drift. We have not resolved the issue -- and it is one way of thinking about the culture and culture wars surrounding milk. (As are various other debates about milk as healthy or not, including the many deaths that came from contaminated milk, the need to deal with milk differently as an industrial product, and more.)
*Portable milk -- cheese, yogurt and related products from many other cultures -- matter. These too are a product of the ways milk reacts to climate (in the absence of refrigeration and etcetera) and to industrialization. The very particularities of cheeses -- associated with very particular cows or goats and the very particular places they graze(d) are now rendered terribly generic -- though the "return" of particularity is now labeled "artisanal" and more expensive. As a side note, I never thought of these forms as "portable milk" but guess they are!
*The financing of dairy is amazing. Basically, the margin for dairy production is tiny so there is pressure to have bigger herds which then has other not-so-nice consequences. The push and pull toward organic (did you know that organic cows cannot be treated for illnesses if they require antibiotics and thus must be sold off the farm or slaughtered -- and only large places can cope with having two separate herds). The relation of small to large operations also amazing.
*The relation between milk and beer across time and place has the potential to be interesting.
*A few local tidbits (for those from the Finger Lakes region): According to page 139, Ithaca NY has some claim to being the birthplace of the ice cream sundae. Who knew? And who knew how much controversy there was about that, how it came to be named, and much more. A tiny bit of upstate also appears around page 196 when Rome, NY appears as the site of early factory cheese making (associated with a chap named Jesse Williams in 1851). And, of course, there is Cornell (also in Ithaca) which features in the not-so-nice tale of rbgh (aka recombinant bovine growth hormone) which mainly led to (a) loads of dairy farms -- huge ones - elsewhere and (b) controversy about the reasonableness of this and a whole market for milk which does NOT have rBGH in it. I recommend the pages on rBGH as particularly important to understanding the impact of our corner of the world in her places in the US and beyond (See pp. 326-329).
*And I am tempted to include one sample paragraph which illustrates the oddly unedited nature of the book more generally. I suspect if this had been tightly edited it would have been a longer process of writing the book but a much better book. Instead, it reads a bit like an organized set of research notes: interesting but . . . . leaving the assimilation to someone else. See page 264 where a paragraph in a chapter on India is interrupted by a parenthetical sentence about boiled milk recipes from America. Yep, just out of the blue. The whole book is just a little like this.
So, in the end you ask: Should I buy this? Well, I wish I had not splurged for the hard cover to be honest, and wish instead I had picked it up at a local library. Am I glad I read it. Yes, of course. But am I glad I bought it? Not so much. Sorry Mark. Your name sold it. But this one is not your best.
For reflections on Kurlansky's books elsewhere on CookingwithIdeas, try here. For other folks' thoughts on Milk, try here or here.
