From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject The Ironies of Drinking Fluid Milk
Date March 5, 2024 1:00 AM
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE IRONIES OF DRINKING FLUID MILK  
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Marion Nestle
March 1, 2024
Food Politics
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_ Today’s mega-milk-industry stems from a lack of scientific
perspective that turned milk into a supposed daily necessity for
children and, to a lesser extent, adults. _

Anne Mendelson. Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood. , Columbia
University Press

 

Anne Mendelson.  Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood.  Columbia
University Press, 2023 (396 pages).

I am an admirer of Anne Mendelson’s books and did a blurb for her
Chow Chop Suey.  But this one is over the top—original, compelling,
brilliantly written.

Driving this book is a question I’ve not heard asked before, at
least not so directly: Why and how did the consumption of fresh liquid
milk (“drinking-milk”)—as opposed to fermented dairy
products—become framed as a nutritional necessity?

Her question derives from some basic facts about cow’s milk and its
industrial production:

Once cow’s milk leaves the udder, it is easily contaminated with
pathogenic bacteria.

Most adults have stopped making the enzyme that digests the sugar
lactose in milk and can’t drink it without getting unpleasant
digestive systems.

To produce milk safely requires complicated and expensive industrial
processes.

The cost of milk production exceeds the price people are willing to
pay for it; dairy farming is a losing proposition even with taxpayer
subsidies.

Industrial milk production is hard on cows and pollutes the
environment.

Why are we even doing this?  For this, she blames 19th and 20th
century European and American doctors who thought the ability to
digest lactose normal, nutritionists (calcium!), and the USDA (3
servings a day!).

She is not against eating dairy foods when they are fermented. 
These, yogurt and the like, are much safer.  Friendly bacteria split
the lactose along with producing acid that destroys pathogens.

You don’t have to agree with all her points to appreciate how well
they are argued.

To wit:

[The book] argues that influential nutritional theories about fresh
and fermented milk took a disastrously wrong turn in the eighteenth
century.  The reason is that the founders of modern Western medicine
had no way of understanding the genetic fluke that allowed them,
unlike most of the world’s peoples, to digest lactose from babyhood
to old age.  In other words, today’s mega-industry stemmed from a
lack of scientific perspective.  That lack turned the one form of
milk that is most fragile, perishable, difficult to produce on a
commercial scale, and economically pitfall-strewn into a supposed
daily necessity for children and, to a lesser extent, adults.  [pp x,
xi].

No other food product is as staggeringly difficult and expensive to
get from source (in this case, a cow) to destination (milk glass on
table) in something loosely approximating its first condition.  If
one existed, it would be treated as an astounding luxury. [p. 1].

Mendelson takes deep dives into the history of dairy use, dietary
recommendations, industrial production, and government dairy policy. 
In attempting to teach about the Farm Bill, I was defeated by Milk
Marketing Orders, the formulas used by the government to set price
support levels required to be paid by “handlers” (milk processors)
to dairy producers in different areas of the country.  I could not
find anything about this in the index, alas, but I loved what she says
about them on page 205.

These formulas gradually became as abstruse, and as unintelligible to
anyone outside a small charmed circle, as anything in the bad old days
before the federal government stepped in.  Far from abolishing the
buyer’s market, they trapped farmers selling fluid milk within the
marketing order system in endless struggles to wring enough out of
handlers to recoup production costs….What I do understand is that as
the postwar era advanced, the sheer incomprehensibility of
producer-handler milk price schemes again became an endless
frustration to dairy farmers, above all those trying to make a living
within the marketing order system for drinking-milk.

One final irony:

Nothing is going to dislodge supermarket drinking-milk from its
towering economic importance.  It is certain to continue along the
track of expansion, consolidation, and increasingly complex
technological infrastructure that it has pursued for almost three
quarters of a century.  Big Milk is going to become Bigger Milk. 
Its absurdities are also sure to become more entrenched.  The
greatest of these is the plain fact that Americans are drinking less
milk while dairy farms are producing more of it.

A personal comment: The book triggered a memory.  I once visited a
school lunch program in Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), Alaska.  Inuit
children were served the standard USDA lunch, which requires half-pint
cartons of milk.  I did not see any of them drinking it.  The
untouched cartons were discarded.  The milk was not only culturally
inappropriate, but wasteful. All food in that part of North Alaska
has to be flown in on airplanes.

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