Does a Body Good

The title, as those old enough will know, is from a 1980s promotional campaign by the dairy industry. Whether milk does in fact do more good than harm has been a matter of debate before and since.

On left, great grandparents Wilhelm and
Theresa c. 1900

My mom grew up on a dairy farm. Her father grew up on a dairy farm. His parents were dairy farmers. Unsurprisingly, there was quite a lot of dairy in my diet when I was a kid. By contemporary standards there is quite a lot today. There is one half-gallon (1.9 liters) in the fridge at this moment. Cow’s milk, full of calcium and potassium, was regarded as health food in the 1950s. (For babies, bottle feeding of various milk formulae was regarded as “scientific” and superior.) A family of four, we had two quarts (again, 1.9 liters) delivered to the house every day for the first dozen years of my life, which was pretty normal. Milkmen arrived near dawn, dropping off full bottles and taking back the empties for steaming and reuse. Homogenization was not as effective back then – especially from the smaller local dairies – so the cream tended to separate out. Shaking the bottle to evenly blend the cream back was a minor thrill – except one time in our kitchen when the cap came off while I gave a vigorous shake and the ceiling got soaked.  Deliveries continued to our house until the mid-1960s when we switched over to milk in cartons from the supermarket, though the old milk box is still by my backdoor just for nostalgia reasons.

1952

There always has been debate about nutritional value versus health risks of milk. In the late 1960s, however, anti-dairy hypotheses began to get the upper hand among health professionals. They were accompanied by diatribes against other sources of animal fats and cholesterol including eggs and red meat. Americans listened. Over the next half century per capita milk consumption in the US dropped by 37%. Low fat milk made up a rising proportion of sales. Annual red meat consumption per capita in the same period (Source: USDA) dropped by 16 pounds and annual egg consumption dropped from its high of 374 to 250. Sales of vegetables, chicken, fish, and fruits rose. This shift to what was purportedly a healthier diet was associated with a doubling of the obesity rate and absolute increase in average adult weight for both men and women of about 22 pounds (10 kilos). Correlation is not causation, but the numbers do give one pause.

Milking animals for food dates to prehistoric times when humans first began domesticating animals. This might seem odd since the majority of adult humans today are lactose intolerant and nearly all humans were 10,000 years ago. Lactose is the sugar in milk, which is broken down by lactase, an enzyme plentiful in infants but sparse (though not absent) in most adults. Yet everything is not what it seems. Drinking milk may cause lactose intolerant people digestive distress (gassiness, loose bowels) but it isn’t actually dangerous. They will still benefit from milk’s other nutritional value. In Neolithic circumstances when simply obtaining enough calories was a challenge, the trade-off was worth it. Lactose tolerance via persistently high lactase production in adults then became a biologically favored trait in pastoral milking cultures. Lactose tolerance evolved completely independently in northern Europe and among the cattle-herding Masai of East Africa. It is a common (though still a minority) trait in Central and South Asia, and not actually rare in East Asia. Accordingly, India, not the United States, is the largest milk producer in 2020.

Mark Kurlansky is known for his microhistories: viewing long spans of history in terms of a single component. In the past I’ve enjoyed his histories on cod, salt, and paper, so when Amazon recommended Milk: A 10,000-Year History I needed little convincing. The book largely met expectations. He tells of the rise of prehistoric pastoralism, the various sources of milk exploited by the ancients (and us) including from mares, camels, donkeys, goats, and sheep. He describes the development of more easily digestible, storable, and transportable milk products (butter, yogurt, cheeses) from Sumerian times to the present. The book is full of recipes both ancient and modern. Cato the Elder, for example, took time out from demanding the destruction of Carthage to write down his cheesecake recipe in his book De Agricultura. Kurlansky tells of the history of ice cream fountains. He discusses historical and current health debates on dairy products, the role of milk in the growth of government regulation, pasteurization versus raw milk, and the goals of animal rights activists. He ends with the economics of dairy, which favor large scale farming; hence since 1970 some 600,000 dairy farms have closed in the US without a drop in production. There is room for artisanal dairy, however, since some people will pay much more for a specialty product, e.g. organic milk from a particular breed of cow or goat or yak or whatever.

Perhaps I was acclimated early by that initial formula, but I for one still like the stuff even in its basic supermarket-shelf form. It just might be time to pour myself a glass.

Ella Mae Morse – Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet (1943)