To drink milk is an inherently natural impulse; an infant placed at the breast knows instinctively what to do. As suitable animals (such as mares, asses, ewes, goats, and various kinds of cows) were domesticated, it appears that drinking animal milk became an acceptable practice. Presumably, folk taxonomic associations between humans and other mammals would have indicated that milk was an animal secretion that could be consumed as food, and there are numerous records and legends of infants suckling directly from animals, as well as from a range of artificial devices (Fildes 1986).
As with most other early foods, the origins of dairy products are unclear. Certain natural fermentations give rise to yoghurt or soft, cheeselike substances that are sufficiently different from putrid milk to have encouraged their sampling. There are stories that cheese originated among Near Eastern nomads who may have stored milk in the stomach bags of cows, a common form of container, in which the natural rennet would have given rise to a sort of cheese. Similarly, one might imagine a horseman setting out with a bag of milk, only to find, when he came to drink it, that the agitation of riding had curdled it into a not unpleasant mixture of curds and buttermilk (Tan-nahill 1973). Whatever the origins, dairy products have had a place in human diets from very early times.
Equally early on in human history, however, a fundamental split occurred in the history and culture of dairy consumption because, as already noted, drinking more than very small quantities of milk causes the majority of the world’s adult population to suffer digestive problems. It has been estimated that although more than 96 percent of northern European peoples are able to digest milk, some 50 to 75 percent of Africans, Indians, Near Eastern Asians, eastern Europeans, and virtually all Asian and Native American peoples cannot digest it. Their bodies stop producing lactase - the enzyme that breaks down the milk sugar, lactose - soon after weaning (Tannahill 1973). It has been suggested that an adult ability to break down lactose spread as people moved northward into colder climates. Covering themselves with more clothes, these people experienced shortages of vitamin D previously derived from the action of sunlight. Vitamin D production in the skin, however, is enhanced with a higher intake of calcium, of which milk is a particularly rich source. There would, thus, have been a selective advantage for those people who retained the capacity to digest milk, and over time, the proportion of the population in northern climates with the ability to digest lactose would have increased (Harris 1986).
Such a starkly biological account, however, does not explain the powerful rejection of milk among many Asian peoples and needs to be supplemented with cultural factors. One suggestion is that Chinese agricultural practices worked to exclude milk from the culture; because planting took place year-round, primarily with human labor in areas of high population density, there were few draft animals that could have provided milk. The main flesh animal was the pig, which was impossible to milk; thus, after weaning, Chinese toddlers were not exposed to milk from other sources. By contrast, in subcontinental Asia, draft animals were more prevalent - indeed, were necessary to prepare land for the shorter planting season dictated by a monsoon climate. Because of greater availability of milk, cultural aversion to it did not develop, and dairy products remained an important feature of the diet (Harris 1986). An alternative hypothesis, and one, apparently, traditionally held by Chinese people, is that the aversion to milk arose from the desire to distinguish themselves from the nomads on the northern borders of China, who drank fermented mare’s milk (Chang 1977). It does seem that milk products had become a feature of the diet of the northern Chinese aristocracy between the Han and Sung periods, but it appears that, after the ensuing period of Mongolian rule, milk definitely acquired a barbarian reputation (Chang 1977).
In most of the preindustrial world, however, milk (or, more usually, dairy products) had a place in the diet of all those who had domesticated animals and could absorb lactose. Among nomadic pastoralists of the Near East, sheep and goats provided the main source of milk and cheese. On the great open grasslands of central Asia, and extending into eastern Europe, mare’s milk, often fermented into the alcoholic liquor kumiss, was consumed in large quantities (Tannahill 1973). On subcontinental Asia, the buffalo was the principal source of milk to be made primarily into ghee - a reduced butter in which most of the moisture is removed by heating - for cooking or ceremonial purposes (Mahias 1988). Pastoralists of Africa, with vast herds of cattle, used a considerable amount of milk in their diets (Pyke 1968). Milk and cheese are also mentioned as foods, medicines, and beauty aids in records of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome (Warner 1976).
In Europe, dairy products were a notable part of the peasants’ diet wherever they were available. Across the continent, the great majority of people lived on the verge of starvation, particularly during the late winter months and the periodic harvest failures. The basic diet of cereal-based porridge or soup was rarely supplemented with actual meat, and the more prevalent dairy products (or “white meats,” as they were called) were welcome sources of animal fat and protein, whether as cheese, butter, beverage, or additions to soup (Mennell 1985). In the early months of the year, however, cheese or butter kept throughout the winter was mostly used up, and cattle not slaughtered the previous autumn struggled to survive until the new grass appeared (Smith and Christian 1984).Thus, though an important source of animal fat and proteins, dairy products (like meat) cannot have been much more than a flavoring for the basically cereal diet of the peasants.
Among the nobility in the late medieval period there was a growing disdain for dairy produce. With upper-class access to often vast quantities of meat, the “white meats” of the peasantry were increasingly scorned, probably especially by the aspiring merchants of the towns. Nonetheless, dairy products did not disappear from the tables of the well-to-do, and in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, butter became more important in noble larders, although used primarily for cooking and making the elaborate sauces of the new haute cuisine then developing in France and Italy (Mennell 1985).
Perhaps because milk was recognized as a particularly rich and nourishing food, as well as something of a luxury to have in more than small quantities, but also (and one suspects primarily) because of the symbolic importance of the nurturing bond between mother and child, milk has achieved some prominence in myths and religious systems. In the Old Testament, the promised land was one of “milk and honey.” The image of a mother goddess suckling her child is a common representation of Earth bringing forth sustenance. The Egyptian mother goddess, Isis, suckled her divine son Horus, while the Greek god Zeus was nurtured by Amalthia (variously depicted as a mortal woman or as a nanny goat). The symbolism of the mother with her infant god passed into Christian representations of the Madonna and Child, which perpetuated the divine linkages between the spiritual and earthly worlds, mediated by the physical nurturing of milk (Warner 1976). Milk and dairy products have a vital role in sacrificial and purifying rituals in Indian religious myths, especially as the life-giving force of the fire god Agni (Mahias 1988).
The place of dairy products in the diet of peoples in nonindustrial societies has remained virtually unchanged over time; they can be an important source of animal protein but remain a minor component of largely cereal or vegetable diets. In northern Europe, however, and particularly in England, the role of milk and dairy products began to change with the wider emergence of commercial agriculture, urbanization, and proto-industrialization, beginning about the end of the sixteenth century and continuing throughout the seventeenth century.
In seventeenth-century England, demand for dairy products increased with the emergence of rural industry and the location of an increasingly higher proportion of the population in towns (Drummond and Wilbraham 1939). Cheese was of growing importance in the diets of urban laborers, particularly in London. It was cheap, nutritious, and also convenient; it could be stored for reasonable lengths of time and could be carried to places of work and eaten easily there. Large quantities of cheese were also required by the navy and by new, large institutions, such as hospitals and workhouses (Fussell 1926-9; Fussell and Goodman 1934-7). This demand was largely met by the commercialized agriculture that had been developing on the larger estates carved out after the Reformation. The numbers of milch cows multiplied, and dairies became necessary and integral parts of English country houses. Dairying was practiced by anyone who had access to a cow, which replaced the sheep as the primary milk provider (Tannahill 1973), and, for the respectable poor in rural areas, could provide an important source of income. The cheese trade also relied on a reasonably efficient transportation system, and London was served by sea as well as by road (Fussell 1966).
Throughout the early phases of expanding commercialization, dairying remained a female domain characterized by an arcane knowledge (Valenze 1991). Although from southern Africa to northern Europe the notion persisted that a woman who handled milk during menstruation might curdle it, the mystery of dairying lay in the special competence of dairymaids (Fussell 1966; Pyke 1968). The dairy in a country house was invariably attached to the kitchen, supervised by the farmer’s wife (or the female head of the household in larger concerns), and the production of cheese and butter was a female operation. From the seventeenth century, books of household management included dairying as a routine aspect of the mistress’s responsibilities. Hygiene in the dairy was constantly stressed, with detailed instructions provided as to the proper construction and maintenance of the dairy and the duties of the women working in it (Fussell 1966).
By the end of the eighteenth century, wherever dairying continued to be carried out in a preindustrial, subsistence agricultural context, milk products retained their customary position as a minor adjunct to the diet, varying only by degrees among places where dairying was more or less pronounced. But in the industrializing and urbanizing world, large-scale commercial agriculture was beginning to alter the nature of production and consumption of dairy produce and bring about a crucial transformation in the historical culture of milk.
World History
