Milking it: a new book about the much-maligned superfood

Milk’s future is murky, dairy unable to hide from humankind’s stampeding desire for artificial things. Will eggheads manage to make udders redundant?

Cow says milk is good for you; mother would agree.

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‘It is possible that some of you may like to know why I have chosen soap-bubbles as my subject; if so, I am glad to tell you.”

So begins Charles Vernon Boys’ Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them (1890), a triumph of enthusiasm over tedium that surely sets the benchmark when it comes to curious books about boring things.

Oranges, by John McPhee (1967), might come a close second (“I intended only some hundreds of words about oranges,” he writes, on page 14 of 165), and Penguin Books deserves a bravery award for backing author Mark Kurlansky to publish Cod in 1999, then, four years later, Salt, the final words on the fish and the condiment.

Milk: The truth, the lies and the unbelievable story of the original superfood

And now we have Milk, prodigiously subtitled: “The truth, the lies and the unbelievable story of the original superfood”. When it comes to the seemingly mundane, this is not author Matthew Evans’s first rodeo, his previous books ruminating on such prosaic topics as dirt (Soil, 2021) and flesh (On Eating Meat, 2019). Though Evans is a chef by trade (he is best known for his SBS series, Gourmet Farmer), Milk is not strictly a recipe book, but rather a journalistic rummaging through the history, biology and industry of the popular dairy product

Those hoping for a balanced biography will be disappointed – Evans makes plain right from the start that when it comes to milk, he’s over the moon, and intends to export his infatuation by way of a literary “If you knew Susie” serenade.

“This book is born out of my love of what comes from a cow,” Evans muses. “I know not everyone loves milk as I do … I want people to marvel at milk … I salivate just writing …”

And salivating is a good thing, apparently – one of the many milky titbits Evans uncovers is that a human baby’s saliva seeps into a mother’s bloodstream during breastfeeding, so that any rogue pathogens in the young one’s reservoir will be dealt with by the mother’s immune system, the antibodies being fed back to baby next feed time. Remarkable.

It’s moments like this that make Milk an interesting read, and there’s plenty of them. It might never have occurred to most readers that it was milk that kept Genghis Khan going all night, his Mongol hoards slurping the juice of their mares as they slaughtered and raped their way across Central Asia. Nor that milk has been – and still is – the drink of choice for white supremacists, from US president Herbert Hoover declaring that milk was responsible for “the very growth and virility of the white race”, to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declaring himself to be “very tolerant … lactose tolerant!”, prompting his alt-right followers to demonstrably guzzle milk as a provocative political gesture.

But a bulk of words in Milk are spent on the mammalian miracle of the mother whose body itself manufactures the perfect food for her offspring, and Evans is rightly overwhelmed by the ­notion.

“Three days ago, this cream was grass,” he writes. “And that blows my mind.”

Human mothers do the cow thing, too, and Evans devotes several chapters to history’s attempts to let mum off the hook, some of which have been fatal, almost all having proved suboptimal. The 18th-century fashion for wet nurses, promoted for reasons of vanity more so than nutrition, was catastrophic, Evans writing that “of the 21,000 babies who were born in Paris in 1780, barely 1000 were nursed by their own mothers”, and “of 66,259 Parisian babies sent to country wet nurses between 1770 and 1776, a third were dead by six months”. A greater understanding of the delicate role of sanitation has shortened the odds.

The advent of baby formula, too, while a life-saver for millions, has been a horn of plenty for the opportunistic; Evans recalling that in the 1980s, multinational food giant Nestlé was busted flogging formula by “body-shaming women” into fearing the inevitable “bosom sag” that would result from breastfeeding.

Milk’s future is murky, dairy unable to hide from humankind’s stampeding desire for artificial things. Anxiety around the environmental wreckage of biofuel, not to mention methane (cow farts accounting for an eye-watering 0.29 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions), has frogmarched dairy into laboratories where eggheads fiddle with ways to make udders redundant. Evans can barely control his own cynicism, reporting that one company, whose slogan trumpets “Same dairy, minus the cow”, is bent on “attracting board members from PepsiCo, Danone and Nestlé, so you know they care about human health and wellbeing”. Message received.

Not that Evans is entirely unkind to such futurists. He quotes one company whose publicity exclaims: “Nature’s method is perfect … but it didn’t count on having 10 billion mouths to feed”, and he thinks that’s “fair enough”.

In the end, though, we are talking about milk, the apple of Evans’ eye, and he wouldn’t trade his cow for all the tea in China.

“I’m biased in favour of dairy, I know,” he croons. “I’m biased in favour of cows, of that there is no doubt.”

If you only read one dairy-related book this year …

Jack Marx was — and is — bottle-fed.