Cultures of Milk

Andrea S. Wiley

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369702
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique publique en matière d'agriculture

Milk is the only food mammals produce naturally to feed their offspring. The human species is the only one that takes milk from other animals and consumes it beyond weaning age. Cultures of Milk contrasts the practices of the world's two leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, Andrea Wiley reveals that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value.Shifting socioeconomic and political factors influence how people perceive the importance of milk and how much they consume. In India, where milk is out of reach for many, consumption is rising rapidly among the urban middle class. But milk drinking is declining in America, despite the strength of the dairy industry. Milk is bound up in discussions of food scarcity in India and food abundance in the United States. Promotion of milk as a means to enhance child growth boosted consumption in twentieth-century America and is currently doing the same in India, where average height is low. Wiley considers how variation among populations in the ability to digest lactose and ideas about how milk affects digestion influence the type of milk and milk products consumed. In India, most milk comes from buffalo, but cows have sacred status for Hindus. In the United States, cow's milk has long been a privileged food, but is now facing competition from plant-based milk.

1

Introduction

Cultures of Milk

Milk. Cheese. Yogurt. These products have been a mainstays of the diets of northern Europeans since cattle were domesticated in the region about 8,000 years ago. The proportions of consumption of each have changed over time, most notably with the rise of fresh milk consumption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is fair to say that when most people think about dairy products they are envisioning them as part of European cuisines, produced by placid large-bodied black-and-white Holstein or fawn-colored Jersey cows grazing in verdant pastures, and consumed by tall, robust, light-skinned people. As a representation of a global pattern of milk production and consumption, this image was never quite accurate. While northern Europe certainly has a well-known set of dairy traditions underpinned by such cows and other similar breeds, this region is not the only one to have a long-established set of practices around milk production and consumption. Nor have northern Europeans always been tall and robust.

Nomadic populations of central Asia, as well as East and West Africa, rely on milk and milk products as dietary staples, and herd a variety of animals (cows, horses, camels, goats, and sheep). But it was in South Asia, among large-scale settled populations that grew crops and kept domestic animals, where the other major dairy culture of the world developed. Here milk comes mostly from another large bovine species, the water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), as well as local cows of the species Bos indicus, as opposed to Bos taurus in Europe. Goat milk is also drunk, although not as extensively and mostly in rural areas. In fact India currently produces and consumes more milk than any other country, although given its large population size, ecological diversity, and high poverty rates, both per capita production and consumption are relatively low. Furthermore, the way in which milk and milk products are consumed is quite different from Europe and among its derived populations in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Aged cheese, for example, a quintessential dairy product in areas populated by Europeans, has never been part of the portfolio of Indian dairy products. Fermented milk and production of curds (yogurt) have a deep history in India, but cheeses created from active acid-based separation of curds from whey are largely products of the Portuguese colonial enterprise. Fresh cheeses such as chhana and paneer now have a variety of culinary uses, but commercial production is limited and these are not savored on their own, but rather incorporated into sweetmeats and curries. Given the centrality of elaborate cheese crafting to European dairying traditions, its absence in India may have contributed to a lack of international attention to indigenous Indian dairy customs. Even when the British ruled much of the subcontinent, there was little appreciation for Indian dairy products. It is also the case that India has not exported its dairy products—aged cheeses are well suited to the global marketplace in ways that fresh dairy products are not—and demand for milk has exceeded domestic supply in India. European Union countries are the major players in the global dairy trade, with Australia, New Zealand, and the United States having more regionally bounded trade networks for dairy.

Understanding Similarity and Difference in Dairy Cultures

In this book I bring Indian dairying traditions to the fore, and compare and contrast them with those in the United States, which are derived almost exclusively from Europe, especially northern Europe. I have conducted research on milk in both countries, and I find that insights into both dairy cultures can be enhanced by comparisons between them. I am less interested in the specifics of dairy production and more concerned with the ways in which various historical, cultural, and political economic forces have shaped how people think about milk and milk products and how these influence consumption in two large countries with robust dairy cultures.

India and the United States have long placed high value on these commodities but each has unique ecological, geographical, historical, and cultural circumstances. While the rise of fresh milk consumption in the United States and northern Europe is reasonably well documented, the fluctuating cultural status of milk and other dairy products has not been the subject of much scholarly work. Moreover, this and related consumption practices in India, with its large-scale dairy industries, have not been systematically studied. How milk and milk product consumption and Hindu ideals about the sanctity of the cow articulate with the political economy of milk production and consumption and how India negotiates the status of milk in ways that are similar to and/or different from the United States, where cows are—for all practical purposes—the only source of milk, is a major theme.

Throughout the book I rely on material from ethnographic work, literature, popular media, advertisements, official policies, published scientific work, and my studies of milk consumption and child growth, among other types of data, in order to address these questions. I consider the range of variability within and between each country with respect to uses of milk, the physiology of milk digestion (i.e., adult lactase production), and public health policies related to diet. I also examine the varying importance of nonfluid forms of milk (emphasizing butter, ghee, cheese, and yogurt [dahi]); complexities associated with different types of milk (cow and water buffalo in India; cow and plant-based milks in the United States); and the relationship between children and milk, including marketing and nutrition education practices as well as evidence concerning milk and child growth.

The overarching approach I take to this investigation is a biocultural one (Wiley, 1992, 1993; Wiley and Allen, 2013), which analyzes the interplay between evolutionary processes, biological outcomes, and social and cultural institutions and ideals. In this case, I assess variation and similarity in milk consumption and the meanings attached to milk within the two countries in relation to their evolutionary and social histories with milk. This deep historical and biological foundation is then considered in light of more recent and contemporary ecological, economic, and political processes that established bovine domestication, dairying, and dairy consumption. I focus on the ways in which these have changed over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and affect contemporary beliefs and practices related to milk consumption. Developments at the local, national, and global levels influence milk consumption in India and the United States and thereby contribute to similarity and variability in the dairy cultures of the two countries.

I start from the observation that, as a food, milk possesses some unique qualities, and that these have been manipulated and understood within different social and cultural contexts. Thus milk’s material nature is front and center, along with its known and imagined effects on the human body. As Peter Atkins concluded in his work on milk’s shifting qualities as it was subject to biochemical and legal scrutiny in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom, “The everyday material of our lives, including food and drink, because it is unconsidered, because it is unchallenged in its significance, is a powerful means of guiding our expectations—in the case of food, our habituated, embodied norms of nutritional sufficiency and bodily reproduction” (Atkins, 2010, 279). The ideas that people hold about milk’s qualities shape its consumption; these have their own history, which I maintain are derived in significant ways from milk’s biology and hence its perceived effects on human biology, especially that of children.

Debates about whether it is more useful to interpret consumption of a particular food as adaptive under a set of ecological and subsistence conditions or if food production and consumption practices are themselves strongly influenced by ideological systems have a long history in anthropology. These competing modes of explanation are best represented by debates over pork taboos among Jews and Muslims, cannibalism among the Aztecs, and prohibitions on cow slaughter and beef consumption among Hindus (cf. Douglas, 2002 [1966]; Harner, 1977; Harris, 1985; Ortiz de Montellano, 1978; Sahlins, 1976). Materialist perspectives—and evolutionary perspectives from the biological sciences more generally—consider adaptive significance (i.e., whether the behavior enhances survival and/or reproduction) as primary and maintain that the benefits of a given behavior should outweigh any costs, measured in economic or Darwinian fitness terms (Brown et al., 2011; Harris, 1979). Normative views follow from that.

On the other hand, both Mary Douglas and Marshall Sahlins argue that ideals are primary, and that these in turn drive behavior, such as what to eat or what to produce. Sahlins articulated this view in the following: “the world environment [of production of agricultural commodities such as meat] is organized by specific valuations of edibility and inedibility, themselves qualitative and in no way justifiable by biological, ecological, or economic advantage” (Sahlins, 1976, 171). The debate between these two rather entrenched perspectives figures prominently in the question of why Hindus consider the cow to be sacred. Marvin Harris argued that it is the economic contributions of the cow that protect it from slaughter (Harris, 1966). This perspective generated a sizeable counterliterature that attempted to show that other factors—Hindu scripture, cosmology, political agendas—underpinned the cow’s sacred status, or provided data that undermined the claim of economic value (see Chapter 3).

In my view, there is nothing inherent to these perspectives that renders them mutually exclusive. A biocultural approach allows for the ways in which a particular behavior (e.g., consumption of milk) might be considered adaptive and how the normative views that people hold influence that practice. Ideals, worldviews, and principles have histories and don’t act as autonomous or ahistorical motivators of behavior; instead these—and their ability to influence behavior—are also in flux in relation to ecological, economic, political, demographic, and other social processes (Wiley, 1992). With regard to milk, how this food figures in people’s imaginations is important. What people think milk ingestion will do for them, or what drinking—or at least purchasing—milk means to them motivates those practices, at least in a proximate sense. In turn, the meanings of those biological effects, as well as manifest biological outcomes, are also critical. In both the United States and India milk fits into conceptualizations of what the body should look like and in fact may influence what the body does look like.

To use a related example, Sidney Mintz demonstrated that sugar fit into new conceptualizations of time and meal patterns framed by industrial work as it infiltrated the British diet during the nineteenth century (Mintz, 1985). Sugar became the energy source for the industrial proletariat, with deleterious consequences for the diet. I argue that milk may have served to rectify some of the nutritional shortcomings of this dietary shift by becoming the food associated with the modern body—due to its perceived abilities to make it bigger, stronger, and more powerful—and these qualities extended to the nation-state (Wiley, 2011a). Of course, milk and sugar became mingled in tea (or chai in India): both tea and sugar were colonial commodities, grown in different hemispheres on a large scale. They flavored and sweetened a familiar domestic commodity, although it is important to keep in mind that fresh milk consumption was not necessarily routine in the United Kingdom, the United States, or India. In my view, milk consumption was bolstered by its use in this new bittersweet beverage, as well as its colonial cousins, coffee (which replaced tea in the United States as the vehicle for sugar and milk) and chocolate.

Why Milk?

Why devote an analysis to milk and milk products? In what way is this topic and comparison more compelling than, say, a comparison of other foods the regions have in common, such as wheat (leavened bread versus flatbreads), or legumes (peas versus lentils)? Insofar as the close analysis of any given food is a lens into different cultures and the historical processes that have shaped culinary traditions, there is no real difference. On the other hand, in both places milk is marked as a “special” food, one with attributes that have no equivalent in other foods. Because of this, milk is particularly elaborated in popular discourse and embedded in political, economic, cultural, and health discussions and institutions. Furthermore, milk is often considered to have specific consequences for the biology of its consumers, so it tells us much about how people think about their bodies, and how their bodies in turn signify something important about their social lives. As Sidney Mintz wrote in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, a book that has become a touchstone for food scholarship, “In understanding the relationship between commodity and person, we unearth anew the history of ourselves” (1985, 214).

There are several ways in which milk is considered special, and these stem from recognition of its unusual source. Milk is produced by maternal mammals as the initial food for their infants. Indeed, milk production by females is a defining trait of this class of animals. What this means too is that milk is the only food that is produced in order to be consumed (honey is another, though it is produced from pollen rather than from bees themselves). The rest of the food that mammals, including humans, eat comes from some form of predation—that is, we have to “kill” plants and animals in order to eat them. Of course, milk is produced by mammals only for consumption by infants, for whom it is their sole food for some length of time. As such, milk is tailored to meet the growth, developmental, and immunological needs of infants of a given species. Given its role in this regard, milk is often described as a “complete” food (blurring the “food/drink” dichotomy), but what constitutes a “complete” food for infants is likely to be quite different from what older children or adults should consume. It is also the case that mammalian milks are highly variable in their composition, and milk from one would be quite unsuitable for another, as each species has different growth rates, sizes at birth and adulthood, and ecological niches (Oftedal and Iverson, 1995). For example, cow milk is too low in iron to be suitable as a breastmilk substitute for young human infants, and it is much richer in protein and calcium to support the rapid growth of a large bovine skeleton.

Humans are unique insofar as many people drink the milk of other mammalian species (mostly bovine), and they consume it well beyond the age of weaning. As I already noted, this has not been the historical norm for humans. The production and consumption of milk and milk products has been restricted to nomadic pastoralist groups and settled societies of Europe and South Asia. Prior to European colonization, there were virtually no domesticated mammals and certainly no dairying traditions among Native American, Australian, or Oceanic populations. In East and Southeast Asia, the use of domesticated animals for dairying was more or less nonexistent. Dairying played a large role in Tibetan and Mongolian diets, and during Mongolian control of China there was some dairy presence in the diet, but subsequently usage of milk products died out (Anderson, 1987; Huang, 2002). In Sub-Saharan Africa, very clear cultural and dietary distinctions existed between pastoralists, who relied heavily on their dairy animals, and agricultural populations, who made little or no use of dairy products (Simoons, 1981). European dairy traditions took hold across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and these regions stand out in the current global distribution of milk availability, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Despite being the largest milk producer in the world, India is not prominent in Figure 1.1, as overall per capita levels are low.

Figure 1.1 Current per capita globa...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Cultures of Milk
• 2. A Brief Social History of Milk Consumption in the United States
• 3. A History of Milk in India
• 4. Diversity in Dairy: Cows, Buffalo, and Nonmammalian Milks
• 5. Milk as a Children’s Food: Growth and the Meanings of Milk for Children
• 6. Conclusion: Milk, Biology, and Culture in India and the United States
• Notes
• References
• Index