Purity and Danger

Milk occupies a curiously ambiguous place in the history and culture of food. It has been pointed to as an archetypal, almost elementally nourishing food, supremely healthful, reflecting the nurturing relationship of mother and infant. In recent times, its whiteness has come to stand as a symbol of natural goodness and purity. But milk also conceals danger. Its nutritional largesse is equally appealing to hosts of putrefying bacteria, and unless milk is consumed almost immediately, it rapidly deteriorates into a decidedly unwholesome mass. Even in the apparently safe period between lactation and curdling, pathogenic organisms may lurk and multiply with potentially more devastating consequences for a new infant than the more immediately apparent problems of an obviously bad food.

The very processes of corruption, however, also provided the ways by which milk became a more widespread and acceptable food. Some contaminating organisms transform milk toward simple forms of butter, cheese, or yoghurt, and it is in these forms, not as a beverage, that milk has been consumed throughout the greater part of the history of human eating. As a highly ephemeral food then, unless milk is transmitted directly between provider (whether human or animal) and consumer, it is fraught with danger. Preservation has thus been the overriding factor in milk’s development as an important food for humans.

Initially, preservation was achieved through manufacture into butter or cheese. Later, briefly, fresh milk was kept safe only by cleanliness of production and speed of transport; in the twentieth century, however, milk has been preserved primarily by means of heat treatment, particularly pasteurization. This preservation of milk, particularly on an industrial scale since the late nineteenth century, highlights another contradictory tension in the nature of its consumption.