The moment feels ripe for an undertaking as ambitious as Mendelson’s. For Americans of a certain age, “Got Milk?” advertisements, featuring celebrities whose upper lips bore pasty milk mustaches, were abiding presences on television or in magazines, propagating the belief that milk was a nonpareil elixir of calcium. Even still, Americans were routinely assailed with a dizzying catalogue of fresh-milk variants in coffee shops and grocery stores: whole, reduced fat, low fat, skim. The very definition of “milk” has only recently become a site of semantic litigation, as plant-based alternatives to dairy—made from almonds or oats, pistachios or potatoes—sprout on supermarket shelves, offering accommodations to lactose-intolerant consumers. The past few years have likewise brought increasing cultural awareness that the American dairy industry, in its current formulation, is sustainable for few: farmers struggle to turn a profit, increasingly contending with depression, even suicide. Cows themselves suffer maltreatment, pressured to bear the highest possible yield. Americans who drink milk may receive a product that scarcely resembles what emerged from the animal; those who can’t tolerate milk might be left to tend to their own discomfort, resorting to Lactaid pills to ease their irritations. This makes a project like Mendelson’s unquestionably well timed, the premise she teases in her opening pages intriguing: How did a practice as absurd as drinking milk become such a sworn article of faith in the United States and beyond?
What follows are three hundred pages dense with scrupulous research, amounting to a largely persuasive attempt on Mendelson’s part to engage the layperson in sharing her anger at this state of affairs. Mendelson whizzes through centuries of history as she charts the gradual spread of “dairying,” from its origins in the prehistoric Near East and Western Asia, where milk carried associations with goddesses, to its prevalence in northern Europe. Settlers to that area developed a genetic attribute that allowed them to digest fresh milk as adults somewhere along their journey from the Fertile Crescent. (Mendelson triangulates that this may have happened between 5500 B.C. and 2300 B.C.) That very trait spread through the population of northern Europe. Thousands of years later, Britain, one of the stations where this genetic quirk was especially prominent, would become a dominant global power, colonizing diffuse corners of the world while it, along with the United States later on, developed the influence to govern scientific dogma internationally.