$milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky$

$milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky$ $milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky$

In addition, while food rationing was an indelible part of the home effort, milk was not rationed, and consumption jumped. As soldiers were drafted into service, physicians noticed a pattern of malnutrition in many of the young men who had grown up impoverished during the Depression. Once again it was war-World War II in particular-that helped transform milk in the U.S. Not much changed with milk in the ensuing millennia except more people came to value it for nutrition and flavor, including some of the first American colonists who brought cows across the Atlantic.Ģ0th Century: School Lunches and the Organic Rule That foundation stayed in place for quite some time. As human beings changed and evolved, the foundation of our milk-drinking culture was laid. It’s possible adult humans already drank other mammals’ milk because illness was better than death during famine, and infants always needed milk if a mother or wet nurse wasn’t available. But around 6,000 BCE, the ability for some adult humans to tolerate lactose kicked in and was passed down through people in Europe as well as in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Humans, like all mammals, weren’t built to digest lactose, milk’s natural sugar, beyond childhood. Then Mother Nature stepped in and changed everything.Īs people and cattle migrated, they took with them a genetic mutation that mysteriously began to appear shortly after dairy products were developed-lactose tolerance.

$milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky$

Dairy got its start in what is now Turkey in about 8,000 BCE, and for reasons of food safety in the days before refrigeration, the first milk from animals was turned into yogurt, cheese, and butter. It took the domestication of cattle, following on the heels of sheep and goats, to put the ancient dairy industry into motion and a quirk of genetics to move it along.

$milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky$

Milk a 10000 year food fracas mark kurlansky