Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink

The story of how Americans came to drink milk

For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as nature's perfect food, as indispensable and the most complete food. These milk boosters have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?

Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, Milk: The Deadly Poison, and Don't Drink Your Milk have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.

In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.

Author: E. Melanie Dupuis
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 02/01/2002
Pages: 310
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.95h x 5.92w x 0.84d
ISBN: 9780814719381

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2002 pg. 136

About the Author
Dupuis, E. Melanie: - E. Melanie DuPuis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink.