Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 344

Velten begins her book by looking at human attitudes to the milk of many mammals around the world over time. She shifts quite rapidly to her main focus: production and consumption of cows’ milk in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and the United States. She organizes her book primarily around shifting views about the value of milk within that period and geographic framework. By the mid-nineteenth century, milk had acquired a bad reputation, as a result of horrific problems arising from the way the commodity was marketed to an ever larger, urban-based population. The author describes city dairies in that period, the way adulterated milk was produced, how disease (most particularly tuberculosis and dysentery) was transferred through milk to people (especially infants), the increased emphasis on cows’ milk as a replacement of human milk for babies, and the rise of both condensed and powdered milk.

The author outlines demands for reform and shows how better control over the quality of milk on the market was put in place. She compares regulations enforced by New York State and Britain to improve the purity of milk and its cleanliness, and to ensure the absence of disease-carrying bacteria in it. She discusses the process of pasteurization. Velten also notes efforts at promoting milk. Milk was supplied by the state to schoolchildren in Britain, for example. The advertising of milk, and state support of advertising, played a role in helping the milk cause. These activities made milk a healthier product and also increased public respect for it. By 1950 milk had achieved huge popularity, with a growing body of consumers in both Britain and the United States.

But late in the twentieth century, milk’s star began to fall. Milk consumption in the United States and in Britain was in decline by the 1970s (particularly among the young), while consumption of carbonated drinks was on the rise. Drinking milk was simply not cool or hip. Some argued that pasteurization had ruined the natural taste of milk. On top of this situation, significant shifts in attitudes to milk as a food had taken place. Dr Benjamin Spock, for example, after years of advocating milk for children, reversed his view. He encouraged the abandonment of milk drinking. People had become concerned about the welfare of cows supplying the milk, as well as health issues around ‘technological’ milk (milk from cloned cows for example). In the meantime, consumption of milk has risen considerably in Asia. Velten briefly compares modern Anglo-American trends with those in Asia late in the twentieth century. The author sees this pattern as part of a larger one, which could be described as ‘nutritional colonization’. Decline of milk drinking in traditional consuming countries does not mean that milk consumption on a world scale is also declining. Asian increases in milk drinking led to a rise in global consumption.

The book’s focus is milk, not the dairy industry. Generally speaking, Velten downplays dairying in her story. Because historical dairying is very much part of the historical milk story, however, overview observations on how the dairy industry developed would have been useful. Knowing more about the bovine types producing the milk within the period she discusses (as well as dairymen’s points of view) would have put the subject of milk into a broader context. Many of the problems of the early fluid milk industry related to contingent changes in the cheese and butter industries. Cattle movement and the role of bovine disease in that movement were also critical factors in historical dairying for milk. A brief look at the rinderpest plague of 1865, and the public’s attitudes to London’s milk in relation to it, would have placed the uproar over the city dairies in perspective. Milk ‘warm from the cow’ was no longer in such high esteem after that time. Understanding the dynamics of the world’s dairy cattle population today – their breeding and production – is essential if one wants to appreciate patterns in global consumption. The story of milk is a complicated one with many facets impinging on it. Recognizing that some complexity in the historical milk story arose from historical dairying is important. It is a point that the author might have emphasized more than she did.

This book is admirable in many ways. It is well written and organized. Casual readers will learn a great deal about milk consumption from it. There is no cutting-edge, innovative information in the book, but I believe the author wanted to attract a general educated reading public, not a specialized group of historians.