Milk by Anne Mendelson Read Free Book Online

everywhere. The premodern history, however, hasn’t been much explored. In fact, a general failure of historical perspective set in at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution afterGreat Britain exported its own milk-centered customs and attitudes to all the Anglophone colonies including the future United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For all practical purposes these are now extensions of the original Northwestern Cow Belt.
    From early times one huge factor has set apart the population of this zone from most of the human race: a capacity for digestinglactose, discussed from a biological standpoint in “The Story of Modern Milk.” A second, almost equally important difference rooted in the northwestern European transitionfrom the medieval to the modern economy came into play later (and as we shall see, decisively shaped the mentality of modern dairying). But at least at the outset, the uses of milk in the future Great Britain and its near European neighbors don’t seem to have been decisively different from other people’s.

    Livestock husbandry and dairying probably spread out from the Near East intonorthwestern Europe at around 3000 B.C. As in the Northeastern Cow Belt, cattle constitutionally liked the local weather and soon became more dominantmilch animals thansheep andgoats. By medieval times sheep’s milk was highly valued by many but discouragingly labor-intensive to produce; where sheep were raised for wool, people sometimes came to ignore any other purpose. Goats tended to be preferred for milking in areas too steep or bleakly exposed for cattle grazing (for example, parts of Norway and Scotland). But this is to get ahead of the story.
    How didprehistoric farmers of the northwest use cows’ or other animals’ milk in the unrecorded millennia before the Romans arrived? Set aside modern assumptions based on an industry that brings fresh drinkable milk to millions, and the truth is that there’s very little to go on. One crucial fact is that sinceNeolithic times the region has contained one of the planet’s most remarkable pockets of “lactase persistence,” or “lactose tolerance,” the ability to digest the lactose in unsoured milk long beyond infancy. Archaeologists hypothesize that the genes governing the condition occurred widely in a prehistoric culture that occupied parts of southern Scandinavia, the Low Countries, north coastal Germany, and the Baltic lands. (Other lactose-tolerant peoples are scattered inAfrica and northernIndia, and there may be still more elsewhere.) But the ability to do something isn’t the same thing as a preconditioned choice to do it all or even 50 percent of the time. There is little evidence to prove that the early peoples of northwestern Europe had as highly developed a preference for drinking milk fresh as their modern descendants. Milk sours there as regularly as in the Near East (though more slowly) and has the same advantages in that form.
WHAT THEROMANS SAW
    The first observers who might have cast some light on the prevalence or nonprevalance of milk drinking were the Romans, who described what they saw in breathtakingly unhelpful language. The problem in trying to decipher their accounts of Gaulish foodways is that they brought a distinctly southern perspective to every northern region they explored.
    From a dairying viewpoint, things had taken very different turns north and south of the Alps when agriculture diffused westward into Europe. The Mediterranean coast fromItaly to Iberia—the Romans’ “Cisalpine Gaul”—developed a version ofDiverse Sources Belt preferences without quite as wide a range ofmilch animals;sheep andgoats became the primary sources, with cow dairying becoming competitive only in pockets. It appears that, except for fresh cheeses, the fresh dairy products that are the focus of this book either didn’t acquire as much importance in the south as in the four major milking zones or were relegated to a lesser role in early