Milk!

A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

By: Mark Kurlansky

Narrated by: Brian Sutherland

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the best-selling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic and culinary story of milk and all things dairy - with recipes throughout.

According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself.

Before the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. But during the 19th century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. And today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization.

Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics and economics.

©2018 Mark Kurlansky (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas is a feat of investigation, compilation and organization.... Altogether a complex and rich survey, Milk! is a book well worth nursing." (Wall Street Journal)

Narrated by Siri

The book has some really good history as do all of Kurlansky’s books that I have read (listed to).
Personally, I would have liked more of the deeper history and less on the relatively modern.

Unfortunately, the narrator is horrible. When I first began listening, I honestly thought the book was being read by Siri with a male voice.
There is virtually no emotion, nothing to help keep you engaged, just textbook reading.

Great History by Author, interesting narrator

The author is very thoughtful, precisely following the history of a very controversial food. From the moment tiny humans come from the womb, until the skill and dexterity along with muscle and skeletal maturity allow for self feeding, milk is absolutely essential. Most of the world, however, cannot digest milk sugar after weaning- unless there is a familial and cultural history of using and eating milk.

The author not only gives historical recipes, he details the societal norms, even going into the milk depots in New York, and how filth, contaminated milk, and milk borne disease has shaped our farming practices, even government policy on milk distribution.

There is also history from the middle east, even China and Japan. Yogurt (yog-hurt, as pronounced by the narrator) is discussed, from Bulgaria, but also Icelandic skyr, which is really a cheese, and the toxic, acidic whey from the straining of mass-produced Greek style yogurt. Cheese from France, in all its variety, and from England (Stilton, Cheddar) and the effects cheese has on the gut, is all given space.

The narrator has a nice tone, but his pronunciation can be a bit humorous, a decisively unique quality, but easy to hear. It isn't distracting, just not your standard generic English.

Informative

Enough history to keep me interested, and enough recipes to cut through the monotony of the excruciatingly long history of milk. Enjoyable - would listen to again.

Read the Book....But don't listen to it!!!

Mark Kurlansky is an instant buy for me. The stranger the topic, the more fascinating I know it will be. So when I saw he had a new book, I went ahead and used my credit without listening to the audio sample. Big Mistake!! The narration sounds so robotic that I'm almost convinced that it IS just a chatbot. The charm of the writing is completely lost by the stilted and monotone delivery.

Fantastic book read by a robot

Fascinating work about milk but the narrator made a male Siri voice sound as animated as Robin Williams in his party days. The recipes are fantastic and the sources well researched. Just the narrator sounded like an old dmv number reader.

Not quite what I was expecting

The book was okay, but I felt the author spent far too much time on recipes seeing as how most readers are unlikely to ever make any of them. And the narrator had no vocal energy. It felt as if he was reading to put his audience to sleep.

Sour milk turns to sweet cream

The first four or five chapters of this book are a monotonous recitation of the many types of dairy products that humans have consumed throughout history. Listener/reader, be patient and wait for the stories of culture and science around a single topic that are the hallmark of Kurlansky’s books. Kurlansky can be quite drol, but this only emerges after the first quarter of the book.

It was a mistake for the audiobook to include the more than 100 recipes that appear in the text. These should have been placed at the end of the recording so that interested listeners could access them, without interrupting the main text. Recommended.

Very entertaining

I picked, Milk, up after finishing, Salt, and am not disappointed.
The book holds your attention by breaking the topic down into digestible sub-topics and avoids Milk-burnout by bouncing between the various aspects of Milk's impact, and interesting digressions relating to the topic.

interesting

very interesting. Well researched and organized. Not as gripping as "Salt" but certainly as informative.

Audible and recipes don't are a bad fit

"The narrative portions of the book are good but a large portion is devoted to recipes which are not interesting to listen to and impractical for cooking. This is a better book to read.