AR-News: Milk--How a wholesome drink became a villain.

[jim robertson]

How a wholesome drink became a villain.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, June 18, 2004, at 1:18 PM PT



America's international reputation is as the land of milk and money. Here, 
milk has long been thought of as not just another nutritious beverage but as 
purity, even patriotism, in a glass. The title of a recent chronicle of the 
rise of milk-drinking in America reflects the national view of the beverage: 
Nature's Perfect Food. "In the U.S., milk is virtually the national emblem 
(apple pie, in comparison, is an also-ran)," London's Guardian pronounced 
last year. If pollsters asked such questions, for most of the 20th century 
milk's favorability ratings would probably have exceeded even water's. In 
the 1980s, milk was so venerated that a sociologist in the New York Times 
linked a decrease in its consumption to the declining public faith in all 
institutions, from the church to the academy to the press to government.

Since then, America's belief in the goodness of milk has taken a darker 
turn. Milk has turned from a symbol of true-blue Americana into a token of 
everything that's wrong with the country. As with most cultural changes, the 
transformation began with extremists, but it has crept into mainstream 
discourse. Like Hulk Hogan suddenly becoming a wrestling villain, the symbol 
of saying your prayers and taking your vitamins, of right-thinking 
Americanness, has now become the bad guy.

These days, milk's chief sin is its cost. In May, the price of dairy 
products shot up by nearly 7 percent, the largest monthly increase in almost 
60 years. Nationally, a gallon of milk runs around $3, and in some places 
you'll pay nearly $5. Local papers everywhere are running stories bemoaning 
the high price of milk. West Virginia's Sunday Gazette-Mail listed ways that 
local residents are stretching their milk dollars: One couple canceled the 
Sunday paper and switched their long-distance service. One area woman is 
limiting the amount of milk her children can pour into their cereal. Another 
pours orange juice over her breakfast. Another woman is buying milk in bulk 
and freezing the extra. And still another is buying 2 percent milk and 
adding water to it to turn it into skim milk, though she hasn't confessed 
the crime to her family. The malaise is obvious. What next, milk lines?


But before milk was too expensive, it was too cheap. Milk was attacked as 
government-subsidized pork, propped up by economic Stalinism. It's committed 
other offenses, too. In our health-conscious times, the once-wholesome drink 
is fingered for fattening kids and clogging arteries. Or is it, as others 
would have it, corporate poison inserted into the food supply by rapacious 
Big Business? Or Frankenfood engineered by egomaniacal scientists? Does 
hormone-altered milk fuel teenage sexuality by causing early puberty in 
girls? Because Northern Europeans (and Saharan nomads) are about the only 
people in the world who can digest milk as adults, is it racist?

There's a national frenzy for milk reform. Some think whole milk and 2 
percent milk should be banned from schools. The Congressional Black Caucus 
has blamed the USDA food pyramid for institutionalizing milk in the national 
diet. Others have sued the federal school-lunch program for racial 
discrimination for refusing to subsidize nondairy beverages without a note 
from a doctor. Animal-rights advocates attack dairy farmers for keeping cows 
in a state of permanent pregnancy and then selling off the calves for veal. 
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals once put Rudy Giuliani on a 
billboard with the tag line, "Got prostate cancer?" The author of a book 
called Milk: The Deadly Poison blamed milk for the death of Florence 
Griffith Joyner. Even "Got Milk?" is under attack. Some dairy farmers claim 
that the mandatory payments they must make to fund government-supervised 
industry advertising is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

These reform movements are reversing a long national tradition. Milk reform 
began as soon as milk drinking became an entrenched American habit—during 
the mid-1800s, as Americans moved to cities. But the early reformers wanted 
Americans to drink more milk, not less. (Milk-drinking is an industrial, 
urban activity, not a rural one. Before pasteurization, most milk was too 
dangerous to drink.) As E. Melanie DuPuis, a University of California-Santa 
Cruz sociologist, details in Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became 
America's Drink, the early reformers blamed rising infant mortality on city 
life: The new cities, they argued, caused women to become morally degenerate 
and physically weak, and they transmitted those ailments to the infants they 
breast-fed. The solution: Feed babies cleaner, purer cow's milk.

For the next 100 years, reformers tried to make milk-drinking more 
healthful. In the early 20th century, the phrase "the milk question" was 
shorthand for the dilemma the beverage posed: Americans needed to drink it 
to improve their health, but because milk carried bacteria and diseases like 
tuberculosis and typhoid, it was dangerous to imbibe.

Milk's reputation has suffered not because milk is worse today—if anything, 
it's safer—but because we've changed our attitudes toward other things. We 
used to like Big Government for protecting public health; now it's robbing 
our pocketbooks. Before industrial farming raped the countryside, it created 
a bountiful food supply. And before milk was contemptibly Eurocentric and 
racist, it was admirably Eurocentric and racist. DuPuis cites a 1920s 
National Dairy Council publication in which a nutritionist declares, "The 
people who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous people, 
who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades in the 
world, who have an appreciation for art, literature and music, who are 
progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect are the 
people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products." A 1933 
history of New York agriculture asserted, "A casual look at the races of 
people seems to show that those using much milk are the strongest physically 
and mentally, and the most enduring peoples of the world. Of all races, the 
Aryans seem have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest users 
of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high 
development of this division of human beings."

You can't blame milk for being confused. It's getting attacked for exactly 
the same reasons it was once celebrated. But perhaps the milk skeptics are 
right—justice may finally be catching up to this innocent-seeming beverage. 
After all, on the Fourth of July in 1850, President Zachary Taylor dedicated 
the Washington Monument and spent the day eating cherries and milk. He fell 
sick. Five days later, he died. For 150 years, milk's gotten away with 
murder. Isn't that long enough?


Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail 
him at suellentrop at slate.com.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102639/