Research

Understanding Milk’s Cultural Impact

  • Free school milk distribution at Newmarket State School, Brisbane City, July 1958

    A postwar scheme that was discontinued by the 1970s was school milk. Children had to drink a 200ml bottle of milk every day at the allotted time, unless they had a note from their parents.

    The milk was delivered to schools early in the morning in crates and would often sit outside in the heat for hours.

    Credit: Queensland Government

Milk is our first food; something that we all have a relationship to even if we may not see ourselves as milk drinkers.

The Complex History of Milk Consumption

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At the same time, milk is also a substance that has a surprisingly complicated history. This goes right back to the beginning. For example, researchers have found that people in both the UK and Kenya started drinking animal milk approximately 6000 years ago at a time when very few people’s bodies could process lactose, a type of sugar found in milk. 

It is still very common to have difficulties digesting milk today.

    1. Kitty with Milk Bottle

      Photo credit: old pc - Photochrom Co - Tunbridge Wells, Kent

    2. The Lactation of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 1480-1485

      Photo credit: public domain/wikimedia commons

    3. A joint advertisement for milk by the Oregon Dairyman's League and Portland Milk Distributions from the February 11, 1920 edition of the Morning Oregonian

      Photo credit: public domain/wikimedia commons

Milk has the potential to be very dangerous, in particular when it needs to travel or be stored before being consumed. Raw milk has been the cause of significant bacterial outbreaks of typhoid, milk-borne scarlet fever, diphtheria and tuberculosis passed on from the cow, not to mention e-coli which develops in milk.

So not only is milk difficult to digest, but milk-safety is also dependent on an intimate understanding of the health of dairy animals, as well as careful processing and storing. This includes boiling, fermentation and pasteurisation, as well as highly industrialised processes such as High Pressure Processing, Ultra-Violet-C irradiation and spray drying.

Didcot Railway Museum milk train

  • Credit: David Merrett from Daventry, England

This combination of a shared relationship with milk, a deep history, and its potential for danger means that not only is milk a nutritional substance that is produced by female animals, but it is also cultural.

For example, we might expect that milk is uniformly white based on what we can access in the supermarket, yet as any dairy farmer will know, the colour of milk can vary considerably depending on a cow’s diet and the age of its calf. Likewise, one of the reasons we drink milk may be because it contains calcium, building strong bones and teeth.

In a British hospital, a child is given a drink of milk.

However that calcium actually comes from the grass that cows eat, and is transferred into their milk. The reason we associate calcium with milk and not, for example, spinach or broccoli - equally rich in calcium - is cultural.

Girl with milk moustache
White and pink floral ceramic cup with spilled milk

    1. In a British hospital, a child is given a drink of milk. Milk is distributed in Britain after the needs of priority classes--children under five, expectant and nursing mothers, older children, invalids, hospitals and schools--have been supplied. The basic allowance of fluid milk for adults in November, 1942 was two pints a week, but priority classes get more, according to their diet requirements

      Photo credit: United States Office Of War Information. England United Kingdom, 1943. Mar. Retrieved from the Library of Congress

    2. Girl with milk moustache

      Photo credit: Alex Green, Pexels

    3. White and pink floral ceramic cup with spilled milk

      Photo credit: Noemí Jiménez / Unsplash

The Role of Politics in the Milk Industry

When a valuable global industry meets cultural expectations relating to milk, you also get politics. For example, governments across the world have played a significant role in both subsidising the milk industry in order to bring the cost of milk to consumers down, and providing children with free milk in schools. This is the case in both the UK and Kenya.

School milk programme

Research focus

In this project we are interested in asking whose cultural relationships with milk have come to dominate these politics, and what the long term everyday impacts of this are to milk consumers and producers today.

  • Photo credit: ILRI/Shadrack Isingoma