Hey April, do you know why British people like me put milk in their tea?
Hi everybody and welcome to a brand new episode of Eat My Globe.A podcast about things you didn't know you didn't know about food.And on today's very special episode we are going to be looking back in time to the history of milk.
from the time when it was first known to be expressed from a mother's breast into the willing mouths of infants, all the way up to today's plethora of milk and milk substitutes.You know the stuff.Almond milk, oat milk, ETC.
Along the way, we'll have some fun too.For example, why do the British like a little spot of milk in their tea?I particularly like a little spot of milk in my tea every time I have some.Milk helps my tea... utterly good.
I'm very sorry.I'm very, very sorry.Again, this is my wife.
Oh dear me.We will have a look at the science of how milk is made, how pasteurisation and homogenisation came to happen, and how milk became the staple of so many cultures. See what I did there?From around the globe.Dear me.Okay.
So, settle down and enjoy Eat My Globe on the story that is milk.This episode will be legendary.
Now the first thing is I should tell you that I do have an episode of Eat My Globe called Milk's Leap Towards Immortality, which is, even though I say so myself, really fascinating and about the history of cheese.
So after you listen to this one, you can check out that great episode too.Now then, I think First, as always on Eat My Globe, we have a look at how milk gets its name in English.
To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, quote, "...a whitish fluid, rich in fat and protein, secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals, including humans, for the nourishment of their young, and taken from cows, sheep, etc., as an article of the human diet."
End quote. And according to our chums at Merrion-Webster, the word milk comes to us from, quote, Middle English, from Old English.Mjölk, milk, akin to Old High German.Meer, milk. or Old English Melkann, to milk."
According to Statista in 2023, India drank or ate cow's milk and milk products more than any other nation on earth.
The European Union, which ranked at a distant second on cow milk consumption, drank or ate about a little less than a third of India's consumption.And the United States, you might ask?
The US came in third place, drinking or eating just a little bit less cow milk than people from the EU.Milk is produced by both humans and by animals who are mammals,
And, as the National Institute of Standards and Technology is currently trying to do, scientists are now looking at the milk of humans and other creatures, such as Bornean orangutan, an African lion, an Asian rhinoceros, among others, to see how the complex chemistry of a mother's milk could help in the diet, immunity and brain growth of the offspring of humans
as well as the offspring of these other mammals.Milk produced by way of childbirth is known as colostrum and is a slightly yellow liquid containing all the nutrients and antibodies to protect babies in the days after birth.
What is interesting to me is that despite needing milk as babies, So many people today have what is called lactose intolerance.Lactose is the major carbohydrate in milk, and it may cause diarrhea, flatulence, bloating, and other intolerances.
The Smithsonian Magazine explains that this intolerance develops because the enzyme that digests the lactose apparently stops working once we're weaned off breast milk.
As a result, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, quote, for primary lactose intolerance, about 75 to 90% of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Mediterranean, and Jews can be affected.
On the other end, only 5% of Northern and Central European descendants are affected, end quote. Now this is not a science podcast, so we can leave that to others to debate how this all works and why certain people are impacted more than others.
But back to milk.Milk has actually played an important role in religion during ancient times, as Finbar Michael McCormick puts it in his paper for Anthropozoologica.
The earliest evidence we have for dairy is just before 3000 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia, which was located in parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Kuwait and Iraq.
Ancient texts from around 3100 BCE, during the reign of Uruk III, showed that Mesopotamians used milk primarily for cheese making and butter making, and not for drinking, because the weather was too warm to keep it as milk.
Their milk would have come from cows, goats and other animals such as sheep. According to McCormick, ancient Mesopotamians offered their cheeses and butters to their deities, but they comprised only a small percentage of the other food on offer.
But it would be worth noting its presence there, given that there is a frieze of a cow being milked next to butter being churned in an ancient Mesopotamian temple.
The same would not be true in ancient Egypt, where milk was much more part of the ritual.
There, one of the Egyptian goddesses, Hathor, took the form of a cow, and King Thutmose III has been depicted as suckling on Hathor's udders in one of the temples in Egypt.Apparently, drinking Hathor's milk allowed a prince to become king.
Similarly, the Egyptian goddess Isis is also depicted as breastfeeding pharaohs.
In the international academic journal Faculty of Tourism and Hotel Management, authors Manal Hamad and Yasmin Mohamed note that, in ancient Egypt, milk, quote, was also frequently mentioned in the religious books.
pyramid text, coffin text and book of the dead as a symbol of purity, purification and rejuvenation.Thus it played an important role in the ancient Egyptian religions."
They go on to claim that milk, quote, was considered as a substance responsible for forming the flesh of the body. making the dead king greater than the god, and making his limbs mightier than those of the gods.
It was a purification substance that purifies the mouth. the whole body of the dead king, and the deceased as well as the outfits of the tomb.
Moreover, milk was perfect nourishment for the dead king to live on in the afterlife, to the extent that he will never feel hungry or thirsty.
It makes the dead king capable to rejuvenate himself and reborn as a young child in the afterlife where he will be a complete being.It helps the dead king ascend to heaven to be among or as one of the gods.It was also a means to make the deceased
a milk brother of the gods in the afterlife."So there you go, milk was as good in death as in life.
And in the biblical times of ancient Israel, milk was both common enough and sacred enough that it was used as one of the metaphors of gods coming to Israel.For example, the Old Testament in Exodus 3 verse 8 states,
So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.'
End quote. Further, during the times of the New Testament, St Paul used milk to symbolise his, for lack of a better term, introductory teachings about God to the Christians of Corinth.1 Corinthians 3 verses 1 to 3 says, quote,
And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people, but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ.I fed you with milk, and not with solid food, for until now you were not able to receive it.
and even now you are still not able, for you are still carnal, from where there are envy, strife and divisions among you.Are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?'
And in India, I am well aware having visited her many times, both alone and with my family, my father was an Indian born from Calcutta. I have seen just how it is used for ritual there, and was done from as far back as 1100 BC.
According to McCormick, in the Hindu religions, the Rig Veda, which is the very earliest Vedic document dating back to 1700 BCE to 1100 BCE, Drawings therein prominently highlighted milk coming out of cow udders.
Indeed, the cow and the milk represented fertility.Moreover, milk played a significant role in Vedic rituals.
The Satapatha Brahmana, which identified various Vedic ceremonies, included milk as offerings, using curds to help congeal food sacrifices, using ghee, the sort of clarified butter which is now found in most supermarkets and health food stores, to purify altars or to fend off evil spirits.
According to McCormick, milk and ghee were the sap of life. which clarifies everything.Get it?Moving on.The Rig Veda, which I mentioned earlier, is part of Hinduism.
That is, India's primary religion did not, according to scholar Wendy Doniger, forbid the eating of beef.Ancient Indians apparently ate them in religious ceremonies, or when they had important visitors.
But, by the time we get to the Sanskrit epic poem, the Mahabharata, which was published between 300 BCE and 300 CE, Doniger suggests that Hinduism was shifting away from beef consumption.
She highlights a story in the Mahabharata that goes something like this, quote, once when there was a great famine King Prithu took up his bow and arrow and pursued the earth to force her to yield her nourishment for his people.
The earth assumed the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life.She then allowed him to milk her for all that the people needed."So milk was seen as having life-giving properties. But milk went beyond that.
For example, even today, as part of the Hindu wedding rituals, couples drink milk infused with saffron and mixed with chopped up almonds on their first wedding night.The ritual stems from the legendary book called the Karma Sutra.
This is an ancient Indian text, most likely written by a person called Vatsayana, probably 2,000 years ago.According to the Kama Sutra, milk supposedly provides endurance and strength during lovemaking.
And this milk concoction was meant not only to sweeten the marriage, but to add vigour as a lovemaker with this aphrodisiac. So you can see that since ancient times, India was already using milk, cheese and butter as part of the religion and culture.
Now let us move to Europe, where unlike in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, ancient Greek and Roman cultures did not really have milk play a significant role in their religious practices.
In Southern Europe, both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans found the use of butter to be an act of barbarism.Here's another tidbit for you to bore people with at parties.
The word barbarism is initially taken from the ancient Greeks' view of how the people who did not speak Greek sounded when they spoke.Apparently, quote, In the Greek ear, speakers of a foreign tongue made unintelligible sounds.Bar, bar, bar.
End quote.So there you go.If you do not speak Greek, you are a barbarian.By the way, if you've heard this tidbit before on a prior episode of Eat My Globe, you're probably just having some déjà vu.Anyway, back to the matter at hand.
The ancient Greeks did not tend to use butter.This was primarily down to their preference for olive oil and because of the fact that their weather was really too hot for them to keep it fresh.
They did create yoghurt and cheeses which lasted longer than butter.These included cheeses made of goat's milk and sheep's milk.
As for milk itself, Mark Kolansky, the author of the rather fun book Milk, a 10,000 year food fracas, notes that ancient Greeks used milk with their cereals.
He also notes that people from ancient Crete drank milk based on unearthed cups with drawings of cows and goats on them. The author Finbar McCormick argues, however, that the ancient Greeks did not really drink a lot of milk.
The ancient Romans, on the other hand, had a strong view of milk drinking.Kulansky says, quote, the Romans, who often commented on the inferiority of other cultures, took excessive milk drinking as evidence of barbarism, end quote. Ouch.
Kolansky also tells the story of how Julius Caesar was shocked by how much milk the British drank when he visited my town.
Kolansky explains that this attitude from ancient Romans about milk drinking stemmed from the fact that lowly farmers and peasants who had access to fresh milk were the ones who drank the stuff. and so milk drinking was associated with the plebs.
Despite this disdain for drinking fresh milk from the upper classes of ancient Rome, they did use milk in cheese making and in cooking.
Ancient Roman cookbook author Apicius had a recipe for Melca, which was made with sour milk with honey, brine and cilantro or coriander leaves for my British friend. which moves us on to Central and Northern Europe.
While ancient Greeks and Romans did not use milk in their religious practices, it appears that in places like Ireland and Scotland, milk played a role in folk religion.
For example, from the 4th century BCE through to about 1656, people in the area have been known to leave offerings of butter and cow's milk.
What's also interesting about Central and Northern Europe in relation to milk consumption is that, unlike many people who have developed lactose intolerance, as I mentioned earlier, that was not an issue here.
To the contrary, in Central and Northern Europe they have lactose tolerance, where their bodies keep on producing that enzyme that allows them to digest lactose even though they've stopped drinking breast milk.
So much so that now 95% of Central and Northern Europeans have lactose tolerance. It appears that this tolerance began around 7,500 years ago, when people then domesticated animals and then they started drinking the milk.
Scientists think that these folks then developed a gene variant that allowed them to tolerate lactose.Some scientists also argue that famine may have led to lactose tolerance because it forced people to drink milk for nutrition.
even if it caused them diarrhoea or flatulence, because there was nothing else to eat.The British have some of, if not the earliest, consumption of milk, which dates back to around 6,000 years ago.
Archaeologists determined that the teeth of seven prehistoric Neolithic farmers in what is now Hambledon Hill, Hazelton North and Bradbury Lane in England, have the milk protein called beta-lactoglobulin, or PLG.
It appears that the proteins came from the milk of cows, sheep and goats.This finding has led scientists to believe that our Neolithic ancestors commonly drank milk, or at least ate dairy products.
Whereas some people believe it found its origins in Ireland and Scandinavia, and in other parts of Central Europe, meanwhile in the Netherlands, the Dutch, whom author Mark Kolansky
has described as, quote, dairy crazed, end quote, consumed so much butter, milk, and cheese that even Julius Caesar took note when he visited the area in 57 BCE.
Kielanski goes on to note that, quote, even the Flemish laughed at them, calling them kastkupen, or cheeseheads, end quote.
But that began to change as soon as people began realising the brilliance of the Dutch dairying system, where they were able to crossbreed cows that allowed for greater milk yields.
So much so that by the 16th and 17th century, they had more milk than anywhere in Europe.In 18th century England, milk has even played a role in the development of the smallpox vaccine, Well, very indirectly anyway.
The story goes that around 1768, a 13-year-old apprentice of a country surgeon in the UK overheard a milkmaid, typically a young girl or an adult female,
who milk cows and made dairy products say, quote, I shall never have smallpox, for I have had cowpox.I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.End quote.That young apprentice turned out to be Edward Jenner,
who was supposedly so inspired by what he overheard the milkmaid say that later on he ended up inventing the smallpox vaccine.
Alas, that story of the milkmaid getting cowpox so she became inoculated from smallpox became one of the great myths of medicine.
According to a paper published by Arthur Boylston in the New England Journal of Medicine, what was more likely to have happened was that a country doctor, John Fuster, was injecting people with a small amount of smallpox to help inoculate them.
Typically, those who never had smallpox would get a reaction from the inoculation, and those who have had smallpox did not get a reaction.
Dr. Fuster noticed that there were some farmers who did not get a reaction, despite not having caught smallpox in the past. the farmers disclosed that they have had cowpox instead.
Dr Fuster then told other doctors about his theory that exposure to cowpox would lead to immunity to smallpox.One of those other doctors had Edward Jenner as an apprentice.
So it is likely that a milkmaid never inspired Jenner to develop the vaccine, because he probably heard the cowpox story from his boss, who in turn heard it from Dr. Fuster.
So Boylston says that a milkmaid was still involved in the smallpox vaccine story, because Jenna ended up obtaining the cowpox virus used in his smallpox vaccine from a milkmaid.Anyway, so there you go.
Milk is somewhat still involved in developing the smallpox vaccine. While milkmaids may have played a somewhat heroic role in the development of the smallpox vaccine, some people may have had a slightly different view of the milkmaid profession.
The Reverend Dr Trusler wrote a guide in 1786 entitled the London Advisor and Guide, containing every instruction and information useful and necessary to persons living in London and coming to reside there.That's a long title.
Anyway, Trusler writes, quote, with respect to milk, though sold at three pennies a quart, it is always mixed with water.
there are cows that are driven into the streets about the west end of the town from which you may have your milk and see it milked at four pence a quart but the milk of these is not very good and the cows are driven about all day yet it is better than what is brought by milk women end quote
I guess he was not a fan of the milkmaids.In light of the Reverend Dr Trusler's concerns about watering down milk, let's talk about the adulteration of milk.From the medieval times through about the 19th century,
there have been concerns about milk cleanliness and adulteration.For example, in medieval Europe, milkmaids would milk cows from urban centres and transport them using uncovered buckets where dirt and other debris might fall.Ew.
In the United States in the late 1800s, a scientist named John Newell Hurty
who was the chief public health officer for the state of Indiana, began to look at the unsanitary nature surrounding food, and for what he called, quote, flies, filth, and dirty fingers, end quote.
Hertie began to make milk safety one of his primary priorities.He even created posters that depicted the gravestones of kids who died of what he calls dirty milk as a warning.
He worked hard to stop the addition of formaldehyde in milk, as well as to pass food safety laws.It was an uphill battle, however.In New Jersey in the 1880s, there was an uproar about, quote, liquefying colonies of bacteria, end quote.Ugh. In milk?
That's yuck.Quite apart from the bacteria in milk, Deborah Blum writes in the Smithsonian Magazine that there was also a huge outcry about the adulterations added to milk in what became the Embalmed Milk Scandal.
This involved adding formaldehyde, chalk and plaster dust to milk.Some unscrupulous people even added calf brains to make their milk look creamy.
Meanwhile, around 1884, a local Potsdam, New York doctor named Dr. Hervey D. Thatcher apparently witnessed a little girl actually drop her dirty doll into a milk pail and the vendor nonchalantly scooped it out and then continued ladling milk out of the pail to sell to other customers.
This unsanitary issue apparently troubled Dr. Thatcher and it inspired him to invent a milk bottle with a lid.The Thatcher's milk bottle was on its way.
Other milk bottle makers, however, claimed that they were responsible too, like Echo Farms Dairy in Litchfield, Connecticut. They claim, in 1879, that they created a bottle, too, that delivered to New York.
But storing and transporting milk was getting better.In 1915, John Van Wormer patented the milk carton that we still see today on our grocery shelves. Anyway, let's look at other things that were done to clean milk up.
You've probably heard of the term pasteurisation and the name of Louis Pasteur, which we discussed in our season 8 episode on the history of pasteurisation.So make sure you check that out.
But you may be surprised to know that Pasteur pasteurised wine, not milk. As a quick review, Louis Pasteur developed a procedure by heating wine to remove microbes and to protect the wine from disease.
That heating of food and drink is now named after him.But as the author Anne Hemelstein notes in Thought Company,
Quote, in 1768 Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani demonstrated heating meat broth to boiling and immediately sealing the container kept the broth from spoiling.
In 1795, French chef Nicolas Appert sealed foods in a glass jar and immersed them in boiling water to preserve them.Canning.In 1810, Peter Durand
applied a similar method to preserve food in tin cans, while Pasteur applied his process to wine and beer.It wasn't until 1886 that Franz von Socklett suggested the pasteurization of milk."End quote.
Just a quick note, that I have written about all these men in Eat My Globe episodes on the history of spam and again in the history of pasteurisation.So, it's pasta... your time to go and listen to those as well.See what I did there?
Well I didn't, my wife did, but anyway.But seriously, it really is Franz von Socklett who we should have to thank for the pasteurisation of milk.As I mentioned earlier, Pasteur's work was with wine.
Joe Schwartz from McGill University notes that Pasteur was more interested in wine and beer, which is a great thing to do.In 1886, it was Franz van Socket who first thought that milk might be suitable for applying the pasteurisation process.
So, thank you, Franz. Before the pasteurisation process, milk caused many health problems, things such as scarlet fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria to name a few.As Thought Company says, quote, approximately 65,000 people died
between 1912 and 1937 in England and Wales from tuberculosis contracted from consuming raw milk."End quote.As people started pasteurising milk, the number of people who got sick from those kind of illnesses fell significantly.
You've probably seen milk sold in your grocery store both as pasteurised and homogenised. And there might be some confusion between pasteurization and homogenization.
While pasteurization is about heating milk to destroy microbes that could cause illness, homogenization is about ensuring the milk you drink looks whiter than the fat in milk is broken down to smaller particles, so it's smoother to drink.
As Alison Spiegel explained in HuffPost, quote, without homogenization, fat molecules in milk will rise to the top and form a layer of cream, end quote.
As a child, I still remember shaking my Jersey milk, which used to come in bottles from the UK milkman, where you can see the Jersey cream on top, which was, I have to say, delicious.
If milk is not homogenized, the cream and the milk will not come together.This homogenized process will allow for a more consistent sip, but also add extra time to the life of the milk.The first patent filed for a machine for homogenizing milk
occurred in 1899 in France by a Frenchman called Auguste Golan.
According to William Pandolph in the Journal of Dairy Science, Golan's patent involved pushing the milk through, quote, a three-piston pump in which the product was forced through one or more hair-like tubes under pressure, end quote.
Now, I can't understand the whole process, but when the fat in milk is forced through these pumps, it will go from large droplets of fat to much more tiny ones.
And I don't know that there are any great thoughts that homogenized milk is better for you,
Although some people might argue that the small droplets of milk fat may be more accessible by the body, but the fact that the homogenised milk lasts longer may be attractive to both consumers and producers.
What I find interesting now is that raw milk is beginning to make a comeback, at least around this time this episode first aired.There is a huge debate over this, as Healthline puts it, quote, An estimated 1% of Americans drink raw milk regularly."
Which is not, in the bigger scheme of things, a lot, but does represent a large increase in the last few years.So why is that?
Well, proponents claim that raw milk contains more vitamins, antimicrobials and fatty acids compared to pasteurised milk, and it is supposed to be better for those who suffer from lactose intolerance and other diseases.
They also claim that diseases such as tuberculosis are no longer prevalent in our current society, so we can stop drinking pasteurised milk.
Some scientists, on the other hand, will argue that pasteurising milk does nothing to decrease or remove the medicinal and health benefits of milk, while still providing an extra level of safety from those diseases.Now,
I'm not going to get into the arguments between these parties, except to say I have tried both.Both taste as if they have not had any ragdolls put into them. Now let's have a look at how milk can be seen to be bad or to have gone off.
I personally do a sniff test, that's all for me.But to be scientific, Healthline says a spoiled milk will 1. have a sour smell 2. have a sour taste
Personally why you're tasting it when it's sour you shouldn't want to but anyway and three have a yellowish appearance With some solidifying of those fat globules now if you still want to check things after that Why would you if it has chunks?
Hey-ho, but you can do a lot of other things like checking the expiration date Seeing if milk has been left in the sunlight to curdle Etc
Finally, let's look towards the types of milk that we now have on offer at the market, in addition to the milk we used to get some 50 years ago, which was whole milk, and that's about it, apart from Jersey Cream milk we used to get on special occasions.
Now as far as I can tell, things like whole milk, 2% reduced fat, low-fat milk, organic milk, skimmed milk, raw milk, lactose-free milk, flavoured milk like chocolate and strawberry,
And there are some others like full cream milk and buttermilk, evaporated milk and condensed milk.Evaporated milk is canned milk with about 60% of the liquid removed from the milk.And condensed milk being the same but sweetened using sugar.
My wife, who is of Filipino descent, and her family have stocks of evaporated and condensed milk in their pantry.Particularly, she says to make a dessert called Leche Flan, which by the way, is rich and delicious.
Let me also say now, that half and half is not a good combination with British tea.I don't care what hotels in the US tell you.In the British Isles, it is just a spot of whole milk or skim milk that saves the day.
Moving on with other milks, such as those from other animals like goat milk, buffalo milk, sheep milk and camel milk.Yes, I have tried all of these.The camel milk is one that I find rather good.
It is popular in the Middle East and Africa and it's quite delicate in flavour.I've also tried a dessert in the Philippines called pastillas. which is a packed confectionary from the Philippines made with caribou or water buffalo milk.
My wife adores it, but it's a bit too sweet for me and I wasn't amused. I'm really sorry about my wife for this.And finally, there's also milk from plants, which is nuts.See what I did there?
Seriously, this category of milk from plants would include almond milk, soy milk, rice milk, oat milk, hemp milk, coconut milk, cashew milk, and pea milk. Before we end though, I just wanted to briefly touch on the history of these plant milks.
They're not a new phenomenon.In fact, ancient Chinese have been drinking soy milk as back as far as the first century.
People from Europe have been drinking almond milk as far back as the 8th century for medicinal purposes, apparently to cure coughing and shortness of breath.
And people from Iraq and Egypt have been using almond milk as ingredients in dishes from around the 13th century.The earliest reference to rice milk was in 1620. when a doctor, Tobias Werner, referred to it.
The earliest reference to coconut milk dates back to 1698, in a publication called Philosophical Transactions.So as you can see, plant milks are nothing new.
So there you have it, a story that has taken us from ancient Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt, to ancient India, to the ancient Europeans, through to the modern day where we have nearly 30 versions of milk available on my last count.
That is, as they say, not to be slurped at.That's one of my jokes.See you next week.Make sure to check out the websites associated with this podcast at www.eatwell.co.uk
We will be posting the transcripts from each episode, along with all the references and resources we used putting the episodes together, in case you want to delve deeper into each subject.
There is also a contact button, so please do let us know if there are any subjects that you would like us to cover.And, if you like what you hear, please don't forget to join us on Patreon.
Subscribe, recommend us to your family and friends, and give us a good rating on your favourite podcast provider.Thank you.Goodbye from me, Simon Majumder.We'll speak to you soon on the next episode of Eat My Globe.
Things you didn't know, you didn't know about food. The Eat My Globe podcast is a production of It's Not Much But It's Ours and Producer Girl Productions.
We would also like to thank Sybil Villanueva for all of her help, both with the editing of the transcripts and essential help with the research.
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