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Nature's Perfect Food
The story of how Americans came to drink milk
For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?
Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, " The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.
In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.
For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?
Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, " The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.
In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.
304 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 1, 2017
This book is a solid piece of intellectual history about "perfection" and how discourses of perfection around milk reveal the way that (white) America's connections to milk have more to do with perfection than science itself supplies. I will say that this book is also subtly about whiteness, in that it is about whiteness even though DuPuis barely mentions it. The beginning half of the book, about consumption, is interesting, but the latter half of the book really gets into like geospatial analysis of what DuPuis calls the "milk belt" and it got much more difficult for me to follow (and ultimately less interesting and, I think, less relevant to DuPuis's overall arguments about perfection narratives.) Again, this book was okay, sort of interesting, but not the most convincing or interesting book to me.
January 23, 2025
[archived review from 2021]
"Nature’s Perfect Food" by E. Melanie DuPuis presents the social and political history of milk as an American food staple. The book is split into two parts, the first of which is entitled “Consumption” and focuses on the origins of milk as a problematic breast milk substitute that developed into the drink most people would recognize today. DuPuis situates the historically political drink that became the beverage associated with the perfect, healthy child. Part II, “Production,” examines the historical practices of dairy farming, delineating the diversity of past farming techniques that slowly went extinct in favor of a more industrialized technique due to society’s pursuit of a perfect, homogenous farming method. The later half of Part II also touches upon controversies surrounding milk and delineates various opinions about milk through the years. Together, these two sections effectively organize DuPuis’s wide variety of information into two major concepts that give the book some direction that it would otherwise be lacking.
When assessing the book’s content, it is first and foremost crucial to note that DuPuis has done her due diligence and certainly presents a breadth of information to the reader. Her research is extensive and intersectional. In the first few pages of the book, DuPuis states, “the answer to the ‘why we drink milk’ question becomes apparent only if we look at this phenomenon as a product of a particular social and political history,” and she does deliver in her endeavor to present milk as a product of social and political history by carefully detailing its origins and how these different disciplines have influenced milk’s development over time (DuPuis 8). This is particularly true of Part I, which provides a contextual timeline of milk consumption: DuPuis provides specific background on each time period and characterizes milk within each society. For instance, she explains how, during the Romanticism movement, thin and even anorexic women were the idealized Romantic aesthetic for the upper-class, while poor women were generally lacking proper caloric intake, which collectively led to decreased breast milk production in women and a resulting increase in reliance on cows’ milk as a substitute (DuPuis 53). With regard to research, DuPuis’s work shines, and she provides ample, multi-disciplinary information that soundly situates milk for the average academic, student or fanatic reading the book.
While an author’s thorough research is a good foundation for a functional publication, assessing whether or not "Nature’s Perfect Food" uses this research to deliver on its initial promises is another story. As aforementioned, in the beginning of the book, DuPuis lays out her plan to use her research to tackle the question “why do we drink milk,” but this proposal is misleading (DuPuis 8). While DuPuis does successfully paint milk as a product of social and political history, the book’s primary goal in doing so does not appear to be answering the question “why do we drink milk.” The more accurate goal of the book seems to be to achieve a rigorous exploration of both the American definition, and pursuit, of perfection over time. It is this concept of pursuing perfection that ends up being the closest explanation the book provides for why we drink milk, but that is mainly because, while there are many chapters that avoid outright answering why we drink milk, all of the different chapters manage to discuss perfection and the extent of its influence through time. This indicates perfection’s overwhelming significance to the publication, as opposed to the unprioritized question DuPuis initially presents.
As she barrels through moments in history, DuPuis shows how society has continually striven to be perfect, and she uses milk’s history only as a concrete example of this, merely one of many demonstrations of this pursuit. For instance, the entire second half of the book details the nuances of milk production, which already feels less relevant to the “why do we drink milk” question in comparison to the preceding chapters on consumption. Beyond that, in the first section of Part II, “Perfect Farming: The Industrial Vision of Dairying,” she breaks down different kinds of dairy farming over the years, right down to the intersectional implications of the kind of protein-rich alfalfa feed certain cows received; however, rather than explaining how this all relates to why humans drink cows’ milk, DuPuis uses this information to show how the image of “the perfect farm” was created, modified, and even today, remains an unattainable ideal for farmers (DuPuis 141).
Perhaps the most frustrating part about DuPuis’s decision to focus exclusively on exploring the history of perfection is that she intentionally avoids making any sort of argument or taking a definitive stance on anything, particularly with regard to milk. While she does anticipate many reasonable arguments readers will likely expect to see, she refuses to engage with them. In the beginning of the book, she states, “the public listens to the argument for and against milk and asks, ‘Which view is correct?’... my book does not come down for or against milk,” and when addressing whether or not milk is healthy for consumers, she is maddeningly periphrastic: “ultimately, the question of whether or not milk is a ‘healthful’ food has to be answered in a way that acknowledges the social context in which milk is consumed. ‘Healthy food’ is an ideal that varies in relation to particular places and times” (DuPuis 3). The only true argument that DuPuis makes in the book is that all of the other writers who have studied milk consumption before her have failed to do it thoroughly in the way that she does. She claims, “looking at what everyone has said about milk — and people have said volumes — is that each student of this subject tells one small part of the story, with little attention to other parts... These more narrow approaches are my building blocks” (DuPuis 6). It seems conveniently contradictory that DuPuis is able to single-handedly parse through and effectively compile all of the different studies of milk consumption in order to create the one true intersectional book that the discipline has been craving, but when it comes to stating whether or not milk is healthy, it is impractical to expect that she could assess the data on milk’s nutrient value, health effects, etc to make any kind of determination. This is especially hard to believe when the first portion of Chapter 3 focuses on the health risks of milk in the nineteenth century. At that time, cities lacked “the knowledge or ability” to provide the “necessary clean environment” and “consequently, the rise in bottle-feeding... was accompanied by an increase in infant mortality rates,” all of which is validated by DuPuis’s citations of public health officials (DuPuis 47). Could it be that, when writing this, it was easy to stand by the fact that out-of-date practices were unhealthy, but it was too controversial to employ the same critical examination to the milk of today?
It is also important to consider the ethics of this intentional neutrality and how successful DuPuis actually was at executing it. To begin, it takes away from some of the author’s credibility, especially when she begins the book by promising this uniquely interdisciplinary publication will be about “what questions have been asked about [milk], and how these questions have been answered” (DuPuis 3). If one of the pressing questions in the discipline is whether or not milk is healthy, then presenting both sides of the argument without actually providing a critical assessment of which side is likely correct, does not offer the reader much more beyond what they likely already came to the book knowing. This overview technique also fails to do either side of the arguments justice, watering them down to summarized points: “on one hand, you are healthy from a governmental point of view, on the other hand, you are ‘healthy’ from the viewpoint of a certain type of political correctness’” (DuPuis 217). This quotation is vital, because it also shows that DuPuis’s neutrality does not always hold up. Placing the mock quotation marks on “healthy” when referring to vegans’ points of view reads as condescension, while the government’s assessment of what is healthy remains unquoted, even though the book has presented data on the government’s history of swayed opinions. There are several other instances of DuPuis’s quasi-neutrality, when her diction betrays her integrity and her mission to abstain from engaging with arguments. For instance, she continually refers to vegan beliefs as “anti-milk rhetoric,” and notably, in the chapter “The End of Perfection,” she shares a personal anecdote: “I always cringe when I think of my vegan students catching me waiting in the drive-in line at Burger King. Vegans are right when they say that animal factory farming is cruel... but try to negotiate that position with children embedded in a Happy Meal community of practice” (DuPuis 217). Her empty approval of vegans’ views on cruelty does little against her trivialization of the entire vegan movement. She effectively others vegans as a community of somewhat irrational idealists, and her judgmental, devaluing word choice and punctuation when referring to vegan beliefs barely adheres to the neutrality she so proudly claims to employ throughout the book.
Overall, without a central argument, the book suffers tonally and struggles to remain engaging. The chapters gradually grow more theoretical, and without a centralizing statement to ground all of the information, there is nothing driving readers to slog through the dense material. In fact, the neutral factuality approach of the book could limit its target audience, restricting it to scholars in the field, students, and people who are particularly driven to read about this subject matter, as opposed to the majority of laymen who would buy this book in the interest of getting drawn into a the subject and learning more. Unfortunately, even with all of its thorough research, "Nature’s Perfect Food" reads like a textbook, with clusters of information that are varying degrees of stimulating, depending greatly on a given reader’s interests and background.
"Nature’s Perfect Food" by E. Melanie DuPuis presents the social and political history of milk as an American food staple. The book is split into two parts, the first of which is entitled “Consumption” and focuses on the origins of milk as a problematic breast milk substitute that developed into the drink most people would recognize today. DuPuis situates the historically political drink that became the beverage associated with the perfect, healthy child. Part II, “Production,” examines the historical practices of dairy farming, delineating the diversity of past farming techniques that slowly went extinct in favor of a more industrialized technique due to society’s pursuit of a perfect, homogenous farming method. The later half of Part II also touches upon controversies surrounding milk and delineates various opinions about milk through the years. Together, these two sections effectively organize DuPuis’s wide variety of information into two major concepts that give the book some direction that it would otherwise be lacking.
When assessing the book’s content, it is first and foremost crucial to note that DuPuis has done her due diligence and certainly presents a breadth of information to the reader. Her research is extensive and intersectional. In the first few pages of the book, DuPuis states, “the answer to the ‘why we drink milk’ question becomes apparent only if we look at this phenomenon as a product of a particular social and political history,” and she does deliver in her endeavor to present milk as a product of social and political history by carefully detailing its origins and how these different disciplines have influenced milk’s development over time (DuPuis 8). This is particularly true of Part I, which provides a contextual timeline of milk consumption: DuPuis provides specific background on each time period and characterizes milk within each society. For instance, she explains how, during the Romanticism movement, thin and even anorexic women were the idealized Romantic aesthetic for the upper-class, while poor women were generally lacking proper caloric intake, which collectively led to decreased breast milk production in women and a resulting increase in reliance on cows’ milk as a substitute (DuPuis 53). With regard to research, DuPuis’s work shines, and she provides ample, multi-disciplinary information that soundly situates milk for the average academic, student or fanatic reading the book.
While an author’s thorough research is a good foundation for a functional publication, assessing whether or not "Nature’s Perfect Food" uses this research to deliver on its initial promises is another story. As aforementioned, in the beginning of the book, DuPuis lays out her plan to use her research to tackle the question “why do we drink milk,” but this proposal is misleading (DuPuis 8). While DuPuis does successfully paint milk as a product of social and political history, the book’s primary goal in doing so does not appear to be answering the question “why do we drink milk.” The more accurate goal of the book seems to be to achieve a rigorous exploration of both the American definition, and pursuit, of perfection over time. It is this concept of pursuing perfection that ends up being the closest explanation the book provides for why we drink milk, but that is mainly because, while there are many chapters that avoid outright answering why we drink milk, all of the different chapters manage to discuss perfection and the extent of its influence through time. This indicates perfection’s overwhelming significance to the publication, as opposed to the unprioritized question DuPuis initially presents.
As she barrels through moments in history, DuPuis shows how society has continually striven to be perfect, and she uses milk’s history only as a concrete example of this, merely one of many demonstrations of this pursuit. For instance, the entire second half of the book details the nuances of milk production, which already feels less relevant to the “why do we drink milk” question in comparison to the preceding chapters on consumption. Beyond that, in the first section of Part II, “Perfect Farming: The Industrial Vision of Dairying,” she breaks down different kinds of dairy farming over the years, right down to the intersectional implications of the kind of protein-rich alfalfa feed certain cows received; however, rather than explaining how this all relates to why humans drink cows’ milk, DuPuis uses this information to show how the image of “the perfect farm” was created, modified, and even today, remains an unattainable ideal for farmers (DuPuis 141).
Perhaps the most frustrating part about DuPuis’s decision to focus exclusively on exploring the history of perfection is that she intentionally avoids making any sort of argument or taking a definitive stance on anything, particularly with regard to milk. While she does anticipate many reasonable arguments readers will likely expect to see, she refuses to engage with them. In the beginning of the book, she states, “the public listens to the argument for and against milk and asks, ‘Which view is correct?’... my book does not come down for or against milk,” and when addressing whether or not milk is healthy for consumers, she is maddeningly periphrastic: “ultimately, the question of whether or not milk is a ‘healthful’ food has to be answered in a way that acknowledges the social context in which milk is consumed. ‘Healthy food’ is an ideal that varies in relation to particular places and times” (DuPuis 3). The only true argument that DuPuis makes in the book is that all of the other writers who have studied milk consumption before her have failed to do it thoroughly in the way that she does. She claims, “looking at what everyone has said about milk — and people have said volumes — is that each student of this subject tells one small part of the story, with little attention to other parts... These more narrow approaches are my building blocks” (DuPuis 6). It seems conveniently contradictory that DuPuis is able to single-handedly parse through and effectively compile all of the different studies of milk consumption in order to create the one true intersectional book that the discipline has been craving, but when it comes to stating whether or not milk is healthy, it is impractical to expect that she could assess the data on milk’s nutrient value, health effects, etc to make any kind of determination. This is especially hard to believe when the first portion of Chapter 3 focuses on the health risks of milk in the nineteenth century. At that time, cities lacked “the knowledge or ability” to provide the “necessary clean environment” and “consequently, the rise in bottle-feeding... was accompanied by an increase in infant mortality rates,” all of which is validated by DuPuis’s citations of public health officials (DuPuis 47). Could it be that, when writing this, it was easy to stand by the fact that out-of-date practices were unhealthy, but it was too controversial to employ the same critical examination to the milk of today?
It is also important to consider the ethics of this intentional neutrality and how successful DuPuis actually was at executing it. To begin, it takes away from some of the author’s credibility, especially when she begins the book by promising this uniquely interdisciplinary publication will be about “what questions have been asked about [milk], and how these questions have been answered” (DuPuis 3). If one of the pressing questions in the discipline is whether or not milk is healthy, then presenting both sides of the argument without actually providing a critical assessment of which side is likely correct, does not offer the reader much more beyond what they likely already came to the book knowing. This overview technique also fails to do either side of the arguments justice, watering them down to summarized points: “on one hand, you are healthy from a governmental point of view, on the other hand, you are ‘healthy’ from the viewpoint of a certain type of political correctness’” (DuPuis 217). This quotation is vital, because it also shows that DuPuis’s neutrality does not always hold up. Placing the mock quotation marks on “healthy” when referring to vegans’ points of view reads as condescension, while the government’s assessment of what is healthy remains unquoted, even though the book has presented data on the government’s history of swayed opinions. There are several other instances of DuPuis’s quasi-neutrality, when her diction betrays her integrity and her mission to abstain from engaging with arguments. For instance, she continually refers to vegan beliefs as “anti-milk rhetoric,” and notably, in the chapter “The End of Perfection,” she shares a personal anecdote: “I always cringe when I think of my vegan students catching me waiting in the drive-in line at Burger King. Vegans are right when they say that animal factory farming is cruel... but try to negotiate that position with children embedded in a Happy Meal community of practice” (DuPuis 217). Her empty approval of vegans’ views on cruelty does little against her trivialization of the entire vegan movement. She effectively others vegans as a community of somewhat irrational idealists, and her judgmental, devaluing word choice and punctuation when referring to vegan beliefs barely adheres to the neutrality she so proudly claims to employ throughout the book.
Overall, without a central argument, the book suffers tonally and struggles to remain engaging. The chapters gradually grow more theoretical, and without a centralizing statement to ground all of the information, there is nothing driving readers to slog through the dense material. In fact, the neutral factuality approach of the book could limit its target audience, restricting it to scholars in the field, students, and people who are particularly driven to read about this subject matter, as opposed to the majority of laymen who would buy this book in the interest of getting drawn into a the subject and learning more. Unfortunately, even with all of its thorough research, "Nature’s Perfect Food" reads like a textbook, with clusters of information that are varying degrees of stimulating, depending greatly on a given reader’s interests and background.
May 3, 2010
This fits into that rare category of books that I haven’t finished. I just gave up on it. I began reading this book in the hopes that it would be reminiscent of Mark Kurlansky’s book about salt, but instead I got a sociological study about perfection and the politics behind the “history” of milk. If I was a sociology graduate student, maybe this book would have been good. I’m not a sociology graduate student though, and the book just isn’t good. The last page of actual text is 244, and I gave up on page 199. Giving up on a book is not something I take lightly. I only remember doing it twice before (John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury and E.L. Doctorow’s The March), and I hate giving up with only 45 pages to go, but it was a struggle to make it through the first 199 pages. There’s no reason it should take 38 days to read 199 pages, but when one makes excuses for not reading, it’s easy to understand why it took so long. Be glad that you don't have to plod through this book because I already did.
December 29, 2018
Overview of the history of drinking milk in the US. Interesting to read that drinking milk (except whole milk as food for infants, or butter milk leftover from making butter) was rare until the mid-1800s as most milk was used to make butter and cheese (which have a longer shelf-life than fresh milk). It was only due to the efforts of a few health promoters that milk became the "perfect" food, especially for children. Unfortunately, the text was very dry in spots, and crammed a lot of information (history of drinking milk, advertising, rise of pasteurization, organics. etc.) into one book.
May 6, 2012
Interesting subject matter but fairly dry and academic, as well as repetitive. Her overall thesis is intriguing but it was hard to keep paying attention.
April 4, 2022
Interesting book, that gets into how the American concept of milk was constructed as well as factors within the milk production and supply chain that lead it to be one of the few nearly universally local consumer goods.
December 15, 2022
a historical view of how milk becomes the perfect food in the US, analyzing both consumption and production. i find the production part extremely difficult to follow
July 15, 2011
I loved this book on the history of milk. She weaves together interesting pieces of history: the industrial revolution, medical history, farm practices, the role of university ag extension. I loved it before I had a son and before I stopped being able to consume dairy. Now I find it even more interesting.
October 11, 2015
This is a great single product history, tracing the contextual reasons for the increase in milk consumption and rise of milk's role and meaning in American society from the mid-nineteenth century to present.
April 4, 2013
An entertaining tale of the religious, ideological, commercial and political movement behind's milk ascent as "nature's perfect food".
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews