E. Melanie Dupuis - Natures Perfect Food: How Milk Became Americas Drink

The story of how Americans came to drink milk
For over a century, Americas nutrition authorities have heralded milk as natures 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, Milk: The Deadly Poison, and Dont 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 Natures Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cows 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 cows 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, Natures Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.