Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink
Author: E Melanie DuPuis
"Du Puis' book is a rich and frothy drink, well worth consuming, just like its subject."New York History
"This is an entertaining, informative, and tightly argued book, one well worth adding to any food library."
Gastronomica
"An excellent social history of the development of milk drinking and production in the United States."
American Studies
"Very readable and extremely well documented...DuPuis provides great insights throughout by reflecting on the thoughts of influential thinkers."
Choice
"DuPuis is able to dive beneath the controversy that milk engenders today. Instead, she presents an informative, balanced history of milk production and consumptionhow we get our milk and why we drink so much of it."
E, Westport, CT
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, "Milk: 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 theydrink each day is truly good for them.
In
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments | ||
Pt. I | Consumption | |
1 | Why Milk? | 3 |
2 | The Perfect Food Story | 17 |
3 | Why Not Mother? The Rise of Cow's Milk as Infant Food in Nineteenth-Century America | 46 |
4 | The Milk Question: Perfecting Food as Urban Reform | 67 |
5 | Perfect Food, Perfect Bodies | 90 |
Pt. II | Production | |
6 | Perfect Farming: The Industrial Vision of Dairying | 125 |
7 | The Less Perfect Story: Diversity and Farming Strategies | 144 |
8 | Crisis: The "Border-Line" Problem | 165 |
9 | Alternative Visions of Dairying: Productivism and Producerism in New York, Wisconsin, and California | 183 |
10 | The End of Perfection | 210 |
Afterword | 241 | |
Notes | 244 | |
Bibliography | 271 | |
Index | 297 | |
About the Author | 311 |
New interesting book: Mea Cuba or Presidential Elections
Food and Feast in Tudor England
Author: Alison Sim
Popular representations of the Tudors at table have caricatured them as loud, gross, and lacking any manners. This is actually far from the case, as food and dining were used as social display by the upwardly mobile. For those with money, meals became extravagantly sophisticated, with a staggering number of courses and breathtaking table displays. Even those lower down the social scale enjoyed some of the benefits of increasing prosperity and the new markets which England's merchants exploited, bringing new foodstuffs into the country and new ideas about eating. Alison Sim also explores Tudor ideas about healthy eating, as they were aware of the effects of various foods on the body and the health-giving properties of certain ingredients. Etiquette, too, was treated with great seriousness in this period, as those who wished to impress a potential patron or benefactor were keen to show off their good manners. What emerges from this evidence is a more balanced and certainly more attractive picture of the Tudors at table.
Booknews
Popular representations of the Tudors have caricatured dinners of the period as loud, gross, and lacking any polite graces. Sim, a costumed guide at Hampton Court, shows that this is hardly the case. Her lavishly illustrated account of Tudor eating habits discusses how changes in Tudor society were reflected in the food people ate and in the way food and dining were used for social display by the upwardly mobile. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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