What is milk?

2011, Nature, http://blogs.nature.com/soapbox_science/2011/03/09/what-is-milk

Peter Atkins, Durham University What is milk may sound like a trivial question or an inappropriate one for a serious science blog. Why should we take any interest at all in a substance that is a matter of everyday consumption? Put on the spot, most people would say that milk is a rather dull commodity and something they take for granted. The Spanish have a saying: blanco y en botella, leche. Literally this is if its white and

in a bottle then its milk but slipped colloquially into conversation it means its obvious. My purpose in this post is to show that a discussion of milk is far from obvious and indeed is something that cannot be left to dairy science alone. We need to look beyond that to understand why milk is as it is today and, ultimately, what is at stake is the quality of all of the food that we consume. The laboratory-based analysis of milk has its origins in the late eighteenth century. In the 1790s Parmentier and Deyeux were already estimating its constituents with simple experiments and they were followed in the early nineteenth century by other French, Swedish and German scientists. But milk, as a complex emulsion of fat globules and water, and a fine dispersion or suspension of casein micelles , was very diffic ult to know given the still emerging techniques of organic chemistry and physics. It was eventually realised that milk is a highly variable substance according to mammal species and factors such as feed. Its principal constituents, fat, protein and sugar, also vary from one breed of dairy cow to another. So what you might ask. Well, food in the nineteenth century was frequently adulterated, and milk was the most notorious example because its dense whiteness enabled the addition of small amounts of water without anyone noticing. The average pint in London in the 1870s, for instance, contained about 25% of added water. Consumers were outraged by the unreliable quality of one of the most important of foods but there was a feeling of helplessness because it was shown that a precise science of milk composition continued to be elusive into the last decades of the century. One simple method of analysis used by the milk trade was the lactometer, which measured the specific gravity of milk, but this had to be abandoned when it was realised that, by adding water and removing some of the butterfat, it was possible to simulate the physical properties of genuine milk. Gravimetric and volumetric chemistry eventually made progress and adulterators were brought to book under a series of Sale of Food and Drugs Acts that started in 1860. The irony was that many innocent farmers were prosecuted before anyone thought to establish a legal definition of the real thing. This came in 1901 with the Sale of Milk Regulations, which in effect claimed that science could determine natures intentions. Natural cow milk was said to contain 3.0% of butterfat, for instance, and a milk that was more watery than this was presumed to have been fraudulently manipulated.

Problem solved? Well no, because what happened if cattle were fed on very watery grass or silage? The milk they produced would be as it came from the cow, nothing added and nothing taken away but it would still be of a low quality fat -wise. Legal challenges in the early twentieth century proved that almost any milk coming from a healthy cow was acceptable, as long as it was not modified later. Here science and the law combined and felt able to say definitively what was natural. From 1901 to 1976 this whole milk i dea remained the British consensus. Meanwhile on the Continent a completely different approach prevailed. Countries such as the Netherlands had butter industries, where it was in their economic interest to regard some extraction of fat as normal. This led at first to fixed legal limits of quality and later to the standardization of the constituents of milk. Britains entry into the European Community in the 1970s meant accepting some legal definitions of foods that were from the Continental tradition. As a result, it was possible for the first time to buy semi -skimmed milk from 1981 onwards, and milks with standardized composition had to be allowed with the beginning of the Single Market in 1993. But it has only been since the Drinking Milk Regulations of 2008 that, at last, milk could be labelled with various fat levels. When you next go to the supermarket, have a look at the dairy shelves. Youll find there an astonishing range of milk. In addition to flavoured or filtered or fortified milk, you will f ind milk with 0.1%, 1%, 2% and 4% fat, and the consumer in England and Wales (but not Scotland) can also choose between raw milk and heated treated milks that have been pasteurized, sterilized or ultra heat treated. There is also homogenized and organic co ws milk, not to mention goats milk and soya milk. Im not saying that these new Euro definitions of quality are better or worse, but they are certainly different from the long history of milk in Britain. It is almost as if milk has had its own life story and we can now write its biography. It seems that most milk drinkers are oblivious to this story and are now content that it is technology that defines what is genuine and natural, and we no longer feel any obligation for our diet to reflect the foibl es and the cycles of nature. We are now sure that we can improve upon nature by producing a substance which has a substantial human imprint. Milk still resists us by turning sour and by persisting in being an ideal medium for the spread of disease, but both of these problems are susceptible to industrial processing. Finally, I would point out that science meets food quality in another interesting way, and once again attitudes have differed on either side of the Channel. In Britain regional foods were annihilated or marginalized by cheap imports from around the world in the second half of the nineteenth century. But free trade in other European countries was carefully managed in order to prevent the destruction of domestic agriculture. As a result, food quality in countries such as France and Italy has tended to be associated more with place than with the British-style chemical vision. These place-based interpretations of food quality were enshrined in European law in the 1990s and since then it has been fascinating to see

British food culture retro-fitting the notion of locality, without any appreciation that the appeal of terroir was often a defensive measure by French wine producers hoping to protect their reputations and their trade in the early twentieth century. Dont get me wrong, I love French and Italian food and wine but it is important to see beneath our romantic vision of them at the hard-headed business sense that has been the basis of the genealogy of their quality. Just because one vision has become so persuasive that it is now hegemonic does not mean that we should shirk our duty to trace its roots.