Natures Perfect Food or Mamas in the Kitchen

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 consumption—how 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 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.

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

Book about: The Cafe Brenda Cookbook or How to Pick a Peach

Mama's in the Kitchen: Weird and Wonderful Home Cooking 1900-1950

Author: Barbara Swell

A hilarious book of country humor and trivia that gathers together jokes, slang, stories, folklore, and facts on a broad range of topics.