Modern Myths: the Great Dairy Delusion

Modern life is filled with myths, for instance, hard work always pays off and polluted rivers have hidden benefits. But of all the swindles enacted on the public, the most outrageous of all must be the 1.5 centuries-long worship of milk. Anyone who grew up in or around the British Isles throughout the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and into the 1970’s, will know what I mean, will remember those annual love-ins with the dairy industry, to try to pour ever more of the white stuff down our throats. Schools, in particular, were regaled with classroom posters depicting rosy-cheeked youths knocking back glasses of the pale and creamy liquid. And every year, each child was handed a leaflet with at least one chart showing the nutritional make-up of milk, so much protein, fat, etc. Milk is a by-product of the meat production industry, with almost 15 billion litres of it produced annually in Great Britain. Milk is a superb culinary ingredient. Without it, we would have no butter, cheese, yoghurt, chocolate or ice-cream. It is essential for the baking of numerous cakes and loaves, and the preparation of a raft of sauces and many more dishes. Without it, the traditional cup of British tea is unthinkable. A protein found within it, casein, was essential to the production of buttons. Nutritionally, it was a mainstay for parents of children who were too old and/or numerous for feeding in the “natural” way and had not graduated on to adult foods. But before we get carried away, the majority of parents do not produce that number of offspring, anymore. The great milk success story is a little like that of the Internet, which resulted from the development of mass communication systems that fell in tandem with the public appetite for boundless information. The romanticisation of milk was brought about by the convergence of various social forces and technological developments and serves as a paradigm of our times. In the 1860’s, Louis Pasteur developed the process of pasteurization, which made cow’s milk disease-free and safe for its mass distribution. Previously, it was safe – if at all – only when drunk soon after milking. Pasteurization took place a century after the migration of the population from the green countryside to the newly-fledged towns of the Industrial Revolution. For that intervening century, the mass of people lived in unsafe and insanitary conditions, and had access to little fresh food. Fast-forward to the early twentieth century and witness their descendants, the less well-off urbanites needing a daily nutritional fix. What better than a glass or two of this by-product of the beef industry, the Great White Hope delivered straight from the green countryside by mass transportation to the dark heart of grimy urban areas? With free compulsory education well in place and an army of schoolteachers more than willing, it seemed, to augment commercial advertising, the milk marketeers held a sitting, captive purchasing sector. And of course, the marketeers advertised relentlessly on that spanking new medium, television. Latterly the offspring of Victorians, parents and teachers bought the message along with the milk: the drink was good for you and a child’s behaviour was graded according to his or her daily consumption, and endorsed and even enforced the wholesale downing of the white stuff. The colour itself denoted purity, goodness and the child not drinking his or her “pinta day” was not only naughty and undeserving of childhood treats, he or she was liable to grow up, if at all, with stunted bones and rotting teeth, together with the wreckage of an immune system. After all, milk was natural, untainted by chemical-laden factory processes. It was produced in that hallowed depth, the cow’s udder. That the cows were not similarly in awe of the human, milk-manufacturing process, escaped notice. As did the sufferings of the lactose-intolerant alongside the glaringly obvious fact that other and better ways to gain a daily fix of proteins, minerals and vitamins, were well in place, that the wholesale downing of milk says more about our culture than any dietary merits it might have . While I have never been an advocate of Margaret Thatcher’s politics, I now admit that she may have known more about nutrition than the average citizen when she infamously withdrew free milk from schoolchildren in 1971, a ruse for which she was dubbed “the milk snatcher”. These days, I spot casein bars on the shelves alongside other, protein-heavy products. Will someone gently remind these protein quaffers that the human animal is not required to grow horns and hooves?