Of course, there may have been a purely gastronomic aspect to this. Milk and honey are a pleasing combination. Honey mixed with yogurt, the sweet and the sour, is especially tasty. There may even be a medical reason for the combination.
Throughout history it has often been argued that, after human milk, goat’s and donkey’s milks were most suitable for us because their compositions are closest to ours. But that is not entirely true. Donkey’s milk has far less fat than human milk, and goat’s milk has triple the amount of protein.
Cows, sheep, goats, and buffalos have four stomachs; camels and llamas have three. Animals that have more than one stomach are known as ruminants. Some ruminants, such as cows and sheep, are grazers who munch on grass, and some, such as goats and deer, instead nibble on nutritious shrubs in the woods.
The word “ruminant” comes from the Latin word ruminare, which means “to rechew.” Food is regurgitated, rechewed, and sent to the rumen, one of the animal’s stomachs, to be decomposed by fermentation before passing on to the other compartments. A cow chews for between six and eight hours a day, which produces some 42 gallons of saliva that buffer the acids produced in fermentation.
Etching by Jean-Louis Demarne, 1752–1829. A cow and calf with goats in background. (Author’s collection)
Animals that have one stomach are known as monogastrics, and it would seem to make sense that milk produced by an animal that digests the way we do would be most suitable for us. This is why even today, donkey’s milk is produced commercially, especially in Italy, and sold as a health product.
Another monogastric animal is the horse, but mare’s milk has caught on in only a few cultures, perhaps because it is extremely low in fat. Pliny the Elder reported that the Sarmatians, nomadic tribesmen in Iran and the southern Urals, consumed mare’s milk mixed with millet, creating a kind of porridge that would become popular in other cultures when millet was mixed with different milks.
Herodotus, the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek historian, wrote that the Scythians, also Eurasian nomads, had a diet that consisted almost entirely of mare’s milk. But when Marco Polo, who is credited with introducing many European food trends, reported that the Mongols drank mare’s milk, Europeans were not tempted to take up the practice.
And why has the pig, another monogastric animal and the most ubiquitous farm animal in the world, never been called to dairy duty? Perhaps it is because we don’t like to eat the milk of carnivores for cultural or psychological reasons, or because meat eating badly flavors milk. But a pig is whatever you make it. Pigs will eat anything, and they can be vegetarian if you prefer. Perhaps we shun pig milk because we prefer to drink from animals that bear one to three babies and have their teats arranged in a single bladder, an udder.
Northern Europeans once considered reindeer milk the best milk of all, and for a time were also partial to elk milk. Neither has remained popular.
Comparing the different types of milk is complex. But in the beginning, the most important issues involving milk were simple: What milk-producing animal was both easiest to domesticate and available in large numbers?
All evidence indicates that milking animals began in the Middle East, possibly in Iraq or the Assyrian part of Iran. Sumerians in the city of Ur created a frieze on a wall of the temple of al-Ubaid five thousand years ago of a scene of dairy workers milking cows and pouring the liquid into large jars. But as early as was this frieze, known to archeologists as “the dairy of al-Ubaid,” it probably did not depict the earliest milking, because cows were probably not available when milking began. Civilization in this area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is thought to date back seven thousand years.
Milking of the reindeer in Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland. An engraving from The Art-Union Scrap Book, London, 1843. Artists Sly and Wilson. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
Man milking cow in detail of a relief on a limestone sarcophagus of Queen Kawit, wife of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II. Egypt, Middle Kingdom, 2061–2010 B.C. From Deir el-Bahri, Werner Forman Archive, Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
Archaeological finds suggest that humans have been herding animals for ten thousand years, and they must have been living close to them for at least that long because animal pathogens started mutating into human diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis ten thousand years ago. Was it then that milking started?
No one really knows. How was it decided that the milk of pastoral mammals could be substituted for human milk when a mother died or was unable to produce enough milk? It seems a bold step to replace mother’s milk with that of an animal.
But perhaps animal milk was first recognized as a commercial product and only later used for feeding human babies. In a hot climate where milk spoiled very quickly, cheese and yogurt, made from soured milk, must have been developed early. In fact, until the age of refrigeration, very little fresh drinking milk was consumed in the Middle East.
Or perhaps the practice of humans drinking other mammals’ milk began when lactating animals were used as wet nurses, the human babies placed on teats to suck milk. This practice occurred in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and even in more modern times in poor parts of Europe. It is not known how frequently it actually occurred, but it is striking how often it comes up in the literature and mythology of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
In ancient times, when abandoning babies was commonplace, there were many stories of infants being saved by lactating animals. The symbol of Rome is a depiction of its two founders, the twin boys Romulus and Remus, breastfeeding on the wolf that raised them.
Another mystery is what kind of animal was first used for milking. It was almost certainly not a cow. If milking really did start in the Middle East ten thousand years ago—or even nine or eight—it must have been with some other animal, as there were not many cows there then, or anywhere else, for that matter.
The ancestor of cattle, of all bovines, was the aurochs. Aurochsen (the correct plural form) were large, powerful, violent, and aggressive animals. With horns more than two feet long and shoulders that stood higher than the height of a man, they fearlessly attacked the humans who hunted them and inspired awe, as testified to by the frequency with which they appear in cave wall paintings. Females were probably less aggressive than males, but even so, milking a wild aurochs was as practical as trying to milk a wild bison on the plains of North America. In all likelihood, neither ever happened.
In time, the wild aurochs were domesticated, and as this domestic version proliferated, the wild aurochs began to disappear. Once ranging over an area stretching from Asia through Europe, they eventually were confined to the forests of central Europe. The last aurochs died in seventeenth-century Poland.
Modern cattle do not stem from these last Central Europeans, but from a cousin, the Urus, which was very hairy and, according to Caesar, almost as large as an elephant. The Urus roamed over Europe, Asia, and Africa. An early domesticated Urus breed was the Celtic shorthorn, a small but sturdy animal that not only provided the Celts with milk, but was the ancestor of many modern breeds.
Was the first milking animal a goat, as goat enthusiasts always claim? Or was it a gazelle, the wild ancestor of goats? This is possible, but gazelle farming would have been difficult unless they were soon domesticated into goats. Perhaps it was a sheep, a relative of the goat. But sheep’s milk, with its high fat and protein content, is rich for drinking, and sheep produce only miserly amounts of milk.
Still, the Sumerians’ first dominant domestic animal was the sheep, which they began domesticating six thousand years ago. The value of Sumerian sheep was not appraised by their capacity to give milk, but by the size of their tails. The ample fat found in sheep tails was an important source of cooking oil.
According to Sumerian tablets, a typical sheep flock numbered between 150 and 180. But some flocks were as large as five hundred. The sheep seem to have been well cared for, especially those owned by the clergy, who had special grazing fields and supplemen
ted their sheep’s diet with dates and bread. They did, after all, want them to have fat tails.
The Sumerians also raised cows and goats, though in much smaller numbers than the sheep, fueling further speculation as to which animal came first. But whatever the case, the Sumerians seemed to struggle with a declining milk production of their domestic stock. They kept crossbreeding them with wild animals—cows with bison, goats with wild mountain goats, and sheep with wild rams.
The shepherds used whatever milk was produced to make butter, cream, and several types of cheese. Soured milk with honey was used as a cough remedy. But the consumption of dairy products was not widespread, and what there was of it was controlled by the temple.
Camels could also have been the first animal milked by humans. Camels are convenient to milk because they are tall animals—though somewhat grouchy. They have the advantage of being able to find food anywhere. They graze in desert areas seemingly devoid of forage, nourishing themselves on scrubby plants that other animals won’t touch and humans often don’t even notice. Camels were milked in the Middle East, but it is not known when that practice began. Pliny opined that camels had the sweetest milk, although if judged by lactose content, that would not be true. The llama, closely related to the camel, provides milk in South America today, but these animals were not milked until the Europeans arrived.
The British writer Isabella Beeton, in her bestselling 1861 book, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, arrived at an assessment of milks that remains a fairly good summary today:
Milk of the human subject is much thinner than cow’s milk; ass’s milk comes the nearest to human milk of any other; goat’s milk is something thicker and richer than cow’s milk; ewe’s milk has the appearance of cow’s milk and affords a large quantity of cream. Mare’s milk affords more sugar than that of the ewe; camel’s milk is employed only in Africa; buffalo’s milk is employed in India.
Once cows became easily available, most milk producers chose to milk them rather than other animals, though that choice has never been without controversy. Mohandas Gandhi, father of the modern cow-worshipping state of India, drank exclusively goat’s milk, which he considered most healthful. But cows are easy to work with and they produce a tremendous amount of milk. A goat might produce three quarts in a day; a really good goat, a gallon. A cow naturally produces several gallons a day, and modern farmers using advanced production techniques can hope for eight or more. However, the larger the animal, the more it has to be fed, and a goat produces five times as much milk in proportion to her body weight as a cow, four times as much milk for her weight as a sheep.
Goats have another advantage over cows, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. They don’t need rich green pastures in which to graze and can find food in places where a cow would starve. They can even climb trees to eat leaves.
Farmers need animals with whom they can have a peaceful, even affectionate, relationship. The Assyrians chanted prayers and magical invocations in which they asked for their livestock to have a friendly attitude.
There is a simple trick for more easily milking cows, goats, sheep, and other animals that animal rights activists abhor. When a calf, kid, or lamb is born, it is taken away from its mother and fed milk from a bottle by the farmer. Most animal rights activists say that the separated animals moan and cry with grief. Some farmers say they do, too. Others deny it or appear not to care; as Brad Kessler, a small-scale Vermont goat farmer puts it, “Milk is power.” Separating a calf from its mother is another of the many enduring controversies around milk.
When animals are left to suckle their mothers, they drink up a considerable portion of their milk—more than they need—and a farmer’s profits. They also grow up to be very independent and sometimes distrustful of humans. But if a farmer feeds the young animals, they grow up with a real fondness for human beings. Cows are too big to frolic with people the way goats sometimes do, but they nuzzle farmers with their noses and follow them around. They like life to be calm and easy, which is why cow farmers are usually calm, soft-spoken people. Sheep follow farmers around in a cluster but demonstrate none of the individualistic behavior of cows or goats. They seem to exist more as a flock than as individuals, which is probably why there is no distinct name for them in the singular. Farmers and milking animals can enjoy a very warm relationship, but it never ends well for the animal, because a farmer cannot afford to keep feeding an animal that has stopped producing milk.
2
GOING SOUR IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT
From ancient times up to the modern era, there have always been babies who were breastfed and babies who were bottle-fed. And from the very beginning, the relative merits and disadvantages of each have been fiercely debated.
Today, many advocates of breastfeeding insist that there are relatively few women who cannot produce milk. But records dating back to the beginnings of civilizations reveal that even back then there were many formulas and medicines for “failed” mothers. The Ebers papyrus, so called because it was purchased in 1873 by a George Ebers, is a 1550 B.C.E. papyrus scroll on herbal medicine that offers a prescription for struggling mothers: Rub the woman’s back with oil and warmed swordfish bones.
If, for some inexplicable reason, the oil and swordfish bones didn’t resolve the problem, the papyrus recommends hiring a wet nurse. Wet-nursing was often seen as preferable to “artificial feeding,” the term by which feeding infants animal milk was known for centuries, but not always—another enduring controversy.
Wet nurses needed to be watched carefully and regulated with great seriousness, as was made clear in the Babylonian legal code of Hammurabi circa 1754 B.C.E. The code stated that if a baby died while in the care of a wet nurse, she could not try to sneak in another baby in its place. Any nursemaid caught doing so would have her breasts cut off.
Sometimes a family sent a baby to a wet nurse but did not have the money to pay her. The code allowed that in such a case, the family could sell the baby to the wet nurse.
The legal codes of the classical world—Egypt, Greece, and Rome—all had laws making it clear that wet-nursing was a highly respectable profession governed by legal contracts. When the baby Moses was found on the banks of the Nile, the pharaoh’s daughter, according to the legend, hired a lactating woman and ordered her to feed the child. The fact that she did this rather than feeding the child animal milk has always been interpreted as evidence of her determination to raise the baby with special care.
In most representations of nursing children, the child is being fed from the left breast, which was thought to contain the best milk because it was closest to the heart; it was only with the introduction of Christianity that this belief began to fade. An aristocratic baby had to be fed exclusively from the left breast. This was possible because highborn babies, especially in Egypt, often had several wet nurses.
Nursemaids were also considered to be a better option than feeding a child animal milk, because in a hot climate, milk can be dangerous. It has to get from the animal to the baby quickly, before deadly bacteria sets in, and in the classical world, this could be a difficult task. Nevertheless, we know that at least some babies were bottle-fed early on because the ancients left bottles behind. Egyptian terra-cotta nursing bottles dating from 1500 B.C.E. have been found, as well as Egyptian nursing vessels of various designs going back to 4000 B.C.E.
In ancient times, as in modern times, there were women who did not want to breastfeed. The fact that they were usually highborn women suggests that only those with some financial means could afford to hire a wet nurse or to rush fresh animal milk to their babies. It may also have been that some social status was needed to refuse a task that many regarded as a woman’s obligation.
In the Egypt of the pharaohs, wet nurses lived in a harem and were well treated and highly regarded. Their names were placed on important party and funeral lists. In Greece by 950 B.C.E., it was fashionable for upper-class women to hire lower-class nursemaids. Wet-nursing was also of
ten the work of slaves, and thus slave-owning women did not breastfeed.
Stone receptacles for milk from Vanous, Cyprus, ca. 2200–2100 B.C. Cyprus Museum. (SEF/Art Resource, NY)
The option of bottle-feeding, in contrast, may have been resorted to by women who had no other choice—overworked and underfed poor women who could not produce enough milk. Bottles were also probably used for the babies of poor women who died in childbirth, and for abandoned children shunted off to orphanages. To substitute animal milk for human milk may have been a last, desperate measure.
Elaborate cups formed in the shape of a woman nursing a baby or holding out a breast from which the milk poured seem to have been the nursing cups of choice for more affluent babies. Poor babies were fed from animal horns.
It seems likely that milk was not originally produced for feeding babies or for drinking. Instead, as an extremely unstable product, it was probably cured, hardened, soured, or fermented into a variety of highly nutritious and stable foods.
Many centuries before Louis Pasteur, the ancient Assyrians knew, probably from their own experience, that the only way to keep fresh milk from becoming poisonous was to boil it. The resulting scum on the pot mixed with breadcrumbs was a children’s treat, which they lapped directly from the pot. It was believed back then, and many twenty-first-century people would agree, that boiled milk lacks flavor and that only the scum and the skin left on top are good to eat.
Yogurt is made by adding a live culture to milk, another trick apparently learned in very ancient times. The milk was then boiled, and the pot was wrapped in cloth and left to cool very slowly, first indoors and later outside in the night air. But when the yogurt was outside, it had to be guarded carefully, as many animals, especially cats, are great yogurt lovers. Thick and sour yogurt gives off an inviting fragrance. In some places, yogurt is still made this way today.
Milk Page 2