Milk! Audiobook By Mark Kurlansky cover art

Milk!

A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Preview
Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Milk!

By: Mark Kurlansky
Narrated by: Brian Sutherland
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $25.08

Buy for $25.08

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the best-selling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic and culinary story of milk and all things dairy - with recipes throughout.

According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself.

Before the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. But during the 19th century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. And today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization.

Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics and economics.

©2018 Mark Kurlansky (P)2018 Audible, Ltd
Agricultural & Food Sciences Food & Wine Gastronomy Science World Food Science Ancient History
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup

Critic reviews

"Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas is a feat of investigation, compilation and organization.... Altogether a complex and rich survey, Milk! is a book well worth nursing." (Wall Street Journal)

All stars
Most relevant  
The book has some really good history as do all of Kurlansky’s books that I have read (listed to).
Personally, I would have liked more of the deeper history and less on the relatively modern.

Unfortunately, the narrator is horrible. When I first began listening, I honestly thought the book was being read by Siri with a male voice.
There is virtually no emotion, nothing to help keep you engaged, just textbook reading.

Narrated by Siri

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The author is very thoughtful, precisely following the history of a very controversial food. From the moment tiny humans come from the womb, until the skill and dexterity along with muscle and skeletal maturity allow for self feeding, milk is absolutely essential. Most of the world, however, cannot digest milk sugar after weaning- unless there is a familial and cultural history of using and eating milk.

The author not only gives historical recipes, he details the societal norms, even going into the milk depots in New York, and how filth, contaminated milk, and milk borne disease has shaped our farming practices, even government policy on milk distribution.

There is also history from the middle east, even China and Japan. Yogurt (yog-hurt, as pronounced by the narrator) is discussed, from Bulgaria, but also Icelandic skyr, which is really a cheese, and the toxic, acidic whey from the straining of mass-produced Greek style yogurt. Cheese from France, in all its variety, and from England (Stilton, Cheddar) and the effects cheese has on the gut, is all given space.

The narrator has a nice tone, but his pronunciation can be a bit humorous, a decisively unique quality, but easy to hear. It isn't distracting, just not your standard generic English.

Great History by Author, interesting narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Enough history to keep me interested, and enough recipes to cut through the monotony of the excruciatingly long history of milk. Enjoyable - would listen to again.

Informative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Mark Kurlansky is an instant buy for me. The stranger the topic, the more fascinating I know it will be. So when I saw he had a new book, I went ahead and used my credit without listening to the audio sample. Big Mistake!! The narration sounds so robotic that I'm almost convinced that it IS just a chatbot. The charm of the writing is completely lost by the stilted and monotone delivery.

Read the Book....But don't listen to it!!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Fascinating work about milk but the narrator made a male Siri voice sound as animated as Robin Williams in his party days. The recipes are fantastic and the sources well researched. Just the narrator sounded like an old dmv number reader.

Fantastic book read by a robot

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The book was okay, but I felt the author spent far too much time on recipes seeing as how most readers are unlikely to ever make any of them. And the narrator had no vocal energy. It felt as if he was reading to put his audience to sleep.

Not quite what I was expecting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The first four or five chapters of this book are a monotonous recitation of the many types of dairy products that humans have consumed throughout history. Listener/reader, be patient and wait for the stories of culture and science around a single topic that are the hallmark of Kurlansky’s books. Kurlansky can be quite drol, but this only emerges after the first quarter of the book.

It was a mistake for the audiobook to include the more than 100 recipes that appear in the text. These should have been placed at the end of the recording so that interested listeners could access them, without interrupting the main text. Recommended.

Sour milk turns to sweet cream

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I picked, Milk, up after finishing, Salt, and am not disappointed.
The book holds your attention by breaking the topic down into digestible sub-topics and avoids Milk-burnout by bouncing between the various aspects of Milk's impact, and interesting digressions relating to the topic.

Very entertaining

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

very interesting. Well researched and organized. Not as gripping as "Salt" but certainly as informative.

interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Worst narrating I have ever heard. He literally sounds like a computer. Inflections in the wrong places, odd pronunciations, flat affect. Well written book with lots of good information though.

Good book, terrible narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews