milk began to take shape, fostered by ideas about health that in a few generations would make fresh milk a nearly mandatory part of everyone’s diet, especially children’s.
Now, many very real medical considerations are involved with milk and linked with its modern commercial fortunes. But fear of catastrophe through lack of fresh unsoured milk —that form specifically—is the least rational of the lot. In fact, it is purely imaginary. It couldn’t have originated if people in nineteenth-century England and North America had known anything about another medically loaded issue that I’ve only incidentally touched on until now:lactosetolerance or intolerance.
THE DIGESTIVE MAJORITY AND MINORITY
To summarize briefly: The lactose dissolved inwhey is the principal sugar of milk, an energy supplier otherwise unknown or almost unknown in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Unlike milkfat and milk proteins, it is the same in composition from one animal’s milk to another. It belongs to the family of disaccharides (double-barreled sugar molecules) and consists of a unit of simple glucose linked with a unit of another simple sugar, galactose.
In healthy baby mammals drinking mother’s milk, an enzyme called lactase severs the link between the two halves of the molecule in the small intestine and frees the galactose to be converted (by yet another enzyme) into glucose, eventually releasing into the bloodstream two glucose molecules’ worth of energy from each original lactose molecule. This feat of transformation becomes unnecessary when the child advances to a milkless adult diet. At that point lactase production stops—though in most cases not completely. Almost all human beings retain at least a vestige of lactase activity throughout their lives. And a few belong to odd mutant populations that never lose lactase activity in the same way as do most people or animals, a condition known as lactase persistence that is as anomalous as a fawn’s keeping its spots once they have served their purpose. For most of the human race, when more than small amounts of unsoured milk get into the digestive system, the lactose in the whey passes almost intact into the small intestine. It draws diarrhea-producing water in its wake, while resident bacteria eventually reduce it to tatters and by-products including painful amounts of gas. (Note that this reaction, though unpleasant, is not an actual allergy. True milk allergy, potentially life-threatening but luckily rare, is an immune response in which the body reacts to milk proteins as foreign substances to be fought off with antibodies and a surge of histamines.)
As any glance at the world’s dairying regions and cuisines shows, lactoseintolerance doesn’t stop adults from consuming milk. It usually deters them from drinking the fresh unsoured milk that suddenly acquired vast prominence in Western diets during the nineteenth century. The milk drinkers of the Northwestern Cow Belt didn’t know that they were mutants able to do something very unusual. And until the vogue for fresh—that is, full-lactose—milk appeared in early modern times, even northwestern Europe treated it as only one possible form of milk among many others with little or no lactose.
PURITY AND PRESTIGE
A shift in priorities occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. The new focus on milk for drinking reflects a “perfect storm” convergence of circumstances. First of all, cash-crop farming began to attract ambitious specialists who saw opportunities in feeding cities. City provisioning had become more complex and troubled as the rural poor, progressively dispossessed by new patterns of land ownership, migrated tourban centers. Townsfolk became both more isolated from once widespread skills like dairying and more dependent on retail sellers who came to the ever-expanding city markets or trolled the streets for customers. A smaller but notable factor was the advent of hot tea and coffee with fresh milk
Now, many very real medical considerations are involved with milk and linked with its modern commercial fortunes. But fear of catastrophe through lack of fresh unsoured milk —that form specifically—is the least rational of the lot. In fact, it is purely imaginary. It couldn’t have originated if people in nineteenth-century England and North America had known anything about another medically loaded issue that I’ve only incidentally touched on until now:lactosetolerance or intolerance.
THE DIGESTIVE MAJORITY AND MINORITY
To summarize briefly: The lactose dissolved inwhey is the principal sugar of milk, an energy supplier otherwise unknown or almost unknown in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Unlike milkfat and milk proteins, it is the same in composition from one animal’s milk to another. It belongs to the family of disaccharides (double-barreled sugar molecules) and consists of a unit of simple glucose linked with a unit of another simple sugar, galactose.
In healthy baby mammals drinking mother’s milk, an enzyme called lactase severs the link between the two halves of the molecule in the small intestine and frees the galactose to be converted (by yet another enzyme) into glucose, eventually releasing into the bloodstream two glucose molecules’ worth of energy from each original lactose molecule. This feat of transformation becomes unnecessary when the child advances to a milkless adult diet. At that point lactase production stops—though in most cases not completely. Almost all human beings retain at least a vestige of lactase activity throughout their lives. And a few belong to odd mutant populations that never lose lactase activity in the same way as do most people or animals, a condition known as lactase persistence that is as anomalous as a fawn’s keeping its spots once they have served their purpose. For most of the human race, when more than small amounts of unsoured milk get into the digestive system, the lactose in the whey passes almost intact into the small intestine. It draws diarrhea-producing water in its wake, while resident bacteria eventually reduce it to tatters and by-products including painful amounts of gas. (Note that this reaction, though unpleasant, is not an actual allergy. True milk allergy, potentially life-threatening but luckily rare, is an immune response in which the body reacts to milk proteins as foreign substances to be fought off with antibodies and a surge of histamines.)
As any glance at the world’s dairying regions and cuisines shows, lactoseintolerance doesn’t stop adults from consuming milk. It usually deters them from drinking the fresh unsoured milk that suddenly acquired vast prominence in Western diets during the nineteenth century. The milk drinkers of the Northwestern Cow Belt didn’t know that they were mutants able to do something very unusual. And until the vogue for fresh—that is, full-lactose—milk appeared in early modern times, even northwestern Europe treated it as only one possible form of milk among many others with little or no lactose.
PURITY AND PRESTIGE
A shift in priorities occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. The new focus on milk for drinking reflects a “perfect storm” convergence of circumstances. First of all, cash-crop farming began to attract ambitious specialists who saw opportunities in feeding cities. City provisioning had become more complex and troubled as the rural poor, progressively dispossessed by new patterns of land ownership, migrated tourban centers. Townsfolk became both more isolated from once widespread skills like dairying and more dependent on retail sellers who came to the ever-expanding city markets or trolled the streets for customers. A smaller but notable factor was the advent of hot tea and coffee with fresh milk
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