Barnard Professor Explores the Rich, Sweet History of Milk

Throughout history, milk has been a symbol of motherhood and fertility, but also prosperity, health and strength. In Hindu mythology a churning ocean of milk releases the nectar of immortality. Statues of the Egyptian goddess Isis show her nursing her son, Horus. Romans credited the creation of the Milky Way to the spraying breast milk of the goddess Juno. Such stories have long intrigued Deborah Valenze , a Barnard professor who specializes in the social and cultural history of 18th-and 19th-century Britain and teaches in the Columbia history program. With a particular interest in food and agriculture, she has offered courses such as "A Social and Cultural History of Food in Europe" and "Edible Conflicts: A History of Food." Now Valenze, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship in April, has turned her storyteller's eye on this staple of the global diet in her new book, Milk: A Local and Global History , released in June by Yale University Press. For so ubiquitous a drink, the literature was surprisingly sparse, she said.