Milk is full of contradictions.
It nourishes, yet excludes. It’s natural, yet processed. It’s tightly regulated, yet deeply emotional. And behind every glass is a web of varied perspectives on milk—from farmers, scientists, mothers, regulators, and campaigners.
The workshop brought museum curators, anthropologists, livestock researchers and a food writer into the same room, alongside online participants including a farmer. We tasted different milks and cheeses as we talked because milk is difficult to understand only as an idea. We also visited some of the milk associated collections at MERL. What emerged was a conversation that moved constantly between the bodily and the political. We asked what counts as care for an animal, and what happens when farmers’ knowledge meets scientific management; how colonial histories have shaped which milk cultures are valued, changed or forgotten; and what is lost when the animal producing milk disappears from everyday view. We talked about pasteurisation, fermentation and intolerance, but also trust, memory, language and power: why milk can signify purity and nationhood in one context and exclusion in another; why pastoral images persist even as production becomes increasingly industrial; and what lab-grown milk might mean for a substance whose meaning has always depended on relationships between bodies, animals, places and technologies. Again and again, we came back to a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is milk?
