Resources
By the end of 2026 we will be sharing the full interviews we carried out for our research if you would like to hear more.
For now, here’s a list of some of the books and articles we have been thinking with:
Atkins, Peter J. Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Academic. Essential for tracing how British science, standards, sanitation, and law tried to stabilise milk as a variable material commodity
Atkins, Peter J. “The Material Histories of Food Quality and Composition.” History and Technology 18, no. 4 (2002): 347–67.
Academic article. Provides a useful conceptual bridge between food materiality, scientific measurement, standards, and commodity history; milk is a principal case.
Beinart, William, and Karen Brown. African Local Knowledge and Livestock Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013.
Academic. Illuminates livestock care, African expertise, colonial veterinary knowledge, and the politics of whose animal-health knowledge counts.
Cohen, Mathilde, and Yoriko Otomo, eds. Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Academic. An interdisciplinary collection connecting milk to law, animal studies, technology, embodiment, race, and political economy
Day, Lindsay, Ashlee Cunsolo, Heather Castleden, Debbie Martin,et al. “The Expanding Digital Media Landscape of Qualitative and Decolonizing Research: Examining Collaborative Podcasting as a Research Method.” Mediatropes 7, no. 1 (2017): 203–28.
Academic methods. One of the two strongest methodological additions: treats collaborative podcasting as participatory data collection, analysis, critical inquiry, and knowledge mobilisation, with special relevance to decolonial work
DuPuis, E. Melanie. Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
Academic. A classic account of how milk acquired its status as a supposedly universal, pure, and necessary food in the United States.
Evans, Matthew. Milk: The Truth, the Lies and the Unbelievable Story of the Original Superfood. Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2024.
Non-academic but well-informed food writing. Evans (a farmer, chef, and food writer) examines milk through its nutritional claims, environmental controversies, dairy farming, formula and plant-based alternatives, alongside the cultural and political meanings attached to dairy. It is useful as a contemporary public-facing intervention, though it should be read critically beside the academic works by Wiley, DuPuis, Smith-Howard, Atkins, and Freeman.
Freeman, Andrea. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA.” UC Irvine Law Review 3, no. 4 (2013): 1251–79.
Academic. A crucial political-legal account of how US dairy policy, racialised nutrition discourse, and state subsidies can reproduce food inequality.
Hayes, Megan. Cows, Cobs and Corner Shops: The Story of London’s Welsh Dairies. Ceredigion: Ylolfa, 2028
Non-academic/local history: Valuable for migration, ethnic enterprise, urban provisioning, and the social geography of dairy retail. Bilingual English/Welsh.
Hove, Godfrey, and Sandra Swart. “‘This is a land of honey – no milk, bar sour!’ African Milk Regimes and the Emergence of a Colonial Order in Southern Rhodesia, 1890s–1907.” Critical African Studies 8, no. 2 (2016): 147–64.
Academic history. Dairy as a lens to show how indigenous milk practices, cattle regimes, and taste cultures were reorganised (and often delegitimised) under early colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia.
Kara, Helen. Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide. Bristol: Policy Press, 2015.
Academic methods. Offers practical grounding for arts-based, technological, mixed-method, and transformative inquiry. Useful for designing creative work around milk, memory, voice, and material culture.
Kretchmer, Norman, and O. Ransome-Kuti. “Lactose Intolerance in East and West African Populations.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 23, no. 5 (1970): 579–83.
Academic biomedical anthropology / nutrition history. Documents lactase deficiency among Yoruba, Fulani, and Hausa groups, providing an early, empirically grounded account of how lactose intolerance became racialised in postwar medicine and nutrition policy.
Kurlansky, Mark. Milk: A 10,000-Year History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
Popular history. A broad, accessible longue durée narrative of dairying, domestication, commerce, nutrition, and changing meanings of milk.
Lasky, Dorothea. Milk. Minneapolis: Wave Books, 2018.
Literary/poetry. Not a historical authority, but valuable for thinking through milk’s affective, bodily, maternal, erotic, and metaphorical registers.
Lundström, Ragnar, and Maria Poletti Lundström. “Podcast Ethnography.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 24, no. 3 (2021): 289–301.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Foundational theory. Useful for framing milk as commodity, labour product, and site of value extraction, especially when reading industrial dairying and retail systems.
Morpurgo, Michael. Cobweb. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2009.
Fiction. Not an academic source on milk, but potentially useful as a cultural text for studying rural childhood, animal-human relations, and imaginative agrarian worlds.
Mwatwara, Wesley, and Sandra Swart. “‘If our cattle die, we eat them but these white people bury and burn them!’ African Livestock Regimes, Veterinary Knowledge and the Emergence of a Colonial Order in Southern Rhodesia, c. 1860–1902.” Kronos 41, no. 1 (2015): 112–41.
Academic history. African animal-health knowledge, slaughter practices, and cattle regimes as they collided with colonial veterinary science and state power; crucial for understanding the politics of whose livestock knowledge counted.
Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Rev. and expanded ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Academic/public-facing. Useful for analysing industry influence, dietary guidelines, lobbying, and the political construction of nutritional common sense.
Paxson, Heather. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Academic ethnography. Shows how dairy becomes “quality,” authenticity, microbial life, craft, and economic value in contemporary American artisanal production.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Academic reference work. Supplies historiographical and methodological context for placing a milk project within broader histories of agriculture, diet, commodities, empire, and food systems.
Rogers, Dallas, Miles Herbert, Carolyn Whitzman, Eugene McCann, Paul J. Maginn, Beth Watts, Ashraful Alam, Madeleine Pill, Roger Keil, Tanja Dreher, Matt Novacevski, Jason Byrne, Natalie Osborne, Mirjam Büdenbender, Tooran Alizadeh, Kate Murray, Kelly Dombroski, Deepti Prasad, Creighton Connolly, Amanda Kass, Emma Dale, Cameron Murray, and Susan Caldis. “The City Under COVID-19: Podcasting as Digital Methodology.” Journal of Economic and Human Geography 111, no. 3 (2020): 434–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12426.
Academic methods. A multi-author, international project in which urban scholars recorded short audio “reports from the field” on their cities during lockdown; it theorises podcasting as a collaborative digital method for rapid, reflexive, and distributed qualitative inquiry rather than just a dissemination channel
Schmid, Ron. The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Products. Washington, DC: New Trends Publishing, 2003.
Non-academic/advocacy-oriented. Useful as evidence of raw-milk politics and alternative dairy discourse. Read critically alongside peer-reviewed scholarship.
Scrinis, Gyorgy. Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Academic. Helps explain how milk’s fats, proteins, calcium, and vitamins are abstracted into political and commercial nutritional claims.
Smith-Howard, Kendra. Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Academic. A central environmental history of US milk, linking industrialisation, hygiene, ecology, regulation, consumers, and technological change.
Velten, Hannah. Milk: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.
Scholarly popular history. Offers concise cross-cultural material on milk’s culinary, religious, social, and economic histories.
Weaver, Lawrence Trevelyan. White Blood: A History of Human Milk. London: Unicorn Publishing, 2021
History of medicine/popular history. Breastfeeding, wet-nursing, infant feeding, and the medicalisation of human milk.
Wiley, Andrea S. Re-imagining Milk: Cultural and Biological Perspectives. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Academic anthropology. Fundamental for bringing evolutionary biology, lactase persistence, nutrition, culture, inequality, and global dairy politics into one critical frame.
Wiley, Andrea S. Cultures of Milk: The Biology and Meaning of Dairy Products in the United States and India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Academic anthropology. Particularly strong for comparative work on how milk is culturally naturalised, morally valued, and differently embedded in US and Indian food systems.
Valenze, Deborah. Milk: A Local and Global History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Academic. Strong global history of milk’s movement from local subsistence and household use toward industrial systems, colonial circuits, and modern nutrition.
