Nature’s Perfect Food

"Melanie DuPuis does a great job of telling how milk came to be seen as central to the American diet. Milk has an amazing cultural apparatus around it. In the United States, most people would recognize the key elements of the milk industry’s marketing campaign—the familiar ‘milk moustache’ and the slogan “milk does the body good.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Melanie DuPuis tells the story of the marketing of milk in the context of immigration to the United States. Milk is imposed on immigrants from non-European countries, such as Latin America or Africa, as a sort of civilizing tonic. It’s still pushed on immigrants, most of whom have difficulty digesting it, through dairy industry marketing and lobbying. Milk is a “white” food, in both the literal and figurative sense, which feels a bit out of step with an increasingly diverse America. DuPuis shows that many of the choices that we make are based on white, Northern European norms that are still the norm, despite the changing demographics of society. She also shows the corporate infrastructure of the food industry and the power of industry marketing campaigns. She shows the whole economic apparatus surrounding purportedly healthy food, which is in some cases not so healthy and in many cases entails cruelty to animals."