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In her new book, Milk, food historian Deborah Valenze gives an exhaustive and sometimes intriguing account of all things milky

ROMAN myth has it that the Milky Way was created after a peculiar domestic dispute. As the goddess Juno slept, her husband Jupiter snuck up and planted his illegitimate son Hercules at her breast. With just a few droplets of his wife鈥檚 鈥渆lixir of immortality鈥�, his otherwise mortal son could be granted divinity and eternal life.

Yet Hercules startled Juno awake and, as she pulled away, her breast milk sprinkled the heavens and earth. Those droplets grew into lilies below, and formed the stars of the Milky Way above.

This is just one of the many myths about the divine power of the white stuff that historian Deborah Valenze explores in Milk. In occasionally tedious detail, she also tours the religious, social, economic, medical and scientific forces that have elevated milk to its staple status throughout much of the modern world. From early religious celebrations of milk in Mongolian and Indian culture to the modern debates over raw milk and the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone in industrial dairy farms to increase production, Milk is certainly comprehensive in scope.

Valenze shows that despite our modern day unease with adults consuming human breast milk, it was often recommended in the past as a curative for a range of ailments. And while the medical establishment is firmly behind the supremacy of breastfeeding for infants today, for the past 300 years medical opinion varied widely.

As for cow鈥檚 milk, we learn that, despite the fact that goats were more abundant and cheaper to keep, the greater versatility of cows and their products helped their milk rise to prominence. Valenze shows how in the 1700s some physicians recommended a cow鈥檚 milk diet to treat conditions from melancholy to infertility. Fresh milk was also one of many remedies for dyspepsia (though not, she notes, the preferred choice of Charles Darwin, who suffered with the condition).

After the late 1800s, widespread use of pasteurisation led to a new era of milk safety, but Valenze makes the case that it wasn鈥檛 only Louis Pasteur who understood the antimicrobial benefits of heat. Indeed, German agricultural chemist Franz Ritter von Soxhlet devised a working pasteurisation system in the same era, but as Valenze notes in a rare moment of levity: 鈥淗e remains obscure in the annals of history, probably because his surname could not possibly be turned into a technical-sounding noun.鈥�

Milk contains plenty of fascinating facts and anecdotes, and raises intriguing questions about the gap between milk鈥檚 high cost of production and low retail price, and whether lactose intolerance is a biological norm. Unfortunately, the results of such clearly exhaustive research are soured somewhat as these questions about present-day issues are left unanswered.