The first global historian of food, Mark Kurlansky, following the bestsellers Cod and Salt, highlights the fascinating cultural, economic, and gastronomic history of milk and all dairy products, with recipes throughout the book. While mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated since the domestication of animals over 10,000 years ago. Today, milk represents a prime example of the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial agriculture and animal rights to genetically modified organisms, the local food movement, and raw milk advocates, who controversially reject pasteurization. Deeply intertwined with human culture, milk has a captivating and ultimately global history to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the right person to do it. Tracing the diverse history of the liquid from antiquity to the present, he analyzes its peculiar and critical role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.