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• W278976437 abstract "What can milk be other than the whitish, opaque and sweet liquid produced by women and female animals as the primary source of nutrition for their offspring? Certainly, we know that the exact components of this liquid vary by species, farming methods, age or nutrition, and that there exist vegetable liquids from soy, rice or almond called milk. One can observe that milk has the tendency to change over time, while for the purposes of consumption these material changes can be put into operation in numerous forms. We are also aware that the highly sensitive substance is not easy to store and transport, and therefore are used to the many hygienic treatments of milk, e.g. pasteurisation, as a preventive measure in the fight against pathogenic microorganisms. Yet, despite all restrictions and well-known technical operations, we tend to identify milk as one of the most natural foodstuffs on our table. Among the plethora of processed food products, milk and dairy products seem to have saved much of their naturalness.However, there is nothing self-evident in the very nature of milk. Neither the material of milk nor its qualities are timeless, stable and unalterable. Our meanings of milk are instead the result of history; especially the question, why a particular food should be for whatever reason a healthy and desirable one, can be answered in very different ways. Today, the notion of nature fits better with our ideals of a healthy food than the notion of manipulation and control, which resembles a mass-produced industrial product. Yet this is only one proposition. Quality cannot be taken for granted. The notion of the material quality of food has, in fact, been a long-standing issue of controversies and contests in economics. Such struggles are the starting point of Peter Atkins’ fascinating study of the ‘nature’ of milk in British science, dairy industry and health politics during the nineteenth century.After the linguistic and visual turns in cultural studies, it sometimes looks as if the material world operates as a last sign for the natural. ‘Can we get our materialism back, please?’ was the polemic phrase of Bruno Latour with which he commented on this tendency. Atkins, too, does not believe in the stability of the material world, yet, at the same time refuses any kind of radical constructionism. While a substance like milk, on close inspection, is fully in the human realm, the material never could be handled without restrictions. Atkins prefers to follow Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (eds), Mangle in Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) as a theoretical framework referring to the ‘dialectics of resistance and accommodation’ (p. 53). Knowledge production is seen as ‘muddling along towards understandings’; in the words of Atkins, science never knew the material qualities of milk, instead it was seeking the natural, and policing the real substance.Thus, Atkins offers a history of the production of knowledge tools intended to perceive and explain the material nature of a bodily substance in order to transform this substance into a commercial product on increasing food markets. Instead of analysing the power of instruments, laboratories, firms and legal institutions – as classical history of science and technology would have done – Atkins concentrates on the mechanisms or, with reference to Foucault, the ‘dispositifs’ that have generated the expertise and norms produced by these institutions. Many branches of research – for example, milk chemistry – ended up in analysing the composition and properties of the fluid. Many technical procedures acted on and distributed the discursive space in which the meanings of the nature of milk were made. Atkins divides the experimental trials on milk into no less than ten distinct forms; likewise, the expertise, and the disagreements between experts.All the scientific findings of the period under consideration are nothing but interpretations attributed to the materiality of the body. One could call it an experimental realism. This experimental realism no longer presented bodily materials in a personal, private or individual form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all individual milks. As such, milk became measurable, normative, standardisable. Although different bodies continued to give different substances, these became increasingly comparable in physical properties, ingredients, taste and quality. Yet speaking through the medium of lactometers, etc., scientists offered curious explanations of matter that created new images of milk. The practice of measuring produced in a laboratory was transmitted to the material world and amalgamated with the perceptions of earlier periods. This becomes very clear in relation to the leading themes of earlier periods. Milk adulteration, for instance, as old as the commercial milk trade, was no longer only defined by secret manipulations but also by the adulteration detection tests and their indicating devices. Hence, formulas or scientific notations relate not only to subsequent problems of standardising and homogenising material differences. If they are leaving the world of the laboratory, they become images of the ordinary materials belonging to everyday life and recognised by all. Atkins analyses this shift with respect to the legal procedures of the British food and drugs legislation, demonstrating that the quality of milk is closely related to the practice of common law. Scientific, technological, commercial, moral and, finally, legal influences are hidden behind ‘a blanket of innocent whiteness’ (p. 277).Milk represents the emergence of a consensus of material ontologies, and it is the work of the historian to map even some of the involved parties. Atkins does not try to sum things up. He is just describing particular historical persons, methods and events, while rethinking food history and doing a very empirical philosophy. He relates his findings on the material quality of milk to other texts from different fields (epistemology, history of science, history of food) and in so doing finds his own narrative. This is quite radical and thought provoking, arguing that the materiality of milk is not a given. Ontology is a quest of politics, and science is as multiple as reality in general." @default.
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• W278976437 date "2011-04-01" @default.
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• W278976437 title "Peter Atkins, Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law, Critical Food Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. xxii + 334, £65.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7921-9." @default.
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