{"id":3676,"date":"2023-03-29T15:49:08","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T15:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3676"},"modified":"2023-04-18T15:54:49","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T15:54:49","slug":"the-white-race-cannot-survive-without-dairy-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3676","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe white race cannot survive without dairy products\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Visiting Milk at London’s Wellcome Collection. For the Telegraph, 29 March 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

So — have you ever drunk a mother\u2019s milk? As an adult, I mean. Maybe you\u2019re a body-builder, following an alternative health fad; maybe you\u2019re a fetishist; or you happened to stumble into the \u201cmilk bar\u201d operated now and again by performance artist Jess Dobkin, whose specially commissioned installation For What It\u2019s Worth — an \u201cunruly archive\u201d of milk as product, labour and value —
\nbrings the latest exhibition at London\u2019s Wellcome Collection to a triumphant, chaotic and decidedly bling climax.<\/p>\n

Why is breast milk such a source of anxiety, disgust, fascination and even horror? (In Sarah Pucill\u2019s 1995 video Backcomb, on show here, masses of dark, animated hair slither across a white tablecloth, upturning containers of milk, cream and butter.)<\/p>\n

Curators Marianne Templeton and Honor Beddard reckon our unease has largely to do with the way we have learned to associate milk almost entirely with cow\u2019s milk, which we now consume on an industrial scale. It\u2019s no accident that, as you enter their show, an obligatory Instagram moment is provided by Julia Bornefeld\u2019s enormous hanging sculpture, suggestive at once of a cow\u2019s udders and a human breast.<\/p>\n

Milk is also about Whiteness. In \u201cButter. Vital for Growth and Health\u201d, an otherwise unexceptionable pamphlet from the National Dairy Council in Chicago (one of the hundred or so objects rubbing shoulders here with artworks and new commissions), there\u2019s a rather rather peculiar foreword by Herbert Hoover, the man who was to become the 31st U.S. President. \u201cThe white race,\u201d Hoover writes, \u201ccannot survive without dairy products.\u201d<\/p>\n

Say what?<\/p>\n

Hoover (if you didn\u2019t know) was put in charge of the American Relief Administration after the first World War, and saw to the food supply for roughly 300 million people in 21 countries in Europe and the Middle East. Even after government funding dried up, the ARA still managed to feed 25 to 35 million people during Russia\u2019s famine of 1921-22 \u2014 which remains the largest famine relief operation in world history.<\/p>\n

So when Hoover, who knows a lot about famine, says dairy is essential to the white race, he\u2019s not being malign or sectarian; he believes this to be literally true — and this exhibition goes a very long way to explaining why.<\/p>\n

Large portions of the world\u2019s population react to milk the way my cat does, and for the same reason \u2014 they can\u2019t digest the lactose. This hardly makes dairy a \u201cWhite\u201d food unless, like Hoover, your terms of reference were set by eugenics; or perhaps because, like some neo-Nazis in contemporary USA, you see your race in terminal decline, and whole milk as the only honest energy drink available in your 7-11. (Hewillnotdivide.us, Luke Turner\u2019s 2017 video of drunk, out-of-condition MAGA fascists, chugging the white stuff and ranting on about purity, is the least assuming of this show\u2019s artistic offerings, but easily the most compelling.)<\/p>\n

Milk also asks how dairy became both an essential superfood and arguably the biggest source of hygiene anxiety in the western diet. Through industry promotional videos, health service leaflets, meal plans and a dizzying assortment of other ephemera, Milk explains how the choice to distribute milk at scale to a largely urban population led to the growth of an extraordinary industry, necessarily obsessed with disinfection and ineluctably driven toward narrow norms and centralised distribution; an industry that once had us convinced that milk is not just good for people, but is in fact essential (and hard cheese (sorry) to the hordes who can\u2019t digest it).<\/p>\n

The current kerfuffle around dairy and its vegan alternatives generates far more heat than light. If one show could pour oil on these troubled waters (which I doubt), it isn\u2019t this one. No one will walk out of this show feeling comfortable. But they will have been royally entertained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting Milk at London’s Wellcome Collection. For the Telegraph, 29 March 2023 So — have you ever drunk a mother\u2019s milk? As an adult, I mean. Maybe you\u2019re a body-builder, following an alternative health fad; maybe you\u2019re a fetishist; or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,619,78],"tags":[1062,336,334,287,325],"class_list":["post-3676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-museums","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-dairy","tag-diet","tag-food","tag-telegraph","tag-wellcome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3677,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions\/3677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}