"Not for Human Consumption": the contested practice of raw milk drinking

Abstract

Consumption of raw cow's milk is contested in Australia, but regulation of raw milk does not stop trade or ingestion of this food. Raw milk is valued by drinkers; decried by those who see it as unsafe. This thesis repositions raw milk outside a debate about the safety of a potentially lethal food to explore the notions of good health, safe food, animal-human relations, self-determination, and the domination of industrialised, globalised food systems of today that underpin and make sense of such debates. Presently raw milk is considered within a tightly held arena in which its microbial properties make it either harmful or safe to consume. In this thesis, I demonstrate the social and corporeal contexts in which raw milk circulates, where it becomes a ready vehicle for the expression of good sociality, good health, good community, good animal-human relationships and better times - so much more than a fluid with particular microbial character. I argue that an important concern raw milk highlights is the control of the anonymous other over the food that is taken into the body - a personal act most often practiced in the company of intimate familiars (Douglas 1972). This concern arises from increasing industrialisation of food systems, expressed in laments over changed taste, texture, health benefits and socialities of food and procurement. Milk expresses all these concerns, deeply held by the participants who routinely drank raw milk. I explore the anonymising effect globalisation has on understanding what our food is, where it has come from and who had a hand in making it. For some, drinking raw milk represents a way to voice resistance to our manufactured, globalised food, supporting local producers, advocating for small businesses, nurturing community involvement. Today's industrialised food has weaker connections to a sense of local, to cultural belonging, to family tradition. Ironically, from the very dominance of industrialised globalised food production systems has grown a re-appreciation of the local, of community, of food less manufactured, of care for food animals, the environment. These elements collectively formed a 'safe' world of consumption, caring for others, oneself and the planet for my raw milk drinking informants. These practices oppose other notions of safety and care that call for pasteurisation and standardisation of milk in the industrial complex. But raw milk drinkers in my research did not always encounter this version of safety; scientists who came on business to farms became entailed in the relations of familial hospitality and often drank their tea with raw milk with the family. The current debate over raw milk obscures this kind of social context, and the capacity of milk to flow and leak out of the strict oppositional categories set out for it as either 'safe' or 'dangerous'.I explore how the conventions of social engagement where raw milk is found can permit raw milk to flow into bodies charged with regulating milk. Lending a conceptual fluidity to milk to show how it connects bodies is useful to think through how animal and human bodies are connected; other emissions from the cow body - such as the faecal matter that makes its way into all milk whether industrially or home produced to reveal ideas about purity, and the bases upon which animal-human relations can occur. The path of milk in Australia to the manufactured present illuminates the loss in modernity of the taste and texture inherent in natural foods. The controversy surrounding raw milk is not just about raw milk but about domains it references: health, wellbeing, relationships between bodies, food production and distribution processes, self-determination. The question I address is, in what ways is raw milk entailed in relations and conceptualisations of safety, health, wellness, self-determination, community and ways of life, and how are these different understandings of drinkers and regulators drawn into the contention? Show more