98 Fun Facts About Milk

Which country is the world's largest producer of milk?

India owes its lead to Operation Flood, launched in 1970, which linked village cooperatives to city buyers through a national milk grid and turned a milk-short country into the world's top producer.

Which Shakespeare play gave English the phrase 'the milk of human kindness'?

Macbeth: Lady Macbeth means it as a complaint, fearing her husband is 'too full o' th' milk of human kindness' to take the quickest road to the crown, which is murder.

Milk looks white because light is scattered by fat globules and by tiny clusters of which protein?

Casein clusters are just the right size to scatter light; take the fat away and they scatter blue light more than red, which is why skimmed milk has a faint bluish tint.

The main sugar in milk is a disaccharide made of glucose and which other sugar?

Lactose is glucose bonded to galactose; the enzyme lactase splits the two apart, and people who stop making lactase after infancy become lactose intolerant.

Lactose intolerance is rarest among adults whose ancestors came from which region?

Northern Europe: only about 5% of people of Northern European descent lose the ability to digest lactose, against 70–100% in East Asia, because their ancestors depended on fresh milk for thousands of years.

Pasteurisation is now best known for milk, but Pasteur devised it in the 1860s to stop what turning sour?

Wine: Pasteur showed in the 1860s that heating it gently, to just under 60°C, killed the microbes that turned it sour without spoiling the taste; it was many years before milk got the same treatment.

Most milk today is pasteurised by holding it at 72°C for about how long?

15 seconds at 72°C was chosen as just enough to kill the hardiest disease germs found in raw milk; the older vat method does the same job in 30 minutes at 63°C.

UHT milk is heated to about 140°C to destroy what ordinary pasteurisation leaves alive?

Bacterial spores shrug off the 72°C of ordinary pasteurisation, so fresh milk must still be kept cold; a second or two at about 140°C kills them too, which is why an unopened carton of UHT milk keeps for months on a shelf.

Homogenisation stops milk separating into cream by doing what to its fat globules?

Breaking them into tiny even droplets takes brute force: the milk is pumped at high pressure through a hair-thin gap, a method Frenchman Auguste Gaulin introduced around 1900, and the shrunken globules stay suspended.

Which breed accounts for about 90% of dairy cows in the United States?

Holsteins, the black-and-white cows bred from Dutch and North German stock, make up about 90% of the US dairy herd because no other breed matches their milk yield.

Milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows has a golden tinge because of what?

Carotene in the fat does it: the orange pigment dissolves in butterfat, and these two Channel Island breeds carry enough of it to tint a whole glass; the same pigment is what makes butter yellow.

Which animals' milk can contain more than 50% fat, the highest of any mammal?

Seals and whales make the richest milk of any mammal: hooded seal milk is more than half fat, letting pups double their weight in a nursing period of about four days, the shortest of any mammal.

Which fermented drink from Central Asia is made from mare's milk?

Kumis is fermented mare's milk; mare's milk carries more sugar than cow's or goat's, so fermentation leaves the drink mildly alcoholic.

Which fizzy fermented milk drink from the Caucasus is cultured with 'grains' of bacteria and yeast?

Kefir: its 'grains' are not cereal but cauliflower-like clumps of bacteria and yeasts; traditionally the milk fermented in a goatskin bag hung by the door, where everyone passing gave it a knock to keep it mixed.

Butter is about 80% fat, so what makes up most of the rest?

Water: butter is a water-in-fat emulsion, with about 16% of it fine beads of moisture locked in the fat; churning turns cream, which is fat droplets floating in water, inside out.

Which watery by-product of cheesemaking is recooked to make ricotta?

Whey: ricotta means 'recooked', because the liquid drained off the curds is heated a second time to coax out one last soft cheese; Norway boils it down instead into sweet brown brunost.

Which French royal was given a marble 'pleasure dairy' at Rambouillet by a husband hoping she would warm to the château?

Marie Antoinette is said to have called Rambouillet a 'gothic toad-hole', so Louis XVI had the dairy built in secret: a little temple where she could taste milk, with Sèvres porcelain pails painted to look like wood.

Paneer, the fresh curd of South Asian cooking, is set with what rather than rennet?

Paneer is set with an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar rather than rennet, which is why it does not melt and holds its shape in curries.

Ghee, essential to Indian cooking and Hindu ritual, is a type of what?

Clarified butter is what ghee is, with one extra step: after melting, the butter is kept simmering over a slow fire, which gives ghee the nutty taste and aroma that plain clarified butter lacks.

Dulce de leche, the caramel-coloured spread of Argentina and Latin America, is made by slowly heating milk with what?

Sugar does more than sweeten here: over hours of simmering it browns with the milk through caramelisation and the Maillard reaction, the same chemistry that colours toast, and the pan cooks down to a thick paste.

Gail Borden received a patent in 1856 for condensing milk using what?

A vacuum pan let Borden boil milk at low temperature without scorching it; his 1856 patent led to a Connecticut condensery that year, and Civil War army orders made his fortune.

Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman with five daughters, is the hero of which Broadway musical?

Fiddler on the Roof: Tevye began as 'Tevye the Dairyman' in Yiddish stories by Sholem Aleichem; on stage his older daughters insist on marrying for love, and an edict of the tsar finally drives the family from their village.

Which singer's 2003 hit claimed that her milkshake 'brings all the boys to the yard'?

Kelis took 'Milkshake', written and produced by the Neptunes, to number three in the US and number two in Britain; she has said the milkshake is a metaphor for whatever makes a woman special.

In the 1980s, US milk cartons famously carried photos of what?

Photos of missing children appeared on cartons from 1984, beginning with two Des Moines paperboys, in the hope that a breakfast-table glance would jog someone's memory and bring a tip to police.

Which Swedish company introduced the aseptic carton that lets UHT milk keep unrefrigerated?

Tetra Pak is named after its first carton, a four-sided paper tetrahedron dreamed up in 1944; its later aseptic packs let milk travel and sit on a shelf with no cold chain at all.

In which country is milk commonly sold in packs of three plastic bags that slot into a reusable jug?

Canada: bagged milk caught on in the 1970s, when going metric meant bottles, jugs and cartons all had to be redesigned while bag-filling machines were simply reset; it took hold in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.

In 1967 a British trade body claimed battery milk floats had given the country what distinction?

Most electric vehicles in the world was the boast: a 1967 press release said Britain had more battery vehicles than all other countries combined, nearly all of them milk floats, though how the foreign totals were counted is unclear.

Why did doorstep milk delivery decline sharply in the second half of the 20th century?

Home fridges and supermarkets ended the round: once households could keep milk cold for days and buy it cheaply with the weekly shop, daily doorstep delivery lost its reason to exist.

Which British politician was branded 'Milk Snatcher' after ending free school milk for children over seven?

Margaret Thatcher was education secretary in Edward Heath's government when she cut the milk to save money; the storm of protest gave Labour the taunt 'Thatcher the milk snatcher', years before she became prime minister.

The 'got milk?' campaign was created in 1993 for the milk processors of which US state?

California's milk processors set up a marketing board in 1993 because sales were sliding as Americans switched to soft drinks; its two-word question worked so well that it was licensed to dairy boards nationwide.

Which director made the first 'got milk?' commercial, with the peanut-butter-mouthed history buff?

Michael Bay directed 'Aaron Burr' in 1993, years before Armageddon and the Transformers films; in it a history buff with a mouthful of peanut butter cannot answer 'Who shot Alexander Hamilton?' on a radio quiz.

Edward Jenner used cowpox, a mild infection caught by milkmaids, to protect people against which deadly disease?

Smallpox: in 1796 Jenner took matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into eight-year-old James Phipps; 'vaccine' comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.

Hans Sloane, credited with a milk chocolate drink from Jamaica, left a collection that founded which London museum?

British Museum: it was founded on the 71,000 objects Sloane left to the nation, a hoard so vast that it also seeded the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

When the word 'milkshake' first appeared in print in the 1880s, what did it describe?

An eggnog-style whiskey tonic: the first milkshakes were adult drinks of milk, eggs and whiskey, taken as a pick-me-up as much as a treat; by about 1900 the word had moved on to wholesome syrup-flavoured drinks.

Oat milk was invented in the 1990s by food scientist Rickard Öste at a university in which country?

Rickard Öste developed oat milk at Lund University in Sweden in the early 1990s while researching lactose intolerance and sustainable food, and went on to found Oatly.

Which plant-based drink spread across Europe during the Middle Ages, centuries before the modern boom?

Almond milk stood in for cow's milk on the Church's many fast days, when animal foods were off the table, so medieval cookbooks gave their basic dishes in a fast-day version made with it.

In which dystopian novel does a teenage gang gather at a milk bar to drink milk spiked with drugs?

A Clockwork Orange: Alex and his 'droogs' sip 'milk-plus' at the Korova Milk Bar before a night of violence; moloko, their word for milk, is plain Russian, like much of the slang Anthony Burgess invented for them.

What is colostrum?

The first milk after giving birth is colostrum, packed with antibodies and growth factors; newborn calves that miss it are at serious risk.

According to Marco Polo, which people carried sun-dried skimmed milk as "a kind of paste"?

Mongol soldiers of Kublai Khan's day, Marco Polo wrote, each carried dried milk on campaign and put some in a leather bottle of water each morning, letting the day's ride churn it into a meal.

In The Sign of the Cross (1932), Claudette Colbert bathes in asses' milk as Poppaea, the wife of which Roman emperor?

Nero's wife Poppaea, Pliny wrote, bathed in asses' milk and took whole troops of she-asses on her travels to supply it; the legend later attached itself to Cleopatra, whom Colbert played two years after this film.

In Greek myth, whose spilled breast milk formed the Milky Way?

Hera, in the best-known telling, was tricked into nursing the infant Heracles; when she pushed him away her milk sprayed across the sky, and the drops that fell to earth were said to have become lilies.

The 2008 film Milk won Sean Penn which Academy Award?

Best Actor went to Sean Penn for playing Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor shot dead inside City Hall in 1978 after less than eleven months in office; it was Penn's second win, after Mystic River.

Which animals are the only large-scale semi-domesticated deer, kept and milked by the Sámi among others?

Reindeer count as only semi-domesticated because the herds still roam free on open pasture; herders such as the Sámi follow them for meat, hides and a little milk, which is richer than that of any other hoofed animal.

Milkweed, named for its milky sap, is the only food of which insect's caterpillars?

Monarch butterfly caterpillars store the plant's toxins in their bodies, which leaves the adults foul-tasting to birds; the orange-and-black wings are the warning label.

Milk of magnesia, the classic antacid, is a suspension of which compound?

Magnesium hydroxide barely dissolves, so it stays suspended as a white, milky liquid, hence the name; it neutralises stomach acid and, in a larger dose, works as a laxative.

Milk glass, the opaque glass beloved of collectors, was first made where?

Venice's glassmakers on the island of Murano called it lattimo, from latte, milk, and made it white and opaque so that it would pass for porcelain, then a costly import.

Milk Duds got the 'dud' in their name because of what?

Failed attempts to make them perfectly round led the makers to call them 'duds'; the 'milk' was the generous amount of milk in the recipe. The brand passed to Hershey in 1996.

To Second World War aircrews, a 'milk run' was what kind of mission?

A low-danger one: the slang likened an easy sortie to the milkman's morning round, just as regular and uneventful, and the phrase now covers any routine trip.

Which Indian dairy brand began as a 1946 farmers' cooperative in Gujarat?

Amul began when Gujarat's dairy farmers, fed up with the prices middlemen paid them, went on a milk strike and won the right to sell through a cooperative of their own.

Fonterra, one of the world's largest dairy exporters, is a cooperative from which country?

New Zealand drinks only a sliver of its own milk: about 95% of its dairy output is exported, most of it through Fonterra, the farmer-owned cooperative created by a 2001 merger.

Which soft-serve chain opened its first store in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940?

Dairy Queen grew from a one-day trial in 1938, when Sherb Noble offered the McCulloughs' new soft serve at his Kankakee shop and dished out more than 1,600 servings in two hours; the first store followed in Joliet.

The ice cream cone is often said to have taken off at the 1904 World's Fair in which city?

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Syrian concessionaire Ernest Hamwi is said to have curled one of his waffle pastries into a holder when the ice cream vendor at the next stall ran out of cups.

In medieval humoral medicine, milk was wrongly believed to be what?

Blood diverted from the womb: humoral medicine held that after birth the blood that had nourished the fetus was rerouted to the breasts and whitened into milk, so milk was treated as a form of blood.

Dairy cattle descend from which extinct wild ox of Europe and Asia?

Aurochs: these six-foot-tall wild oxen were tamed at least twice, once in the Fertile Crescent and once in South Asia, and the last known survivor died in a Polish forest in 1627.

Which hormone triggers the 'let-down' reflex that releases milk during breastfeeding?

Oxytocin squeezes the milk out, while prolactin is the hormone that makes it; the same oxytocin drives contractions in labour, and its part in bonding has earned it the nickname 'love hormone'.

Which widely farmed animal is almost never milked for people?

Pig milk stays off the shelf because a sow has many small teats instead of an udder and turns aggressive while nursing, which makes her nearly impossible to milk.

Which espresso drink's Italian name means 'stained', after the dash of milk that marks it?

Macchiato is Italian for 'stained' or 'spotted': the name marked out an espresso with a small splash of milk from a plain one, which is why it tastes far stronger than a latte.

Camel dairies have opened in which country, home to the world's largest population of feral camels?

Australia shipped in camels from the 1840s to carry explorers and freight across its deserts; turned loose when motor transport took over, they multiplied into vast feral herds, and the first camel dairies opened in 2014.

Fresh milk is faintly acidic, but which acid builds up as it sours?

Lactic acid: bacteria in the milk feed on its lactose and give the acid off, which is why raw milk left standing turns sour by itself.

The holes in Emmental cheese are bubbles of which gas, produced by Propionibacterium during ageing?

Carbon dioxide: bacteria release it as the cheese ripens, and researchers reported in 2015 that the bubbles form around specks of hay dust from milking; cleaner modern dairies left so few specks that the holes began to shrink.

Which country produced about 28% of the world's cow-milk cheese in 2022, more than any other?

The United States made about 28% of the world's cow-milk cheese in 2022, ahead of Germany, France and Italy; per head, though, a 2014 count put the French, Icelanders and Finns on top at about 25 kg a year.

Which Renaissance painter's 'The Origin of the Milky Way' hangs in London's National Gallery?

Tintoretto painted it about 1575; the canvas was later cut down by about a third, so the lower part of the scene, with a reclining figure of Earth, is known only from a seventeenth-century copy.

US rules define which food by its two cultures, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus?

Yogurt: the bulgaricus half of the pair was first isolated in 1905 by Stamen Grigorov, a 27-year-old Bulgarian medical student working in Geneva, from a sample of his homeland's yogurt.

Which dairy brand did Isaac Carasso found in Barcelona in 1919 and name after his young son?

Danone comes from Danon, the family nickname of his son Daniel; Daniel Carasso later ran the firm, fled Nazi-occupied France for New York, and relaunched it there in 1942 under the American spelling Dannon.

Which ice cream brand's Danish-sounding name was invented in the Bronx and means nothing in any language?

Häagen-Dazs was coined by Reuben Mattus as a tribute to Denmark's protection of its Jews during the war; he added an umlaut that Danish does not use and printed a map of Denmark on the carton.

Casu martzu, a sheep's-milk cheese outlawed under EU hygiene rules, comes from which island?

Sardinia's casu martzu is pecorino left open for cheese flies to lay their eggs in; the larvae digest the fat into a soft, pungent paste, and because they can jump, diners shield the cheese with a hand as they eat.

Processed cheese was invented in 1911 in which European country?

Switzerland: Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler melted Emmentaler with sodium citrate in search of a cheese that would keep longer, and found the smooth sauce set solid again; that same salt is why processed slices melt without splitting.

Which company put the first sliced processed cheese on sale in 1950?

Kraft's 1950 slices were not wrapped one by one: an engineer at a rival firm, Arnold Nawrocki, worked out how to do that in 1956, and Kraft's own individually wrapped Singles did not arrive until 1965.

Baskin-Robbins' famous 31 flavours were meant to represent what?

One for every day of the month was the idea when Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins unified their shops under one name in 1953; the 31 became the cornerstone of the chain's marketing and its logo.

Under US rules, ice cream must be at least 10% what?

Milk fat: anything leaner had to be sold as 'ice milk' until 1994, when the FDA changed the rule and let makers call it low-fat ice cream.

Traditionally, buttermilk is what?

The liquid left after churning butter is traditional buttermilk, which is why, despite the name, it is low in fat; modern cultured buttermilk is skimmed milk soured with bacteria instead.

According to one story, the ice cream sundae was invented to get around laws forbidding what on Sundays?

Serving sodas on a Sunday was banned in Evanston, Illinois, in 1890, the story goes, so its druggists served the ice cream and syrup without the fizz and called the result a 'Sunday soda'.

Which animal is the world's second-biggest source of milk, after the cow?

Water buffalo give about 15% of the world's milk, against 81% from cattle; theirs carries roughly twice the fat of cow's milk, which is why Italians prize it for mozzarella.

Which Hindu god, raised among cowherds, is fondly known as Makhan Chor, the butter thief?

Krishna, as a child in Gokul, raided the neighbours' butter so often that they hung their pots out of reach; the Dahi Handi festival re-enacts the theft, with human pyramids climbing to smash a hanging pot.

A milk allergy, unlike lactose intolerance, is the immune system reacting to what in the milk?

Proteins: the immune system mistakes them for a threat, whereas lactose intolerance is only a shortage of a digestive enzyme; the allergy affects about one child in forty under three, and most outgrow it.

What has been suggested as the original evolutionary function of lactation?

Keeping eggs moist: one hypothesis holds that early mammal ancestors secreted fluid from skin glands to stop parchment-shelled eggs drying out, and that the mammary gland evolved from such apocrine glands, as monotremes suggest.

Which cow disease did Health Canada cite in rejecting the milk hormone rBST in 1999?

Mastitis, an udder infection, was among the harms to cows (with lameness and infertility) that led Health Canada to refuse rBST a licence in 1999; US regulators had approved the same hormone six years earlier.

Most rennet enzyme today comes not from calves' stomachs but from what?

Engineered microbes: the calf gene for the enzyme, chymosin, was spliced into bacteria, and in 1990 the result became the first genetically engineered product the US FDA approved for food.

Which birds feed their chicks a cheese-like 'crop milk' secreted in the parent's throat?

Pigeons and doves make it from the lining of the crop itself, which swells and sloughs off as a rich curd; flamingos and emperor penguins feed their chicks a similar secretion.

Which mammal has no teats and instead releases milk through pores in its skin?

The platypus, a monotreme, has no nipples: milk oozes from mammary-gland pores onto patches of fur, where the young lap it up. Echidnas, the other monotremes, feed their young the same way.

The Dayak fruit bat of Borneo is one of the few animals known for what?

Males producing milk: male Dayak fruit bats have been found lactating in the wild, a near-unique case among mammals; nobody knows why, though one theory is that it eases the female's burden of feeding the young.

'Milk fever', which strikes dairy cows just after calving, is a shortage of which mineral?

Calcium drains into the milk faster than the cow can free it from her bones; despite the name there is no fever, since her temperature actually falls, and calcium run straight into a vein is the standard cure.

Which British garden bird became famous for pecking through milk-bottle tops to steal the cream?

Blue tit taught blue tit: the habit spread bird to bird as a textbook case of cultural learning, then faded along with doorstep delivery and full-fat milk.

The Milkmaid, a c.1658 painting of a kitchen maid pouring milk, is by which Dutch artist?

Johannes Vermeer tucked a foot warmer and a wall tile showing Cupid into the corner behind her, hints, scholars have argued, that the maid's thoughts are on love while she pours.

Anna Burns's novel Milkman won which literary award in 2018?

Milkman took the Booker Prize in 2018, the first win for a Northern Irish writer; asked what she would do with the £50,000, Anna Burns said she would clear her debts and live on what was left.

Frank Mars named his 1923 Milky Way bar not after the galaxy but after what?

A popular malted drink, the chocolate malted milkshake, was the model: Mars's son suggested the idea at a soda fountain, and the bar was advertised as 'chocolate malted milk in a candy bar'.

Which bedtime milk drink is named after the brothers whose Wisconsin-made powder was patented in 1883?

Horlicks: James and William Horlick first sold their powder as a food for infants, and William's fortune later helped pay for Byrd's and Amundsen's polar expeditions.

Which Cadbury box of chocolates was delivered by a James Bond-style hero in TV ads from 1968?

Milk Tray's 'Man in Black' ads ran from 1968 with the tagline 'And all because the lady loves Milk Tray'; the brand dates from 1915, when the chocolates were sold loose from trays, hence the name.

In the Book of Exodus, what is described as 'flowing with milk and honey'?

The Promised Land of Canaan is 'a land flowing with milk and honey' in Exodus 3:8 and 3:17, God's pledge to Moses at the burning bush; the Israelites took possession only after forty years in the wilderness.

In the Hindu churning of the Ocean of Milk, which god became a giant tortoise to hold up the churning mountain?

Vishnu, as the tortoise Kurma, steadied Mount Mandara on his shell while gods and demons hauled the serpent Vasuki back and forth around it; Shiva's part was to swallow the poison the churning threw up.

The WHO recommends feeding babies nothing but breast milk for how long?

Six months of nothing but breast milk, then breast milk alongside solid food to two years or beyond, is the WHO advice; in practice fewer than half of the world's babies under six months are fed that way.

Dentists know milk teeth by which name?

Deciduous teeth are shed like autumn leaves: the 20 milk teeth start dropping out at about six, each pushed out by the permanent tooth growing in behind it.

The harmless North American milksnake's red, black and yellow bands mimic which venomous reptile?

Coral snakes wear the same red, black and yellow bands, a likeness thought to scare off predators; the milksnake's own name comes from an old barnyard fable that it sucks milk from cows.

In Poland, a 'bar mleczny' or milk bar is what kind of establishment?

A cheap, state-subsidised canteen: the first milk bar opened in Warsaw in 1896, and under communism they fed workers whose firms had no canteen; many survive as private businesses serving subsidised dishes.

Cow's milk began to be fortified with vitamin D in the 1930s to fight which childhood disease?

Rickets, which softens and bows growing bones, was common in smoggy industrial cities; fortifying milk with vitamin D from the 1930s all but eliminated it in the US.

Which rival did the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company merge with in 1905?

Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss merged in 1905 as the Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company; Anglo-Swiss's founders, the Page brothers of Dixon, Illinois, had sold their US business to rival Borden in 1902.

Mycobacterium bovis, once commonly caught by drinking raw milk, causes which disease?

Tuberculosis from infected cows once reached people mainly through raw milk; the time and temperature of pasteurisation were set to destroy the tuberculosis germ, which is why such cases are now rare wherever milk is treated.

Carnation evaporated milk's famous slogan claimed it came from what?

'From Contented Cows' became Carnation's slogan in 1907; founder E. A. Stuart had picked the brand name from a cigar display in a Seattle shop window after starting the company in Kent, Washington, in 1899.