Food Words: Milk and Dairy

In their roots, both milk and dairy recall the physical effort it once took to obtain milk and transform it by hand. Milk comes from an Indo-European root that meant both “milk” and “to rub off,” the connection perhaps being the stroking necessary to squeeze milk from the teat. In medieval times, dairy was originally deyery, meaning the room in which the dey, or woman servant, made milk into butter and cheese. Dey in turn came from a root meaning “to knead bread” (lady shares this root) — perhaps a reflection not only of the servant’s several duties, but also of the kneading required to squeeze buttermilk out of butter and sometimes the whey out of cheese.

Over the last few decades, however, the idealized portrait of milk has become more shaded. We’ve learned that the balance of nutrients in cow’s milk doesn’t meet the needs of human infants, that most adult humans on the planet can’t digest the milk sugar called lactose, that the best route to calcium balance may not be massive milk intake. These complications help remind us that milk was designed to be a food for the young and rapidly growing calf, not for the young or mature human.