Tag Archives: lactation

White and nutritious – milk and racism

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UNTIL I WAS ABOUT 18, I drank a pint of chilled milk in the morning and another when I came home from school. I did not drink all the varieties of milk that were supplied by the milkmen who worked for the Express Dairy Company, but chose the ‘homogenised’ variety, which did not have cream at the top of the bottle. Never once whilst drinking this refreshing slightly watery liquid did I ever imagine that I would one day visit an exhibition about milk. Today, the 29th of July 2023, I viewed an exhibition called “Milk”, which is being shown at the Wellcome Collection in London’s Euston Road until the 10th of September 2023. Amongst the numerous exhibits displayed in this beautifully curated show, the following particularly interest me.

  1. There was a collection of decorated porcelain cream jugs.  Each one was shaped like a cow. Cream used to be poured into the hollow cow via a hole in its back. Then, a lid was placed to cover that orifice. To use the cream jugs, the cows were tilted so that the cream could flow out of another hole through creatures’ mouths.
  2. There was a terracotta model of a mule carrying two trays laden with cheeses. This Ancient Roman artefact dating back to the 3rd or 2nd century BC was found by archaeologists in Southern Italy. In times long before refrigeration, making cheese was one way of preserving milk for future use.
  3. I saw a metal lactometer, which was used to determine the amount of water in milk. My wife said that when she was a child in India, milk used to be delivered to the door. To check whether the milkman had watered it down, her mother used a lactometer just like the one on display at the exhibition.
  4. Our daughter spotted an 18th century etching depicting St Bernard of Clairvaux kneeling before the Virgin holding the Christ Child. As the saint knelt before the Virgin, he received a squirt of her milk from her breast. This was supposed to grant him wisdom and eloquence. When she was studying History of Art, our daughter wrote a thesis about this curious episode – The Lactation of St Bernard’.
  5. A rather uninteresting looking exhibit proved to be most fascinating. It consisted of two milk testing forms, which had to be completed after a farmer’s batch of milk had been tested for diseases, bacteria, fat content, and protein content. The forms on display related to milk produced by cattle on the Dartington Hall Estate in Devon. The Estate was founded to research the merits of various scientific farming methods. One of the founders of the Estate was the agronomist Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974). What made him special in my mind was that after meeting the great Rabindrath Tagore (1861-1941) in the USA in 1913, he later (in 1922) set up for Tagore an Institute of Rural Reconstruction near Tagore’s university at Shantiniketan (now in West Bengal). After marrying Dorothy Straight, Elmhirst and his wife established the Estate at Dartington in 1925. It was modelled on what he had founded near Shantiniketan.

There were plenty of other exhibits that were both visually interesting and thought provoking. A theme that I felt pervaded the exhibition is related to the colour of milk – white. Because milk is often perceived as being healthy, pure, and virtuous, it may also nourish the malevolent ideas of white racists. One of the exhibits showed a video of Trump supporters cavorting around, each one of them waving large bottles of white milk whilst shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Yet, the ancestors of racists like these were perfectly happy to snatch the newborn babies of black slaves away from their mothers, so that these unfortunate women could be forced to breast-feed the babies of the white women of the families who owned them. Their milk was white, but not their skin colour. To compensate for these and other harsh reminders that all is still not well in the racial tolerance scene, the exhibition includes a satirical film from You Tube ( https://youtu.be/cevXg_SlT-Q ), which makes fun of people with racist tendencies.  

Well, it never occurred to me that milk and racism might be considered in the same brackets until I visited the splendid show at the Wellcome Collection. It is well worth seeing not only because of its historical and scientific aspects, but also for its artistic and sociological content.

Saturday night feeder

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BRUGES 65 BLOG

MY LATE MOTHER trained at the Michaelis Art School in Cape Town. She became a commercial artist. After she married my father in London in early 1948, she became a more creative artist, a painter and then a sculptor. Her interest in art was shared by my father, who became deeply interested in the history of art. Most of our family holidays were connected with my parents’ enthusiasm for art both old and new. I used to be quite envious of my friends whose parents took them to the seaside, but now that I am older I appreciate the special nature of our family holidays.

One of the places my parents enjoyed visiting was Bruges (Brugge) in Belgium.  We used to stay in the city’s Hotel Portinari. Once every visit, we did something that I found more enjoyable than visiting churches and museums. We took a boat ride along the city’s canals. These tours involved travelling in a small low boat powered by an outboard motor. The most exciting part of this voyage was when we passed beneath a particularly low road bridge. The tour guide would tell us all to duck our heads. My mother, who saw danger around every corner, always  emphasised how important it was to lower our heads as much as possible to avoid them being smashed to a pulp by the metal struts under which we were passing. In retrospect, considering the potential for experiencing this awful injury (possibly leading to death), I am amazed that my mother sanctioned these boat trips every time we visited Bruges.

My mother passed away, I married and in 1995 our daughter was born. Six weeks after her birth, we crossed the English Channel and we took our daughter with us. We were driving to Rotterdam in Holland to meet my wife’s parents, who were disembarking there after a cruise on the River Rhine.

We wanted to spend a night in Bruges on our way to Holland, but were unable to find accommodation in a hotel that we could afford. Instead, we booked a hotel at nearby Damme, which was said to be picturesque.

We arrived at our hotel in Damme on a Saturday afternoon. I remember that we had trouble getting hot water to flow in our shower. However much the hot tap was turned, the water remained icy cold. The problem was solved when a member of the hotel staff explained that the taps had been labelled wrongly: hot water flowed when the cold tap was opened.

 In the evening, the three of us went to a restaurant in Damme. The dining room was a long rectangle in plan. A long central ‘aisle’ ran between two lines of tables. Each table was occupied by late middle-aged couples sitting  with their backs to the walls and facing the diners seated opposite them across the aisle. Not one of these people looked as if they were enjoying their night out, or even being alive. They were a miserable looking bunch.

We were shown to the one remaining empty table. Within minutes of sitting down, our daughter decided that she needed a drink, not of Belgian beer but something that only wife could supply.

My wife asked the maitre d’hôtel whether there was somewhere that she could breastfeed our daughter discreetly. He pointed at a door. My wife stood up and walked towards it. Before she reached it, the hitherto seemingly moribund diners sprang to life. They told us that they did not mind if our daughter suckled in the dining room. They did not want mother and child to be exiled, or even self-exiled.

For the rest of the evening, our fellow diners remained animated, exclaiming how sweet our daughter was and offering much advice. Our arrival and our daughter, in particular, had made that Saturday evening a huge success for these ageing members of Damme’s  bourgeoisie.

 

Picture of the Minnewater in Bruges, taken in the early 1960s