ABSTRACT
As the story of only one man, Chapter 2 is little more than an amuse bouche in the vast banquet of food history. Nevertheless it provides an important preliminary view of the problems of knowing milk. Early methods and equipment, in the everyday practical world at least, faced difficulties in perceiving and measuring. Frustrated observers on all sides of the milk industry were reduced to looking for traces of what otherwise remained hidden. Steve Hinchliffe has written on this in the rather different context of biogeography. His urban water voles are elusive creatures and often fresh footprints and active latrines are the only evidence of their continued presence. He suggests that knowing them is not a matter of revealing, but rather one of making them present. 1 So it was with milk.
