Milk Craze: Body, science, and hope in China By VeronicaMak, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2021. 256 pp.

Veronica Mak's study takes its cue from a question that has routinely surfaced in both popular and academic discussions: how is it that a region associated traditionally with “lactase non-persistance” is now among the world's largest consumers of milk and dairy products? A quarter of the world's total milk production today is finding its way to markets in China and Hong Kong. What several western observers have called “Milk Craze,” Mak suggests, cannot be explained by simplistic narratives about biocultural or environmental factors, nor can it be brushed away as modernization or westernization. There are several historical threads that have converged in contemporary China's thirst for milk, and Mak sets out to follow several of these, bringing new insights and raising puzzling questions in the process. In the last decade, there has been a renewed interest in the scholarship on milk and dairy across geographical contexts, especially as industrialized dairy production is increasingly tied to climate change as well as ethical concerns about consequences of industrialized diets. While scholars of contemporary China have astutely analyzed milk and dairy consumption through the lens of food safety, state-making, and westernization, Milk Craze is the first comprehensive monograph length account that offers a historically situated ethnographic narrative. The book seeks to address the meteoric rise of the dairy industry in China by analyzing macro level changes in global and national political economy alongside micro level ethnographic analysis of collective and individual experience of wellbeing, health, and parenthood. Or as Mak describes her approach: connecting rise of the postwar world food regime with the history of “local” milk culture (153). In looking back to the past, and sometimes covering centuries in a matter of pages, Mak makes a case for the existence of a “milk culture” that preceded western imports of cow-based milk production and was marginalized with the rise of industrialized dairy production. The book begins with a focus on water buffalo rearing and cheese-making in the coastal province of Shunde and argues that the emergence of a leisure class in premodern China, associated with the expansion of rice cultivation and growth of silk trade, transformed milk from a medical substance into a variegated set of dietary articles. Chapter 2 moves to 19th-century Hong Kong and highlights how western settlement in the region coincided with the growth of the first large-scale dairy farms that imported cattle and sought to establish a local dairy industry geared toward the British market. Cow milk was at first restricted to British tearooms. Overtime, as tea was “glocalized,” particularly in the form of a specialized preparation called “silk stocking milk tea,” which emerged from working class street hawker tea-stalls, local markets for liquid milk were simultaneously cultivated. Mak's historical construction is largely based on secondary accounts as well as narratives of actors she encountered in her ethnographic work, raising questions about the role of memory, place, and contemporary geopolitics in shaping these narratives. Zooming out from these specific sites, Mak analyses comparative developments, and queries how political economic restructuring in the late 1970s, had differential consequences. Mak's analysis links the fall of water buffalo farming and rise of cow-based milk production to post-Mao era reforms of the late 1970s, which on the one hand moved coastal provinces, like Shunde, from agriculture to industrial and service sector specialization, and on the other opened regions like Inner Mongolia to large-scale dairy farming. Today, Shunde specializes in electronic product production, and as a result, the buffalo farmers are pushed to the suburbs, their occupation now characterized as uncivilized and backward, has also led to a fall in traditional cheesemaking. In the open grasslands of Inner Magnolia, large-scale dairy companies with state and global capital investment, became primary drivers of consumption. Mak draws from her prior experience in food marketing and traces how dairy companies generated markets for dairy products by capaciously drawing from both nutrition science and traditional Chinese medicine, thus creating a “new food regime” in China. She briefly highlights the consequences of this food regime for the safety of consumers, and for dairy farmers, who are reduced “price takers” (102) with no power over terms of sale and are often directed to sell to specific dairy companies. The two penultimate chapters will be of interest to readers of the journal. Mak's ethnography creatively addresses how mothers and families encounter and negotiate ideas about consumption, health, and the body through their engagement with milk products marketed for children. Mak addresses two phenomenon that she sees as part of the larger medicalization of childhood: the “insufficient milk syndrome” among lactating mothers, which has led to large-scale consumption of infant formula milk, and the “picky-eating disorder,” a diagnostic category that Mak suggests has enabled the expansion of manufactured milk powders beyond infants and the sick to healthy children of school-going age. Pharmaceutical companies, like Abott and Nestle, Mak suggests play an outsized role in pushing these products across different segments of the markets. However, consumption is not a knee-jerk response to marketing tactics, instead, Mak attentively pieces together how people come to see consumption as an exercise of agency aimed at cultivating present and future prosperity. While a focus on motherhood is expected, Mak innovatively also draws attention to the role that fathers have come to play in the modern milk powder economy. Finally, Mak contextualizes the rise of “picky-eating syndrome,” and nutritional proposals for its resolution, against the far-reaching transformation of the modern education system and service economy, wherein academic excellence has become the primary route to professional success and capital accumulation. Milk Craze is not only ambitious in its scope but is also eclectic in positioning itself within the scholarship on food. The book's conceptual scope draws equally from Foucauldian studies of conduct and power, and from classic works in the political economy of food. Individual chapters too draw upon a whole array of concepts—from glocalization and risk society to the analytic of the world food regime. However, without an overarching framework to nest many of its arguments, the book at times risks slipping into a flat account of milk consumption being driven primarily through a “pharmaceutical nexus” of “global companies, physicians, and the state.” In her ethnographic attention to changing ideas and micro-practices of consumption, Mak's analysis is at its most convincing and creative best. Milk Craze's clear chapter organization and easy writing style makes it a great choice for the undergraduate classroom. Especially the last two chapters that situate consumption within changing place of work, family, and childhood would make for excellent case studies for undergraduate discussions on health, body, and food in comparative and global context. Outside the classroom, Milk Craze makes for an engaging read and given its wide scope and contemporary bent, will be of interest to scholars beyond those interested in health, food, and economy.