Introducing Animal Protein at All Costs: Milk Consumption in 1940s–50s Mexico

Cow’s milk gained preeminence in Mexican discourse in the early twentieth century, when the newly created science of nutrition identified the white liquid as an important source of animal protein and vitamins. Cow’s milk was considered essential for human development and a feature of “civilized nations,” in other words Europe and the United States. In accordance with this idea, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Mexican state sought to increase milk consumption by importing powdered milk, reconstituting it, and distributing it through subsidized state shops and the school breakfast program. These policies demonstrate that Mexican nutritionists and state officials reproduced the idea of milk’s superiority, denying or questioning, at best, the nutritional value of non-dairy diets. This paper explores milk drinking in mid-twentieth-century rural and urban Mexico from two perspectives: state discourse and policies and everyday practice. Drawing from archives, censuses, contemporary medical journals, newspapers, cookbooks, women’s magazines, and oral history interviews, this work reveals the strategies and ideology of postrevolutionary reformers and working-class clients, particularly women. By looking at nutrition ideas and welfare policy this paper seeks, on the one hand, to stress the role of middle-class policy makers and doctors who argued that milk was essential in the development of a modern nation. On the other hand, women’s memories reveal the difficulties of implementing middle-class ideals in working-class households, and the various reasons that they chose to drink or not drink milk in everyday life.