Dairy Tales: Global Portraits of Milk and Law

Abstract

Milk appears across and within jurisdictions in distinct and at times contradictory ways: as symbol of purity and nature or of advanced capitalism; as an emblem of a distant agrarian past or as harbinger of futuristic and techno-scientific food production; as a universally revered and nutritionally perfect food or as a consumer product whose global reach is attributable to coercive colonial and economic practices. This special volume of the Journal of Food Law & Policy brings together a series of “dairy tales” and explores an under-studied dimension of milk—its relationship with law and power—from an interdisciplinary and interjurisdictional perspective. The Jurisdictions canvassed in the volume include Canada, China, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, and the United States. Each “dairy tale” addresses some distinct aspect of the legal forces shaping milk production, distribution, and consumption in the particular social, political, and economic context. Together these studies reveal how legal relations around milk are shaped by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and animality and how they are driven both by broad colonial, economic, and social forces, and by the choices, experiences, and power relationships of particular interspecies communities.

Keywords: Dairy, law, colonialism, globalization, gender studies, indigenous studies, animal studies, agricultural studies, rural and development studies