Politics & Power Quote by Marvin Harris

Milk here isn’t just a beverage; it’s a cultural script Marvin Harris is holding up to the light. The line lands because it begins with a casual confession - “Like most North Americans” - and then quietly shifts into an indictment of how deeply nutritional “common sense” is manufactured. Harris, an anthropologist famous for treating everyday habits as evidence, flags the way milk gets framed as destiny: first food, universally liked, morally good, biologically necessary. That escalating stack of claims mirrors the experience of being taught them: not as arguments, but as background radiation.

The specific intent is to unsettle the reader’s certainty. By calling the idea a “notion,” Harris cues skepticism without sounding conspiratorial. He’s not debating calcium intake; he’s pointing at the social machinery that turns one region’s agricultural product into a presumed human universal. The subtext is that preference is trained, not discovered. “Everybody must like it” isn’t descriptive; it’s coercive, the kind of statement that makes dissent feel childish, ungrateful, even unhealthy.

Context matters: late-20th-century North America is where school lunch programs, advertising, and industry lobbying helped cement dairy as a pillar of health, even as most of the world’s adults are lactose intolerant to some degree. Harris’s larger project - cultural materialism - asks what economic and institutional incentives disguise themselves as nature. He’s inviting us to hear, beneath the wholesome slogan, the clink of policy, profit, and power.