Continue viewing this article with a TANK Digital subscription.

Around the world, different cultures have produced fermented, alcoholic and probiotic drinks inspired by the same humble substance: milk

Photography by Karolina BurlikowskaStyling by Francesca Russo

It’s a truth nearly universally acknowledged that any baby in possession of a constitutive lack must be in want of some warm milk. Almost all of the big-dog psychoanalysts and thinkers mention milk, because nearly all of them discuss the breast and its alternately nourishing and witholding; only Jung, however, seems to go so far as discussing cheese, using it in a footnote as a metaphor for the variety of human types (“Fatty milk makes good cheese, like some humans; others would be humans made with skimmed milk, bland cheese, and even bitter milk cheeses.”)

The symbolic value of milk is hardly difficult to understand. Beyond the relationship with the infant and the nourishing breast, milk is also pure white, the colour of pure potential. It’s smooth and gentle, almost neutral, in taste. The ancients tended to see it more as something to bathe in than consume – see Cleopatra’s baths of donkey milk, and the Greeks’ use of goat milk in massage. Aristotle speaks disparagingly of the Persian’s habit of milk-drinking, and their commendation of it as an “immaculate element” (the implication is that the practice is barbaric).

Now, white people consume by far the most milk, and the biggest milk drinkers are in northern Europe (the top three countries that consumed the most per capita last year are Denmark, Montenegro and Estonia). Yet many cultures have not only folded the drinking of milk into their cultural traditions and social practices, but experimented with the substance – creating drinks with their own health benefits, or that are designed to last longer in hot temperatures, or which pair more nicely with certain foods. Across these pages, we celebrate the variations on milky drinks that have been produced by cultures across the globe, from spiced horchata in Mexico to the intensely fermented Persian doogh. Travel via your tastebuds – your calcium levels will thank you.  Nell Whittaker

Art direction: Weronika Uyar  / Hair: Rio Shimmaki  / Make-up: Iliana Mavroeidakou  / Casting: Lucy Rogers / Photography assistant: Klaudija Avotina / Styling assistant: Alina Polifka / Model: Bailee Watkinson at Lindenstaub