It’s good, sometimes, to think long and hard about the really basic things in life – or, at least what may seem like the really basic things in life – and at Milk, a (free) exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, this happens seemingly without any effort on the part of the visitor. Suck it up quickly, as if through a straw! For here, in a (metaphorical) pint bottle, are art and history, biology and ecology, and public health and politics. I guarantee you’ll never think the same way again about your morning cup of tea, nor even – if you’re of a certain age – about those memories, almost a cliche now if written down, of the milk you were forced to drink at school as a child (ugh).

It opens with a huge udder, as vast and foreboding as a black cloud (a hanging sculpture by the contemporary German artist, Julia Bornefeld), and an irresistibly cheery collection of 18th- and early 19th-century Staffordshire cow-shaped creamers – a pairing that sets the tone for the peculiar combination of comfort and anxiety ahead. People are ever more fundamentalist about food, but its production is complicated, and so, increasingly, are its effects, whether on the land or our bodies. If I felt mournfully admiring of a 20th-century Ministry of Health that improved infant mortality rates via a promotion of milk – if only our present government were half so proactive in the matter of the obesity crisis – equally, the Wellcome’s displays forced me to think about some of the ethical problems associated with dairy farming, several of which, I will admit, I hadn’t really considered before.

But I don’t want to make Milk sound preachy. The time I spent there was uplifting; in my head, I composed a mental note to Gary, our Liverpool-supporting milkman (yes, in the middle of London, we still have one), suggesting that he might like to see it, too. Food and farming link us in the most profound way to our ancestors, a connection I find vaguely numinous, and which is stressed explicitly in the exhibition by the starring role given to a terracotta Roman sculpture of a mule bearing two trays loaded with round cheeses – a tiny marvel I couldn’t help but notice the curators had lit like an altar. (And who can blame them? Not me, the devout, even fundamentalist, cheese-worshipper, who duly called in at a certain premium deli for a slice of Doddington on my way home.)

Human ingenuity always moves me, especially in the cause of food and drink. Milk is used to make so many good things: creations developed, on occasion, in pretty extreme circumstances. For instance: ice-cream. Imagine the whole business, pre-refrigeration. In a cabinet, I found a small, squat, heavy-looking glass: the kind of thing you might use to serve a shot of vodka or cherry brandy. This was a Victorian penny-lick ice-cream glass. Customers would buy a scoop from the seller (cost: a penny), who would give it to them in a glass they’d lick clean and return. Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t highly sanitary – the glasses were rarely washed between sales – and in the late 1800s they were blamed for the spread of cholera.

The Wellcome Collection uses this glass to make a point about attitudes to immigrants. Most of the ice-cream sellers in 19th-century London were Italian; the museum is insistent the health warnings were aimed as much at their foreignness as at their practices. But I think its time might, in this instance, have been better spent in telling us more about the vendors. What about their ice-cream? Was it safe to eat? Even in the early 20th century, thousands of people died of tuberculosis contracted from milk.

Ah, well. Never mind. When I got home, I did my own research – and yes, people often fell ill after eating ice-cream made from questionable ingredients. The thickness of penny-lick glasses, moreover, may have had as much to do with making money as anything else: its depth caused portion sizes to look more generous than they were. The glasses were banned (on health grounds) in London in 1898, and by 1903, a New Yorker called Italo Marchiony had patented his pastry cup for ice cream: the fully hygienic parent of the waffle cone we all know and love today.
Milk is at the Wellcome Collection until 10 September