Written explicitly for undergraduates, Re-imagining Milk demonstrates how a particular commodity can be used to illustrate ethnocentric beliefs about the universal goodness of milk; biological variation in human populations; political and economic processes that inform dietary policies, nutrition education, and current trends in globalization; the utility of a biocultural approach to the study of food; the cultural construction of a commodity that is consumed by many students on a daily basis, or if not, certainly is one that students "know" they "should" consume daily.

Intended as the primary text for introductory courses on medical anthropology, this text integrates human biological data relevant to health and disease with both evolutionary theory and the social environments that more often than not produce major challenges to health and survival. Students who take this fastest-growing anthropology course come from a variety of disciplines (anthropology, biology, especially pre-med students, and health sciences, especially), so the text does not assume anything beyond a basic high-school level familiarity with human biology and anthropology. In addition to being the only current text that takes a biocultural approach, it provides a state-of-the-science review of selected topics and looks at the potential application of the biocultural anthropological approach to health interventions/prevention. Among the topics covered are nutrition, infectious disease, stress, reproductive health, behavioral disease, aging, race/racism and health, mental health, and healers and healing.

Andrea Wiley investigates the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural factors that contribute to the peculiar pattern of infant mortality in Ladakh, a high-altitude region in the western Himalayas of India. Ladakhi newborns are extremely small at birth, smaller than those in other high-altitude populations, smaller still than those in sea level regions. Factors such as hypoxia, dietary patterns, the burden of women's work, gender, infectious diseases, seasonality, and use of local health resources all affect a newborn's birth weight and raise the likelihood of infant mortality. An Ecology of High-Altitude Infancy is unique in that it makes use of the methods of human biology but strongly emphasizes the ethnographic context that gives human biological measures their meaning. It is an example of a new genre of anthropological work: 'ethnographic human biology'.

Andrea Wiley contrasts the practices of the world’s leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, she shows that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value.