Milk and dairy products constitute a gigantic force in American foodways. But why?

We do not need cows' milk to survive. Other mammals' milk in other cultures proves as effective for feeding babies who for one reason or another cannot access a human mother's breastmilk. And yet, the dairy lobby is one of the most forceful lobbies shaping U.S. food policy.

Untold grazing acreage, transportation and refrigeration resources, packaging, marketing, and endless feet of refrigerated store shelving is devoted to pushing cows milk and dairy products.

It started innocently enough, with cows at hand in just about everybody's back yard. But with the huge demographic shift to urban population centers, and the concomitant loss of real estate devoted to blithe, cud-chewing cows, an industrialized dairy sector was born.

And from its beginning, this industry was rife with literal corruption of the product by unscrupulous middlemen. In the decades before pasteurization was applied to raw milk, pathogens multiplied in uncooled milk and the mortality rate for infants in U.S. urban centers reached 25 percent.