**Warning, this episode is both very gross and very sad.**
Take us back to the good old days when the air was clean, the grass was green and the cows were happy. The milk tasted better back then. Straight from the cow, gallons of creamy goodness for all to drink. But while Granny’s farm may have been fine, milk wasn’t always some magical pure product.
In fact, there was a time when milk was goddamn disgusting.
Let’s go back to the 1800’s when there were hundreds of whiskey distilleries in New York State. Some lunatic had the great idea to feed the leftover rank grain goop to the cows. Weirdly, they noticed that the cows increased their secretion of milk afterwards. Thus began the distillery dairies.
All across America and Europe, dairies joined forces with distilleries, serving the boiling slurry, or swill, which was said to be acidic enough to corrode iron, to their cows. Day in, day out, with no water or harder grass to chew on, the poor cows were chained up in a windowless metal shed right next to the distilleries. They were definitely not happy.
Needless to say, the cows got bloody sick. With ulcerated sores all over their body, including on their udders, many cows' teeth went rotten and fell out from the hot acidic food. Most lost their tails, some lost their hooves and sometimes their legs would fall off. But every day the distillery milkers would come, no matter the condition of the cow, to get their goddamn milk.
Milk is a generous term here. The resulting liquid was described by Robert Hartley, a man who wrote a book to expose the horrors of these distillery dairies, as having an unnatural, bluish tint or riddled with reddish brown pus.
But surely people wouldn’t drink it if it looked so bad. Well, that’s where the dairymen got clever. Not only did they add a bit of river water to make the milk go further, but they also discovered you could fix the colour by adding flour, plaster of Paris, chalk - either of them would do the trick.
Now, to get that lovely yellowish creamy layer that the people crave, just a dash of pureed calf brains. Apparently, it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee. (We just threw up in our mouths). And if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde to stop the decomposition. Yep. Formaldehyde.
You can just imagine the health department inquiries. One investigation discovered insect larvae in the milk (likely from the river water). Others found milk containing sticks, hair, blood, pus and manure. In fact, one estimate said that people consumed more than 2,000 pounds of manure in a given year.
As you can guess, many people got sick and died. So why were people still drinking the damn stuff? And why wasn’t anything being done about these horrific distillery dairies?
No one listened to Robert Hartley or took notice of his book. So it was up to Frank Leslie. Frank found a particularly pus riven bottle of milk on his doorstep one morning that was udderly disgusting so he decided it was time for a shake down. See, Frank was a newspaper guy and after analysing the specimen, he dispatched his corps of reporters and artists to the head-quarters of the poison. He wanted everyone to know the truth about what was happening in those disgusting metal sheds.
The milkmen started getting turned away. Angry mobs began to form outside distillery dairies and milk carts. Unfortunately, the distilleries were a powerful lobby group and successfully blocked any serious inquiry into the dairies and stymied calls for reform. Classic.
But by 1862, thanks to Frank Leslie’s work, regulations finally came in banning the swill milk trade. Another 50 years and a slaughterhouse scandal after that, the Pure Food Act was signed and later on in the 1930’s, pasteurization became a standard procedure.
No more formaldehyde, no more pus, no more manure.
So, anyone thirsty?
SOURCES:
- An historical, scientific, and practical essay on milk, as an article of human sustenance: with a consideration of the effects consequent upon the present unnatural methods of producing it for the supply of large cities, by Robert Hartley
- Dr. Hurty vs Embalmed Milk, by Haley Brinker
- Health benefits of Raw Milk on Australian Raw Milk Movement
- How we Poison Our Children, in the New York Times May 13 1858
- The 19th-Century Fight Against Bacteria-Ridden Milk Preserved With Embalming Fluid, by Deborah Blum
- The 19th-Century Swill Milk Scandal That Poisoned Infants With Whiskey Runoff, by Tyler Moss
- The Dangers of Raw Milk: Unpasteurized Milk Can Pose a Serious Health Risk, by the US FDA
- The Surprisingly Intolerant History of Milk, by Daniel Fernandez
- The Swill is Gone, by Bee Wilson
- Toddler dies, four children seriously ill after drinking raw cow's milk, by Marissa Calligeros of The Age
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