added. All this coincided with an emerging popular-science vogue that claimed to incorporate the discoveries of the first real modern chemists and public-sanitation pioneers.
CHILDREN OF THE AFFLUENT BEING FED MILK IN ST. JAMES’S PARK, LONDON.
The new idea that many substances were acids, bases, or neutralized productsof reactions between the two seems to have captured many imaginations by the end of the eighteenth century. So did the concept of “putrefaction” as a process of chemical decomposition. Putting two and two together and coming up with five because as yet nobody knew anything aboutbacteria, some influential would-be experts decided that acids were damaging substances and alkalis benign, while acidfermentation of foods was often a sort of dangerous putrefaction likely to lead to dyspepsia if not pestilence.
CHILDREN OF THE POOR BEING FED “SWILL” MILK IN NEW YORK, 1878.
Meanwhile, more and more consumers were city people who had never acquired the home skills of fermenting bread doughs or milk, or any familiarity with the resulting sour flavors. It was not difficult for many leaders of medical and culinary opinion to convince a sizable audience that bread and milk were best when “sweet” and “pure”—the bread chemically leavened instead of leavened by yeast or sourdough fermentation; the milk free of any sour “taint.” Of course the mysteries of the lactose in sweet milk had not yet been plumbed.
By 1851 the London–street life chroniclerHenry Mayhew was describing supposedly healthful “new milk” straight from the cow being sold in St. James’s Park to children and “others, of a delicate constitution,” who in the surly opinion of one seller would benefit more “if they was set to some good hard work.” A crucial breakthrough was at hand: the ability to sell fresh (i.e., full-lactose) milk for drinking at a higher profit than in any other form.
SWILL DAIRYMEN MILKING A COW TOO FEEBLE TO STAND, 1858.
Yankee enterprise now showed the way to milk that would be cheap and convenient for buyers, lucrative for producers. By 1830 the demand for fresh milk had increased exponentially in the major northeastern cities of the United States. So had the supply—but much of it came from dozens or hundreds of cows herded into crowded, filthy milking sheds next to breweries or distilleries, where dairyists thriftily bought up the wastes for fodder. This opportunistic dovetailing of interests sickened or killed huge numbers of cows and provokedhorrified outcries from public-health advocates who saw the watery, bluish, ill-tasting “swill milk” doing the same to people.
Farmers and middlemen shortly began working to get much better country milk to the cities. Their great ally was rail or steamboat transport of milk in sealed cans, which started in the 1840s and had decisively driven out swill milk in a few decades. Dozens of local railway lines were built to connect rural regions with cities, enabling dairy farming to become the livelihood of sundry bailiwicks such as Orange County, New York. Small though they look today, the East Coast operations begun during this era were on a scale that allowed tens of thousands of city dwellers to take up milk drinking as a relatively safe and affordable daily habit—perceived, however, as necessity, not habit.
Medical opinion now unanimously held that drinkable unsoured milk was indispensable for children and healthful for everyone else. Doctors did notice that milk seemed to disagree with more people than any other food of equal importance. But there was no way that they could have identified lactose as a culprit. In fact, more and more evidence seemed to mount that fresh milk was a godsend if not a miracle food. There were “milk cures” that had patients in sanatoria gulping six quarts a day for six weeks before returning to society in (according to adherents) a state of restoration. Less bizarrely, after about 1910 calcium and phosphorus were
CHILDREN OF THE AFFLUENT BEING FED MILK IN ST. JAMES’S PARK, LONDON.
The new idea that many substances were acids, bases, or neutralized productsof reactions between the two seems to have captured many imaginations by the end of the eighteenth century. So did the concept of “putrefaction” as a process of chemical decomposition. Putting two and two together and coming up with five because as yet nobody knew anything aboutbacteria, some influential would-be experts decided that acids were damaging substances and alkalis benign, while acidfermentation of foods was often a sort of dangerous putrefaction likely to lead to dyspepsia if not pestilence.
CHILDREN OF THE POOR BEING FED “SWILL” MILK IN NEW YORK, 1878.
Meanwhile, more and more consumers were city people who had never acquired the home skills of fermenting bread doughs or milk, or any familiarity with the resulting sour flavors. It was not difficult for many leaders of medical and culinary opinion to convince a sizable audience that bread and milk were best when “sweet” and “pure”—the bread chemically leavened instead of leavened by yeast or sourdough fermentation; the milk free of any sour “taint.” Of course the mysteries of the lactose in sweet milk had not yet been plumbed.
By 1851 the London–street life chroniclerHenry Mayhew was describing supposedly healthful “new milk” straight from the cow being sold in St. James’s Park to children and “others, of a delicate constitution,” who in the surly opinion of one seller would benefit more “if they was set to some good hard work.” A crucial breakthrough was at hand: the ability to sell fresh (i.e., full-lactose) milk for drinking at a higher profit than in any other form.
SWILL DAIRYMEN MILKING A COW TOO FEEBLE TO STAND, 1858.
Yankee enterprise now showed the way to milk that would be cheap and convenient for buyers, lucrative for producers. By 1830 the demand for fresh milk had increased exponentially in the major northeastern cities of the United States. So had the supply—but much of it came from dozens or hundreds of cows herded into crowded, filthy milking sheds next to breweries or distilleries, where dairyists thriftily bought up the wastes for fodder. This opportunistic dovetailing of interests sickened or killed huge numbers of cows and provokedhorrified outcries from public-health advocates who saw the watery, bluish, ill-tasting “swill milk” doing the same to people.
Farmers and middlemen shortly began working to get much better country milk to the cities. Their great ally was rail or steamboat transport of milk in sealed cans, which started in the 1840s and had decisively driven out swill milk in a few decades. Dozens of local railway lines were built to connect rural regions with cities, enabling dairy farming to become the livelihood of sundry bailiwicks such as Orange County, New York. Small though they look today, the East Coast operations begun during this era were on a scale that allowed tens of thousands of city dwellers to take up milk drinking as a relatively safe and affordable daily habit—perceived, however, as necessity, not habit.
Medical opinion now unanimously held that drinkable unsoured milk was indispensable for children and healthful for everyone else. Doctors did notice that milk seemed to disagree with more people than any other food of equal importance. But there was no way that they could have identified lactose as a culprit. In fact, more and more evidence seemed to mount that fresh milk was a godsend if not a miracle food. There were “milk cures” that had patients in sanatoria gulping six quarts a day for six weeks before returning to society in (according to adherents) a state of restoration. Less bizarrely, after about 1910 calcium and phosphorus were
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