Milk

by Anne Mendelson

  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 chronicler Henry 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 provoked horrified 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 conclusively proved to promote healthy skeletal growth. Dairy products clearly were the richest known source of both. From World War I on, public nutrition-education programs would urgently implore mothers to feed milk to children by the quart.

  Two major worries continued to dog “Nature’s Perfect Food” as a continuous country-to-city pipeline materialized. The lesser was adulteration, which was very widespread but seldom involved anything more dangerous than a little adroitly administered water and whiting or plaster of Paris testifying to the premiums that fresh or theoretically fresh milk commanded. Milk-borne epidemics remained a more serious concern.

  Public understanding of contagions had improved greatly with the work of the microbiologists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. During the last third of the nineteenth century the milk industry used such discoveries to advance factory-scale production of relatively—though far from completely—safe milk. Sterile bottling techniques on plant production lines became feasible at the same time as tuberculin testing on dairy cows (now known to be a vector for tuberculosis) and bacterial counts of milk samples under a microscope. These factors would have been tremendously important in any era. But modern technology was about to usher in others—refrigeration and pasteurization—destined to make milk in the industrialized West even more firmly identified with the sweet, full-lactose milk that non-Westerners had trouble digesting.

  The earlier successes in getting milk from country to city had not solved the problem of temperature. Many bacteria, including the lactic-acid kinds that make milk go sour, can be kept in check if the milk is thoroughly chilled. Railway cars refrigerated with blocks of ice helped push back the geographical limits of milk collection and distribution after the Civil War, and by the early twentieth century mechanically refrigerated tank cars were starting to take over. Milk was already being chilled at bottling plants, and the consumers who bought it often kept it in home iceboxes until use.

  The weak link here was the farm, where the milk emerged from cows (normal body temperature about 100°F) into the ambient temperature of the barn. When dairying was more of a home enterprise, many households had had springhouses for keeping things cold, but now farmers had little choice but to put the results of morning and evening milking into cans and head for the milk train. Depending on the season and the length of the journey from farm to plant, any resident bacteria might or might not have had opportunity to multiply. Thus despite many gains in understanding, milk-borne diseases were still enough of a reality at the end of the nineteenth century to spur a long, ultimately successful milk-pasteurization campaign whose most famous exponent was the New York department-store magnate Nathan Straus.

  The pasteurization process that became most common after about 1900 involved running the milk into a vat, heating it beyond the tolerance of nearly any microorganism, and maintaining a certain temperature for some period of time to kill bacteria as uniformly as possible. There were competing ideas about the ideal conditions, but eventually most dairy plants opted for a temperature of about 145°F and a heating period of thirty minutes, followed by prompt chilling. Between 1900 and 1920 pasteurization, usually by this formula, became mandatory in most parts of the country.

  But that wasn’t the end of the pasteurization story. In the 1930s many plants began switching to another method involving not separate batches but a continuous pipe feed of milk—“high-temperature/short-time,” or HTST, pasteurization. This requires a pasteurizing temperature of 161°F maintained for fifteen seconds (not minutes) and nearly instantaneous cooling to 40°F. Since about 1970, the even more drastic continuous-feed “ultrahigh-temperature” pasteurization—UHT or “ultrapasteurization” for short—at or above 280°F for about two seconds has been gaining ground.

  Early pasteurization initiatives went along with calls for much stricter governmental supervision of sanitary conditions at dairy farms. Whatever the public-health benefits, these pushes toward modernization drove small and marginal farmers out of business if they could not afford the necessary capital investments. Meanwhile, a certain medical faction continued to oppose pasteurization as an unwarranted interference with the natural qualities of milk. For several decades the “certified milk” adherents not only kept commercial raw milk before the public (at premium prices) but energetically publicized the quite valid view that superstrict hygienic supervision and testing at critical points could reliably prevent milk-borne infections without recourse to pasteurization. Certified milk production was, if anything, a harder option for farmers, since the certifying “medical milk commissions” held them to stricter standards (especially regarding bacterial counts) than the local authorities enforcing requirements for pasteurized milk.

  The one factor that both sides insisted on was a low-enough temperature to keep the milk fresh—i.e., unsoured, with the original lactose intact. By the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific means existed to distinguish “putrefaction” from benign bacterial fermentations, but advanced Western food preferences now had little room for plain sour milk. In the early days of 145°F pasteurization, Southerners, many
Ashkenazic Jews, and ex-rural types nostalgic for the sour milk of their youth still could still “clabber” pasteurized milk at home by leaving it out at room temperature. More up-to-date people clapped it straight into the icebox or refrigerator. This latter practice tipped the population of invading bacteria toward the kinds called psychrophilic, or psychrotrophic, meaning “cold-preferring.” Such organisms feed not on lactose but on milkfat and milk proteins. When they go to work the result is inedibly bitter, truly putrid milk. The HTST and UHT pasteurization methods that eventually carried the day posed further bars to natural souring, because the very rapid, thorough heating and cooling of the milk virtually eliminated lactic-acid bacteria along with other microbes.

  Though the pasteurization and certification campaigns were a tremendous public-health success in many ways, they played a distorting role in others. In their single-minded focus on one goal, they helped to relegate naturally fermented fresh dairy products to some lesser realm and wipe out home cooks’ already fading knowledge of how to work with milk for multiple purposes. They capped and legitimized both the equation of pure, first-class milk with nonsoured milk for drinking and the idea that such milk is not just one food among many but a fundamental necessity for human survival. By the time Western medical opinion belatedly noticed the phenomenon of lactose intolerance in the late 1960s, American consumers and most of their nutritional advisors were too automatically conditioned to a milk-in-every-fridge mentality to grasp two clear implications: first, that anyone can happily live without using milk in any form; and second, that drinking large amounts of unsoured milk is foreign to the habits of most dairying peoples throughout the world.

  Neither of these thoughts seems to have seriously affected public-health education. By and large, unsoured milk for drinking continues to be treated as a core food or defining element of the American diet in a way that soured milk is not—and this despite the fact that it has been losing any resemblance to real fresh milk for the better part of a century. The ins and outs of the story are tortuous, but the basic reason for the debasement of quality couldn’t be simpler. From early milk-train days on, milk for drinking commanded higher prices than milk meant to be changed into other forms, an irresistible stimulus toward expansion at whatever cost to quality.

  As the volume of milk produced by the nation’s farms grew in the twentieth century, the entire system became riddled with struggles for competitive advantage. Investment in advanced devices that reduce labor costs per unit of milk has become ever more essential to farmers’ survival. Obvious instances are electric milking machines and refrigerated bulk tanks, widely adopted after the rural electrification initiatives of the 1930s and mandatory almost everywhere by about 1950. Another expensive machine that people are likely to know less about is the cow herself, as reinvented for our time.

  COW AND SUPERCOW

  There came up on the drive immediately before the front door, under the custody of a boy, a cow. It was an Alderney cow, and any man or woman at all under-standing cows would at once have perceived that this cow was perfect in her kind. Her eyes were mild, and soft, and bright. Her legs were like the legs of a deer; and in her whole gait and demeanour she almost gave the lie to her own name, asserting herself to have sprung from some more noble origin among the woods, than may be supposed to be the origin of the ordinary domestic cow,—a useful animal, but heavy in its appearance, and seen with more pleasure at some little distance than at close quarters. But this cow was graceful in its movements, and almost tempted one to regard her as the far-off descendant of the elk or the antelope.

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE

  The Belton Estate (1866)

  ALDERNEY COW, 1834

  Bessy, Will Belton’s gift to Clara Amedroz early in the star-crossed courtship at the heart of Trollope’s novel, is the nonpareil of what used to be meant by a “dairy cow.” Few of her counterparts today evoke thoughts of deer and antelopes. For many dairy farmers, the ideal modern cow is more like a ruminant SUV. You could call her an expanded and consolidated version of a cow, just as today’s dairy farms are expanded and consolidated versions of farms. A case in point: While the number of dairy cows in this country shrank from about 18 million to 9 million between 1960 and 2005, the total amount of milk they produce increased from 120 billion to 177 billion pounds during the same period.

  In 1856 the English writer George Dodd’s magnificent survey The Food of London reported that one especially fine cow had given 28 quarts (7 gallons, or about 56 pounds) of milk a day for six weeks. In 1975 an Indiana cow named Beecher Arlinda Ellen set the dairy world on fire by pumping out a record-eclipsing average of 152.5 pounds (more than 76 quarts, or 19 gallons) a day during a year’s lactation, for a total yield of 55,661 pounds, compared to a national 1975 dairy-cow average of about 10,000 pounds. Ellen’s feat has since been surpassed several times, and the current 365-day lactation record is the 67,914 pounds yielded by a Wisconsin contender, Muranda Oscar Lucinda-ET, in 1997. By 2005 the national average was almost 20,000 pounds a year per cow.

  The road to such “improvements”—if that’s the right word—has paralleled the growth of the fluid-milk industry since about the early nineteenth century. Scientific breeders then began distinguishing the best milkers by body type and working with local breeds to accentuate their advantages.

  Trollope’s Bessy represents one extreme of the “dairy type.” From his description it’s plain that she was of what we would now call Jersey stock. Doe-eyed and curiously reminiscent of shy, tawny woodland creatures, Jersey cows are the smallest and most enchantingly pretty of the major modern dairy breeds. At the time of Will Belton’s wooing, they and the slightly bigger, less deerlike Guernseys were usually lumped together as “Alderneys.” Bessy probably weighed only between six hundred and seven hundred pounds; in this country the Jersey was gradually developed into a somewhat larger and coarser animal, so that a latter-day American relative might be between nine hundred and one thousand pounds.

  Beecher Arlinda Ellen, a black and white behemoth who at maturity weighed 1,750 pounds, cannot ever have reminded anyone of an antelope. She and Bessy were poles apart on any scale of dairy-cow values. But both exemplify a talent that breeders have been exploiting and amplifying for the last two centuries: the gift of converting more of what they eat and drink into milk than other cows. At one glance cows of advanced dairy type, whether tiny or enormous, are easy to tell from beefy counterparts who put more food energy into gaining weight than lactating. They are not exactly gaunt, but their pelvic bones jut starkly from hollow, angular flanks and their ribs are either plainly or almost visible under a very thin layer of flesh. Their entire system is concentrated on making milk, not infrequently to the point of endangering life and limb.

  But what are we calling milk? The Bessies of the dairy world direct a phenomenal amount of caloric energy from their food into manufacturing a rich, concentrated source of nutrients, chiefly milk proteins and milkfat but also important amounts of lactose and minerals. The Ellens also channel just about everything they ingest into milk—extraordinary volumes of milk so diluted that it can almost be said to have been watered inside the cow. (The average milkfat percentage from Ellen’s famous 1975 lactation—2.9—was far below the mingy federal minimum standard of 3.25 percent for whole milk.) Genetic propensities to give richer milk and more milk tend not to go together. It’s possible to manage both, but not easy. The first is economically advantageous if the milk is intended for purposes like butter- or cheesemaking. The second became the be-all and end-all for many or most dairy farmers when golden opportunities opened up in the fluid-milk market.

  A “COW OF THE FIRST CLASS,” CIRCA 1860

  Early nineteenth-century English breeders tackling the quantity-quality equation produced the progenitors of four major breeds that later were adopted and revamped by American dairymen: the Channel Islands cattle (Jerseys and Guernseys), the somewhat larger, lyre-horned red and white Ayrshires, and a branch of the beefy Durham, or Shorth
orn, race specially engineered for milk. Later in the century American breeders began experimenting with a strapping, strong-framed Alpine cow that would become the American Brown Swiss. They also became interested in a large black and white (sometimes red and white) kind from the northern Netherlands that was first called “Dutch” or “Friesian.” In most countries its descendants still have the name “Friesian,” but American breeders unaccountably preferred “Holstein-Friesian” or just “Holstein.”

  Literally dozens of other breeds have their adherents on the American dairy scene, but the ones we hear about most in popular reporting are Jerseys and Holstein-Friesians. Cows like Ellen—you probably don’t need to be told that she was a Holstein-Friesian—are what food writers generally associate with the latter. It’s a wrong stereotype, for there are many Holstein-Friesian dairy herds managed at least as much for quality as quantity of milk. To farmers who grew up understanding flavor, quality means rich percentages of both milkfat and “SNF,” or “solids nonfat,” which includes everything else except water. Nonetheless, the real reason that Holstein-Friesians now make up more than 90 percent of today’s U.S. dairy-cow population has to be volume, both in its own right and in relation to milk-production costs per cow. The average yield per year of Jersey cows is now about 16,000 pounds of milk, compared to 21,500 pounds for Holstein-Friesians.

  The picture really isn’t all that simple. Because many breeds can have particular virtues, dairy herds with “grade” stock (purebred or close to it, but not officially registered), mixed stock, or deliberate crosses of several breeds are more common than ones made up of single-breed registered stock. Many a “grade” Holstein-Friesian herd owes its fine milkfat and SNF records to a strategic admixture of Jersey genes. But higher and higher volume per cow certainly is a universal (though not exclusive) goal.