In 1857 the Common Council of Brooklyn decided to investigate and issued a report that shocked New Yorkers who drank milk or fed it to their children. The report was also difficult reading for anyone who had any regard for the treatment of animals. The report described how cows were brought to the dairy, tied in one spot, and kept there for the rest of their lives. Steaming brewery slop flowed past them in a trough three times a day while they stood in their filth and waited for the slop to cool enough to eat. On average a cow ate thirty-two gallons of this slop a day, but was given no water because it was thought that the swill contained all the water the cows needed. Since they were given no solid food on which to chew, they often lost their teeth.
The Brooklyn report spurred the very popular magazine Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to take on the issue with a series of devastating articles, accompanied by beautifully drawn illustrations such as one of a suspended cow, nearly dead, being milked—cows fed on swill might not have been healthy, but they did produce a lot of milk. A May 1858 article in Leslie’s stated, “Swill milk should be branded with the word ‘poison’ just as narcotics are.” In the summer, the temperature in the enclosed stables could be as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The manure piled up around the cows, and on those rare occasions when it was shoveled out, it was thrown into a nearby river. Cows in distillery dairies usually lived for only six months.
In New York in the 1850s, cows were fed swill that contained residue from nearby distilleries. The milk these cows produced became known as swill milk and resulted in a major adulterated food scandal as it killed thousands of infants in a single year. (Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1878)
In addition, the cows frequently came down with tuberculosis, but still they were milked. Tuberculosis in cows can infect humans who ingest their milk, but at the time it was widely believed that bovine tuberculosis could not be transmitted to humans. Thus as late as 1913, few Londoners were upset when a test showed that one in ten milk samples arriving at the London train stations contained tubercle bacilli.
Swill milk was loaded onto carts and sold on the city streets. Often the cart had a sign saying PURE COUNTRY MILK or GRASS FED MILK. This was not milk for the poorest people—they could not afford it and breastfed their babies. It was milk for the working and middle class, and even some of the affluent. But by the 1860s, the word was out. In her 1869 book, Catherine Beecher warned that if a child was reacting badly to milk, a parent should first ascertain if the milk really came from “a new milch cow … as it may otherwise be too old. Learn also if the cow lives on proper food. Cows that are fed on still-slops, as is often the case in cities, furnish milk that is often unhealthful.”
Because of the Leslie’s campaign, a number of brewery dairies closed. Others were cleaned up, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, under public pressure, milk purity laws were passed and brewery dairies closed. Late in the century, the lactometer was invented. It could measure the amount of solids and fats in milk, and made state laws on milk purity enforceable. In the state of New York, milk was required by law to be 12 percent solids, of which at least 3 percent had to be milk fat. If not, the producer was fined. The irony is that some of the bestselling milks today—0 percent, 1 percent, and 2 percent fat—were illegal in the nineteenth century. But the perception of fat has shifted. People today tend to view it as unhealthful, something to avoid, whereas it used to be a sign of quality.
Even after the lactometer was invented, milk, including true “pure country milk,” still killed people at times, especially children. There was a scientist in France who had a theory. But few believed him.
11
THE FIRST SAFE MILK
An interesting breakthrough regarding milk was reported by Phineas Thornton of Camden, South Carolina, in his 1845 The Southern Gardener and Receipt Book:
A foreign journal states, that some milk was lately exhibited in Liverpool from on board a Swedish vessel, that was several months old, having made two voyages from Sweden to the West Indies and back again, and remained perfectly sweet and fresh.
He went on to describe a newly discovered industrial process—canning—that had made this possible, and added:
It is evident this discovery will be most available at sea; but when bottles could be easily obtained, many families living in cities and villages who keep a cow, might, by preserving some in this way, furnish themselves with a supply for the time a cow usually goes dry for the winter. In any event the experiment could cost but little.
Canning was one of the first food inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Like most of the early industrial inventions, it was a French idea that the British were first to develop. The French had scientists and engineers, but the British had entrepreneurs. When Napoleon was sending armies around the world, portable food that would not spoil was a great challenge for the French military, and a 12,000-franc prize was offered for a good solution.
Nicolas Appert, a chef and candy and liqueur maker, spent fourteen years developing his response: Food, if thoroughly sealed in a glass jar and heated, would not spoil. He experimented with vegetables, stews, fruits, jam, and also sterilized milk. But his milk experiment was not entirely successful because the resultant product had an unpleasant taste. He wrote a book on his method and it was translated into English in 1809. As soon as it appeared, a Londoner named Peter Durand patented the exact same idea. And had an additional thought: Why did glass jars have to be used? Perhaps other types of containers would work better. Not long thereafter, a man named Bryan Donkin built the first canned food factory on the Thames.
But milk wasn’t being canned. That would come later. Rather, it was being put up in jars like jams and preserves. It is not known if the Swedes were the first to apply canning to milk. But they may have been, since this was the country that consumed the most milk per capita. Those who point this out, next start talking about how tall and healthy they were.
Canned food arrived in the United States in 1819, but was not popular until the Civil War, when its usage was spurred either by military necessity or by the discovery that the addition of a salt, calcium chloride, to the water raised its temperature and made the process more efficient.
At the same time, a certain amount of interest in putting up food in jars arose, and recipes for this process began to be included in cookbooks. Among them were recipes for preserving milk.
In 1867, Annabella P. Hill, a Georgia judge’s widow with no particular scientific background, wrote Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book, which went through numerous editions and was very influential in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her interest in wholesome milk may have been influenced by the fact that five of her eleven children had died before the age of five—not unusual at the time. She gave this recipe, “To preserve milk for a journey”:
Put the fresh sweet milk into bottles; put them into an oven of cold water; gradually raise it to the boiling point; take them out and cork immediately; return the bottles to the boiling point; let the bottles remain a minute. Take the oven from the fire, and let the bottles cool in it.
Another problem with nineteenth-century milk, aside from merchants who deliberately diluted it, was all of the dirt, twigs, leaves, and other detritus that fell into the milk pails by accident. The fact that an open pail was considered an acceptable conveyance for fresh milk indicates how little thought was given to hygiene.
According to the legend, in 1883 Dr. Henry G. Thatcher of Potsdam, New York, was standing in line buying milk. In front of him was a little girl with a very dirty well-worn rag doll. While the vendor was scooping up milk from his bucket to fill her pitcher, the little girl accidentally dropped her doll in the bucket. But the kind milk vendor averted the crisis by fishing the doll out, shaking it off, and handing it back to the girl. Then he served Dr. Thatcher his milk.
Whether or not there actually was a doll, this tale, like all good stories, illustrates a truth. The merchant was untroubled by the doll’s fall
ing into his milk, nor did he expect it to bother his customers.
The supposed event led Dr. Thatcher to patent a milk bottle with a sealable lid a year later. It wasn’t much of an invention, considering that Appert had started putting up milk in sealed jars eighty years earlier. Yet it was the first milk bottle and a huge step toward safer milk.
Not everyone in the dairy industry was happy about the new idea. Now they would have to buy these bottles and replace them when they broke, which would probably be a frequent occurrence. And the health authorities would probably demand that the bottles be thoroughly washed after each use. But consumers were pleased with the idea of getting their milk in sealed bottles rather than ladled from dirty buckets, and by the turn of the century, most milk came in bottles. Farmers delivered milk to dairies, and dairies bottled the milk at a plant. The dairy business was looking less like a family-run operation and more like an industry.
After the acceptance of bottles, the term “artificial feeding,” which had been popular earlier, gradually fell out of favor. Now the term to use was “bottle-feeding.”
Bottles helped promote the idea of adding other ingredients to milk—of making “formula.” In the 1860s, many doctors and household guides advised mixing milk with various combinations of water, cream, and honey. In 1867, a German pharmacist in Switzerland, Henri Nestlé, offered his neighbor a mixture of fresh milk, wheat flour, and sugar for his ailing child. The child recovered, and, being a good entrepreneur, Nestlé bottled his formula and claimed to have saved the child’s life. In some versions of this story there was no sickly neighbor. But either way, Nestlé’s formula involved adding ingredients to milk; he called his invention a good “Swiss milk and bread.” It was the world’s first commercially sold bottled infant formula and the beginning of the Nestlé company in Vevey, Switzerland.
Formula was based on the observation that human milk appeared thinner and tasted sweeter than cow’s milk. So to make cow’s milk more closely resemble human milk, it had to be watered down and sweetened. But then it was observed that this formula lacked the fat content of human milk. A little cream was added. Some, observing that human milk was alkaline and cow’s milk more acidic, suggested adding water to correct the acidity level. Really, everyone was just painting in the dark—guessing how to make the artificial equivalent of human milk out of cow’s milk.
Then in 1884, A. V. Meigs, a Philadelphia doctor, published his chemical analysis of human milk, which became the standard. His laboratory used what were for 1884 extremely sophisticated techniques, and he concluded that human milk was 87.1 percent water, 4.2 percent fat, 7.4 percent sugar, 1 percent inorganic matter such as salt and ash, and 1 percent casein, which is protein. He then analyzed cow’s milk and found that it contained 88 percent water, 4 percent fat, 5 percent sugar, 0.4 percent ash, and 3 percent casein. So the early makers of formula had been wrong to add water, and right to add fat and sugar.
Meigs was concerned about the higher casein level in cow’s milk compared to human milk. Casein coagulated firmly and Meigs believed that too much of it was indigestible for babies. He therefore recommended adding lime water to cow’s milk to both break down its casein and make it alkaline. To adjust its sugar level, he recommended adding more lactose, the sugar already in milk, and increasing its fat content by adding cream. This became the formula that was used for years. Its inescapable flaw is that not all human milk is the same. Not all cow’s milk is the same, either. For example, the milk of a Jersey cow has more fat than the milk of a Holstein. Still, it was a formula that people trusted.
Formulas convinced many women, at least those who could afford it, that there was a suitable substitute for breast milk. A study in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century showed that 90 percent of working-class women still breastfed, but only 17 percent of middle- and upper-class women did. In the twentieth century, with the advent of safe pasteurized milk and improved commercial formulas, breastfeeding declined even further. By 1950, more than half of all American babies were fed formula. But this increase was also thanks to another nineteenth-century invention: canned evaporated milk.
In 1828, America’s first commercial canner, William Underwood, preserved milk in a bottle with sugar, but it didn’t sell. In 1847, a Belgian named Francis Bernard Bekaert improved on the formula by adding carbonate of soda. That same year, Jules Jean Baptiste Martin de Lignac obtained a patent for a process that evaporated milk to one-sixth its volume with a little added sugar. But all these plans failed because the milk fat separated and did not sit well in the liquid. The milk tasted overcooked, even burned. It was an unappealing product.
Today, Gail Borden is remembered as the inventor of condensed or evaporated milk. He used the word “condensed,” but “evaporated” is an often-used alternative. The milk was condensed with an evaporator—Borden really didn’t invent anything. But he was the first to produce preserved milk that was appealing. Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb either.
Gail Borden Jr., born in 1801, was from an American establishment family, a descendant of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams and two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Although he had less than two years of formal education, he became a surveyor and a newspaper publisher. By the 1840s, the Industrial Revolution was beginning to explode with life-changing new ideas, and he, like many others, decided to become an inventor. At this point living in Galveston, Texas, his first invention was the “locomotive bathhouse,” a closed room on wheels for women to wade into the Gulf of Mexico safe from sun and surf and prying eyes. Then he built a kind of wagon, a prairie schooner, or, as he labeled it, “terraqueous machine, that had sails and could also do water crossings.”
Next he became interested in industrializing food. His first idea was to construct a large-scale refrigeration facility. Then in November 1846 a group of eighty-seven people led by George Donner and James Reed became trapped in heavy snow in the high Sierra Nevada. They were not rescued until February, by which time only forty-eight were still alive. Many had died from starvation, and many of the survivors had stayed alive by eating the dead. This was a well-known and sensational story in 1847, and Gail Borden kept thinking that everyone in the Donner party could have survived if they had had well-preserved provisions.
The invention that Borden then came up with was dehydrated meat biscuits. Meat was dried in an oven, mixed with flour or vegetable meal, and pressed into thick crackers. He imagined huge sales orders coming in from armies all over the world and from explorers and migrants making long treks, like the Donner party. The biscuits won him a gold medal at a London exhibition, but no one wanted to buy them because it was generally agreed that they tasted awful.
On Borden’s return voyage from London, his ship encountered rough waters, and the two cows kept in the hold to provide milk to the infants onboard became too distressed to do so. Several of the infants died. This apparently greatly troubled Borden, because when he got back to the United States, he started working on a way to preserve milk in cans.
Borden’s first attempt, boiling milk in an open pan with some molasses added, kept very well, but was a dark color that was said to be ugly. People also disliked its molasses smell.
Advertisement for Borden’s condensed milk, c. 1888.
In 1853 Borden went to a Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York, to look at an interesting piece of equipment they had called a vacuum pan. It had been invented by an Englishman, Edward Charles Howard, in 1813 for the refining of sugar. The pan reduced the pressure on a boiling liquid to below the pressure normally exerted by its escaping vapor, and this enabled the liquid to be evaporated at a far lower temperature.
Eighteen years before Borden’s visit to New Lebanon, another Englishman, William Newton, believing that evaporated milk would taste better if it were evaporated at a lower temperature, had been the first to use the vacuum pan for
milk. But he had never tried to market his idea.
Borden’s first attempts did not go well. The milk stuck to the sides of the copper evaporation pan. He decided to try greasing the pan, and this worked much better. The milk tasted good. But the patent office at first rejected his invention, saying that it was not an invention at all—it had all been done before. This was somewhat true, and yet Borden had produced a better condensed milk than had ever been made before. He kept submitting his patent application, and on his fourth try, in 1856, he was finally awarded a patent for condensed milk made in a vacuum pan with the addition of sugar. Borden’s “sweetened condensed milk” was put on the market in 1860, just in time to sell to the fast-growing Union Army.
He also went to market just as Frank Leslie’s campaign against swill milk was scaring everyone in New York off milk direct from the cow. Borden, on the other hand, offered New Yorkers milk in a can for their babies that was both safe and sweet.
12
A NEW AND ENDLESS FIGHT
Those for whom it has seemed odd that the French, who have had so little interest in drinking milk, could have such an impact on milk production can take comfort in the fact that Louis Pasteur was not particularly interested in milk. His concern and his research were primarily focused on beer and wine. But his idea, his “germ theory”—so called because it took time before it was accepted as fact—had a huge impact on dairies and on public health and medicine in general.
Easy to state but complicated to demonstrate, Pasteur’s theory was that there are tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye, that cause disease—and other effects, such as fermentation. Some germs are useful and some are harmful. Pasteur’s theory explained a number of things about milk that were already known. It explained why people got sick and died from milk, why unhygienic dairies were more likely to cause illness, and why fermented milk products, such as cheese and yogurt, tended not to make people ill, not even in warm weather.
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