How Raw Milk Got a Bad Rap
by Nina Planck
Pasteurization has little to do with health and everything to
do with practical matters. Without pasteurization, the
transport, distribution, and sale of industrial milk and cheese
as we know it would be impossible. This is a brief history of
pasteurization in the U.S.
The push for pasteurization began in the late 1800s and the
early 1900s. It was a response to an acute and growing public
health crisis caused by inferior milk. At one time, milk came to
the kitchen in buckets straight from the family cow or in glass
jars from a local dairy farm, but with the rise of cities, urban
dairies developed to supply the growing population. In cities
from New York to Cincinnati, most milk came from crowded, urban
dairies where cows were confined indoors. Owners put the dairies
next to whisky distilleries in order to feed cows a cheap,
unhealthy diet of spent mash called distillery slop. They were
remarkably efficient. In 1852, three quarters of the milk drunk
by the 700,000 residents of New York City came from distillery
dairies.
'Slop milk' was so poor it could not even be used to make butter
or cheese. Unscrupulous distillery dairy owners sometimes added
sugar, starch, or flour to give body to the pale, thin milk.
Others thinned it with water to make more money. Conditions were
unhygienic. Bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis were common and
cow mortality was high. The people milking cows were often dirty
or sick.
As distillery dairies became common in the early 1800s, many
deaths from diseases such as infant diarrhea, scarlet fever,
typhoid, undulant fever, and human tuberculosis were caused by
contaminated milk. Infant mortality (often due to diarrhea and
tuberculosis) rose sharply, accounting for nearly half of all
deaths in New York City in 1839. Reformers blamed the slop milk
industry and some began to call for pasteurization, which kills
pathogens such as tuberculosis that could be carried in
contaminated milk.
At first, no one argued that raw milk itself was unsafe,
according to Ron Schmid in The Untold Story of Milk. 'Demands
for pasteurization allowed for the continued production and sale
of clean raw milk,' he writes. 'No one was claiming that all
milk should be pasteurized, as even the most zealous proponents
of pasteurization recognized that carefully produced raw milk
from healthy animals was safe.' In New York City an ordinance to
ban raw milk was introduced in 1907 was defeated by a coalition
of doctors, social workers, and milk distributors who argued
that safe milk should be guaranteed by inspections instead of
mandatory pasteurization.
For a short time, that view prevailed-but only briefly. Theodore
Roosevelt appointed a panel of experts who concluded in 1908
that raw milk itself was to blame for food-borne illnesses. In
1914, New York required pasteurization of all milk except milk
sold from certified dairies. In the Standard Milk Ordinance of
1924, the F.D.A. urged states to require pasteurization and by
1949, it was the law in most states.