Milk (8 page)

At that time, commercial trade in fresh milk was only slightly more possible than trade in the morning dew. Up to a century or two earlier, people who drank fresh milk had generally gotten it by milking their own cow or goat. City dwellers willing to gamble could buy it from someone who drove a cow or goat about the streets and milked a few cups’ worth into a customer’s bowl or pot, or hawked it from pails. (The gamble was on not being killed by any plagues carried
by the animal, milker, or pail.) But everyone was at least as used to
soured as fresh milk until an urban market specifically for fresh milk began to take shape, fostered by ideas about health that in a few generations would make fresh milk a nearly mandatory part of everyone’s diet, especially children’s.

Now, many very real medical considerations are involved with milk and linked with its modern commercial fortunes. But fear of catastrophe through
lack of fresh unsoured milk
—that form specifically—is the least rational of the lot. In fact, it is purely imaginary. It couldn’t have originated if people in nineteenth-century England and North America had known anything about another medically loaded issue that I’ve only incidentally touched on until now:
lactose
tolerance or intolerance.

To summarize briefly: The
lactose
dissolved in
whey is the principal sugar of milk, an energy supplier otherwise unknown or almost unknown in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Unlike milkfat and milk proteins, it is the same in composition from one animal’s milk to another. It belongs to the family of
disaccharides
(double-barreled sugar molecules) and consists of a unit of simple
glucose
linked with a unit of another simple sugar,
galactose.

In healthy baby mammals drinking mother’s milk, an enzyme called
lactase
severs the link between the two halves of the molecule in the small intestine and frees the galactose to be converted (by yet another enzyme) into glucose, eventually releasing into the bloodstream two glucose molecules’ worth of energy from each original lactose molecule. This feat of transformation becomes unnecessary when the child advances to a milkless adult diet. At that point lactase production stops—though in most cases not completely. Almost all human beings retain at least a vestige of lactase activity throughout their lives. And a few belong to odd mutant populations that never lose lactase activity in the same way as do most people or animals, a condition known as
lactase persistence
that is as anomalous as a fawn’s keeping its spots once they have served their purpose. For most of the human race, when more than small amounts of unsoured milk get into the digestive system, the lactose in the whey passes almost intact into the small intestine. It draws diarrhea-producing water in its wake, while resident bacteria eventually reduce it to tatters and by-products including painful amounts of gas. (Note that this reaction, though unpleasant, is not an actual allergy. True milk allergy, potentially life-threatening but luckily rare, is an immune response in which the body reacts to milk proteins as foreign substances to be fought off with antibodies and a surge of histamines.)

As any glance at the world’s dairying regions and cuisines shows, lactose
intolerance doesn’t stop adults from consuming milk. It usually deters them from drinking the fresh unsoured milk that suddenly acquired vast prominence in Western diets during the nineteenth century. The milk drinkers of the Northwestern Cow Belt didn’t know that they were mutants able to do something very unusual. And until the vogue for fresh—that is, full-lactose—milk appeared in early modern times, even northwestern Europe treated it as only one possible form of milk among many others with little or no lactose.

A shift in priorities occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. The new focus on milk for drinking reflects a “perfect storm” convergence of circumstances. First of all, cash-crop farming began to attract ambitious specialists who saw opportunities in feeding cities. City provisioning had become more complex and troubled as the rural poor, progressively dispossessed by new patterns of land ownership, migrated to
urban centers. Townsfolk became both more isolated from once widespread skills like dairying and more dependent on retail sellers who came to the ever-expanding city markets or trolled the streets for customers. A smaller but notable factor was the advent of hot tea and coffee with fresh milk 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 products
of 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 about
bacteria, some influential would-be experts decided that acids were damaging substances and alkalis benign, while acid
fermentation 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 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.