Nature's Perfect Food

How Milk Became America's Drink

E. Melanie Dupuis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814721414
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?

Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, "Milk: The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.

In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.

      PART I

CONSUMPTION

1

Why Milk?

DO WE NEED to drink milk? Could we do without it? Should we? For over a century, American nutrition authorities have heralded milk as “nature’s perfect food,” as “indispensable,” as “the most complete food.” These milk boosters have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk mustache ads. This pro-milk ideology has a long history, but is it true?

Recently, in the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric, for example, portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like Milk: The Deadly Poison and Don’t Drink Your Milk have portrayed milk as unhealthy for humans. Controversies over genetically engineered hormones to produce milk and questions about antibiotic residues have also prompted a number of consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them. A food that was once glorified is now coming increasingly under question.

The public listens to the arguments for and against milk and asks, “Which view is correct?” Inevitably, when I tell people I am writing a book about milk, they think I plan to advocate one or the other side of this question. To their great disappointment, I have to answer that my book does not come down for or against milk. Instead, the book is about where milk came from, what questions have been asked about it, and how these questions have been answered.

To do this, I will go back to the beginnings of fresh milk drinking as a major dietary practice in the United States. By examining the growth of the fresh milk commercial enterprise, we will be able to see clearly how we came to drink milk. We can also see what other possible dietary practices, dairy or otherwise, got passed up along the way. The development of the milk industry was a part of the politics and ideologies of its times, from mid-nineteenth-century Victorian ideals to the ideals of our postindustrial age. How we drink milk, and why, has as much to do with the social relationships we share, and the way we think about these relationships, as it does with providing the body with nutrients. Ultimately, the question of whether or not milk is a “healthful” food has to be answered in a way that acknowledges the social context in which milk is consumed. “Healthy food” is an ideal that varies in relation to particular places and times.

Intrinsic to the rise of milk as the “perfect food” is the idea of perfection itself. Ideas about perfection provide a key to understanding modern society. The modern story of the march of progress entails the march to a perfect world. The industrial form of production, the hierarchical form of managerial bureaucracy, and the economic idea of supply and demand meeting at a single point all imply that there is one, single, perfect way to make, organize, market, and consume today’s commodities. Ideas about perfection also underlie the way we look at our bodies and the food we consume to sustain our existence. National dietary guidelines, bodily standards of weight and blood composition, as well as homogeneous media images of health and beauty, imply that there is one, single, perfect body form. For example, national dietary guidelines, powerfully illustrated by the food pyramid, privilege one cultural form of eating at the expense of other cultures and food practices. It portrays one “best” way to eat and one “best” way to look.

The story of milk as a perfect food provides an exceptional opportunity to examine this sort of storytelling. Looking at how milk became America’s ideal can help us gain an understanding of the perfect story and how it took hold of American society. To some extent, telling the perfect story requires “boosters,” people explicitly working on behalf of a particular vision of perfection. As we will see, some people have told the milk story with that specific purpose. However, the vast majority of people writing the story of milk are not boosters per se; they see themselves as objective scientists, or as working in the best interest of society as a whole. Yet even in these cases, historians, economists, and others writing the history of milk have implicitly taken as fact many parts of the perfect story. In fact, this is the perfect story’s express purpose: to take a particular interest and dress it in the robe of universality.

The perfect story portrays drinking this food fresh from the cow as an ancient custom and America as a milk-drinking nation from the beginning. In fact, as we will see, fluid milk drinking was an extremely minor aspect of the human diet until modern times. Even the northern European countries consumed the vast majority of their dairy products in preserved or fermented forms such as cheese, sour milk, and yogurt. Americans in some parts of the country, particularly in the Northeast, ate dairy products on a regular basis; the “family cow” was quite common, not just on farms but in town backyards.¹ But the limited amounts of milk she provided the family went mostly to the production of butter and cheese, which were the center of the American dairy diet, particularly butter. Fluid milk drinking was an afterthought, and much of it was probably the fermented buttermilk, or “clabbered milk,” that was a by-product of butter production, and this milk was primarily used for cooking or fed to hogs.² In other words, from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century, fresh milk was not a major American beverage.

Yet histories of milk commonly describe the rise of sweet milk provision to the cities as a way to preserve a major traditional American food habit. The story starts with the fact of the family cow and assumes that she primarily supplied the family with fresh milk. In these histories, the rise in milk consumption was inevitable; the demand for this food was already present in the cities, as urbanites recalled their rural past. From this perspective, explaining the rise of milk drinking only involves the story of how to bring this desired rural substance safely to the city. From this perspective, the story of milk is “a portrayal of man’s humanity, and sometimes inhumanity to man, and as in the truly popular drama, of a righteousness born of knowledge, triumphant in the end.”³

In fact, sweet, fresh cow’s milk began its real life as an American food in the mid-nineteenth century, primarily as a breast milk substitute for infants and a beverage for weaned children. It began not on primeval farms, but in the burgeoning city; not with the rise of sanitation, but before sanitary production was possible. Milk drinking as a new food habit began in the mid-nineteenth century, when this food was still dangerous, even deadly, as it was produced at that time. One historian has referred to the nineteenth-century city milk supply as “white poison.”⁴

Despite increasing evidence that the milk supplied under this system was deadly, city people increasingly supplied this milk to their infants and children. Some opponents of this system went so far as to attest of the milk that “out of 100 children fed with it, 49 die yearly.”⁵ As early as the 1840s, a prominent milk reformer claimed that three-quarters of all infants and children in New York City were being raised (or dying) on cow’s milk. While this claim was probably an exaggeration, it does indicate that substantial numbers of children were drinking cow’s milk at the time.⁶

Yet by the 1880s, milk drinking as a food habit had begun to spread to the populace as a whole. By the 1940s, the average American was drinking over a pint of milk a day, twice as much as her 1880s counterpart.⁷ Milk had become a major staple of the American diet. For most of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans—children, adults, older people—drank milk in large quantities.

If, in fact, the history of milk is not simply a happy reunion with a longed-for past, if the consumption of this substance in its sweet, fresh form coincided with the rise of the city, then another story needs to be told. How did this milk-drinking habit happen, and why did milk become an indispensable American dietary staple?

To answer this question requires looking at milk from its beginnings, in the cities where the demand for it first began. We also have to look at the making of milk, from the farms on which it has been produced to all those forces working when you open a refrigerator and reach for that carton. In other words, the answer to the milk question needs to look at this food from production to consumption, from the birth of the industry in the mid-nineteenth century to the “Got Milk?” campaign, from the nitty-gritty details of milk production to the place of perfection in American social thought.

One of the most amazing facts I discovered in my study of milk consumption over the last century is that no one has asked these questions in a systematic way. What I have discovered, looking at what everyone has said about milk—and people have said volumes—is that each student of this subject tells one small part of the story, with very little attention to other parts. This fractured talk about milk blinds us to some of the most important questions, the “why milk?” and “how milk?” questions that can illuminate one of our most basic food habits. Somehow, in studies of the dairy industry, its regulation, its science, and even in more historical and sociological studies of this food, the why and how of milk tend to get missed.

However, these more narrow approaches are my building blocks as I try to tell the larger story about milk. For that reason, this book is totally—even madly—interdisciplinary, taking information from such widely diverse disciplines as agricultural economics, rural sociology, geography, business history, women’s history, cultural studies, media studies, and dairy science. In the following pages, you will be introduced to a wide variety of religious and social reform movements, economic studies of dairy farm efficiencies, feminist studies of the American family, and American ideas of nature. We will jump from economics to politics to culture and back again.

To answer this question about milk also requires asking why this question has been so invisible for so long. My answer will be that the conventional stories about milk fit into conventional ideas about social change. The following chapters will closely examine those conventional stories, what I call the “progress” and “downfall” stories. Both of these stories tend to depend too much on the idea of history as an automatic process and not enough on how history is the product of cumulative choices people make. To ask new questions about the rise of milk drinking will require the formulation of a different story, one that includes people, and not just processes, in the explanation.

As just about any American can tell you, milk production is highly regulated by the government. But this was not always so. Even now, with deregulation a keyword in any political agenda, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, milk has continued to be one of the most heavily regulated commodities around. How did milk attain this privileged position in American politics? The answer to this question and the answer to the question above—why do we drink so much milk?—are intrinsically intertwined.

This is not just a city story, however. It is also a story about the countryside, particularly about how the relationship between the country and the city changed over the course of American history. The story of perfection first arose in the rural religious movements of the Second Great Awakening, then moved to cities to eventually become the basis for urban social reform movements. Eventually, urban professionals brought this story back to the country, as a tool to reshape farm production to fit a new urban vision of perfection. In this process, food and agriculture experts arose as powerful actors, telling a new story about perfect farming. This new urban-based vision of the countryside portrayed the farmer as the efficient, industrial provider of cheap urban sustenance. As farmers became less powerful in American politics, they became less able to have a voice in the creation of this dominant story of American life, including country life. As a result, farmers became invisible as actors in the industrial story of perfection.

To answer the important questions about milk requires heavy use of historical resources. However, this is not a history—or even a social history—of milk drinking. In these pages I examine the rise of a particular food habit in American life, as a social practice and as a story about that practice. I focus on the stories about milk, the deliberations, the public rhetoric and debate that created milk as a new, modern food. I also focus on the social, political, and economic relationships around dairy production itself, and how these relationships were recognized, ignored, celebrated, or deplored in the public—increasingly urban— deliberations on milk. These deliberations about milk were motivated by the desire for social reform. Since the mid-nineteenth century, milk has been a part of the American social change agenda, from the temperance movement to the Progressive movement, the New Deal, and finally the current movement against genetically engineered foods.

When I tell people I am writing a book on milk, inevitably they respond, “So you’re going to talk about recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH).” I have written about this controversial genetically engineered hormone currently used to boost a cow’s milk production,⁸ and this book originally came out of my interest in rBGH. Nevertheless, those readers looking for an exposé of rBGH in this book will be disappointed. I am not interested in decrying the advent of biotechnology. Instead, I am more interested in looking at the anti-rBGH movement as one in a long line of social movements around milk.

I can tell you the simple answer to the “why we drink milk” question: milk is more than a food, it is an embodiment of the politics of American identity over the last 150 years. Therefore, the process of showing why we drink milk will involve looking at milk in the context of the rise of industrial food and modern eating in American culture. The answer to the “why we drink milk” question becomes apparent only if we look at this phenomenon as a product of a particular social and political history.

Using milk to represent the process of food industrialization overstates the case, to some extent. Fluid milk as a food has one strange quality that makes it unlike any other industrial food: the history of milk, unlike many other commodities such as wheat, rice, or even orange juice, is not a history of the march to globalization. Fresh milk production has remained relatively local, although this local aspect is in itself a political phenomenon (having to do with a public unwillingness to take some or all of the water out of fresh milk in order to move it around in its concentrated or powdered form). Therefore, the social and political context, even today, revolves around “milksheds,” the areas around cities that still provide a particular metropolitan area with a significant proportion of its fluid milk.

Most histories of the industrial food system focus on the increased movement and processing of food, how food has been made fast and global. Bill Friedland, in his study of the California lettuce industry, notes the relationship between the introduction of fresh food into cities and the industrialization of the agricultural production process.⁹ However, industrialization of lettuce production, like that of many other foods, involved a reorganization away from the local foodshed. Milk is one of the last foods to retain this intimate connection between freshness and local production, between farmer and consumer. In fact, the political and economic links between cities and their rural milksheds generally deepened with the rise of milk consumption.

Because fresh milk seems to be an exception to the processes of globalization, it is treated as a somewhat old-fashioned product, the remnant of a system kept in place by the power of the dairy lobby. In fact, drinking fresh, fluid milk from an unknown animal is an industrial form of consumption, even more today, when “fresh” milk is actually the recombined product of various dairy food components. In fact, the story of modern milk is the story of the modern corporation. As Alfred Chandler has noted, food corporations, including the major dairy corporations, represent some of the earliest firms organized along the lines of the modern industrial enterprise.¹⁰ Providing this new food to cities involved some of the modern business strategies that characterize the global food structure today. For example, contemporary accounts of the global food system describe the multinational strategy of “global sourcing”: playing one region of producers off another to lower the selling price. In fact, as we will see, such strategies were first used to control milk prices, and farmer agitation over prices, in milksheds over a century ago.

This continued localness of production also enables us to see more. Because both the production and consumption of this food has historically revolved around city milksheds, farmer-consumer relationships have tended to cover only a few political jurisdictions, thereby putting the politics and culture of this food into a clear light all the way from the farm to the table. In contrast, current global food politics often involve noncontiguous overlappings of regional, national, and global political institutions, making the relationships between farmers, food companies, consumers, and government officials harder to untangle.

Yet despite their eventual power to mold the tastes of the American public, the large industrial dairy corporations did not create the initial demand for milk. The recent Nestlé infant formula controversy, in which floods of corporate advertising convinced poor women in countries with inadequate and impure water supplies to replace breast milk with powdered formula, cannot be used to explain the drop in breast-feeding among urban women in the early nineteenth century. As I will show, fresh fluid milk and other breast milk substitutes were part of Americans’ imaginations and desires even before a system adequate to provide these foods was in place.

The story of how milk became the “perfect food” tells us a great deal about how Americans have talked about food, thought about food, and thought about themselves in the last century. Therefore, while this book’s primary subject is milk, in fact milk is a focus for a discussion of changes in American cultural relationships around food. Contemporary movies like Soul Food and Babette’s Feast show how the dinner table, as a place for sharing food, signifies commonality and “collective consciousness” better than any other symbol. Yet that commonality often masks systems of repression, forcing people to “eat” particular notions of identity, purity, society, and nature. Milk was one of the first foods to become the subject of a public bargaining conversation over what “good” food was, and this debate over goodness overlay a larger but more hidden debate about the nature of American society. Therefore, while the rise of the milk industry required a reformulation of social conceptions of the body, particularly the bodies of women and children, these social conceptions were in flux before the indust...