From Local to Global: How Did Milk Become Food for All?

To understand the truest history, we must first recognise a vital yet somewhat counter-intuitive fact: before milk gained genuine popularity as a drink, the production of milk-based products in the Western world was already growing at an exponential rate. A key reason may well be that, from the 1850s onward, milk had acquired the new identity of an industrial product. Gail Borden had already demonstrated that canned milk products — whether condensed milk or milk powder — possessed the portability and shelf stability that liquid fresh milk most conspicuously lacked. As his process was widely adopted, other patented processes appeared around the world, because determined experimenters sought to refine his method by adding or reducing ingredients (chiefly sugar) in order to achieve a better product.

In 1885, Britain first developed milk powder, which gradually made its way onto the market as a commodity. Initially it served as a supplement to infant food, and later became a foundational ingredient in the manufacture of chocolate and confectionery. In North America and Switzerland, the milk industry had already become a highly lucrative business, with output reaching astonishing levels. The popularity of canned milk products also gave rise to some important questions, the most pressing being: what were consumers primarily doing with canned milk products? Were most buyers simply pouring it into their coffee? Were mothers using these canned goods to concoct their own improvised special recipes for infants? Of all the canned products sold, how many had been purchased for cooking purposes? All these diverse possibilities suggest that processed milk products paved the way for a future market in liquid fresh milk — a milk deemed safe in quality and priced within the reach of ordinary consumers. In any case, the enormous surge in demand for dairy products had a holistic effect on the industry itself: it reshaped the modern conception of the dairy farming business, and this was especially evident during the First World War.

A crucial driving force came from North America, where dairy agriculture had already expanded from the Midwest states as far west as Oregon and Washington. The pace at which the condensed milk manufacturing industry expanded reflected, in some measure, the growth of the dairy sector as a whole. Between 1890 and 1900, the total volume of condensed milk products on the American market had increased almost fivefold, rising from 38 million pounds to 187 million pounds; the outbreak of the First World War briefly pushed that figure to 875 million pounds. Wartime demand from European markets sustained continued sales growth, and in 1919 the United States produced more than two billion pounds of condensed milk and 44 million pounds of milk powder. Even such staggering figures accounted for barely half of the overall milk supply. Although per capita cow ownership in the United States rose from one to five, milk production had possessed the capacity to generate surplus output ever since 1900.

As new business arrangements took shape on the sales and distribution side of the industry, production surged dramatically under the combined influence of various forces. Large enterprises emerged triumphant from the reorganisation of Western European and American capitalist economies at the close of the nineteenth century. The milk processing industry was among the most successful segments of the food trade at the time, and the convenience of global food-export networks allowed a wide range of products to cross oceans and reach markets they had previously never touched. Major companies seized upon new methods such as cheap long-distance transport and refrigeration technology and began competing fiercely in the world’s milk markets. Another point that cannot be overlooked is that international commercial capital began restructuring production facilities abroad. Swiss firms established a foothold in Norway and Spain; American entrepreneurs turned their gaze towards Switzerland; and Swiss immigrants began transforming the shape of the industry across the American Midwest. This new landscape, in which large-scale enterprises produced milk, disrupted the existing configuration of the dairy industry and overturned the entrenched notion of milk as a familiar, local product.

By 1920, for instance, the Borden Milk Company had already earned a place “among the largest manufacturing enterprises in the United States and Canada”. Even by the standards of the day, Borden’s vertical integration appeared remarkably modern: the company owned and operated 31 condensed milk factories, 11 “raw-material supply plants”, 11 can packaging factories, 2 confectionery factories, 2 malted milk factories, and 2 dry milk powder plants. Its subsidiary, the Borden Farm Products Company, ran “8 certified dairies, 156 township bottling plants and receiving stations, and 70 urban pasteurisation plants and distribution branches”, and it supplied the bulk of the fresh milk consumed in New York City, Chicago and Montreal.

The scenery around Vevey in Switzerland is picturesque, the hillsides dotted with charming brown cows — a landscape that inspired the German-born Henri Nestlé in the 1860s. With rising enthusiasm for a new infant formula, Nestlé transformed the local character of the region into a product of broad appeal (one endorsed by physicians). The product blended milk powder made from Swiss milk with roasted grains and was initially sold in pharmacies across Europe. In 1868, Henri boasted to a partner: “Believe me, promoting the same invention simultaneously in four countries is no small feat.” By 1873, his product had crossed two oceans and reached sixteen countries and territories, including Mexico, Argentina, the Dutch East Indies and Australia.

Nestlé set out to produce affordable Swiss milk and founded his brand with a blend of sincerity and grand ambition. He said: “Those who buy the most milk from us are not the wealthy.” (Throughout the company’s history, Nestlé never abandoned his blunt maxim or his profit-obsessed calculations.) “We must keep the price of infant food within everyone’s means. Two cans at 3.6 Swiss francs is far better than one can at 2 Swiss francs.” Depicted on these elegant tin cans was a mother bird feeding her newly hatched chicks in the nest. Agents had suggested to the founder that he adopt the cross from the Swiss national flag as a brand emblem, but he flatly refused. The image of a bird formed the centrepiece of his “coat of arms” — after all, the surname Nestlé in Swiss German simply means “a small bird’s nest”, and here the personal image prevailed over the national symbol. In an age of surging nationalist fervour, Nestlé’s self-interest may well have served sales. After 1871, residents in the areas surrounding the company’s factory began accusing Nestlé of driving up local milk prices. In a country that regarded cheap and abundant milk as an inalienable right, such an accusation was no trivial matter.

Intense competition was brewing in the nearby mountainous regions, suggesting that competitive pressures had been quite evident since the 1860s. The Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company, based in Cham — a town not far from Zurich in Switzerland — bore its particular name not because its founders were English or Swiss, but because those two nations offered the most promising sales markets for its products. Charles A. Page was born in the United States, and his tenure as US consul in Zurich had given him an intimate understanding of Swiss agricultural production. Together with his brother George, he spent a period in America learning condensed milk production under Borden. On returning to Switzerland, they founded the company in 1866. Their plan proved highly successful: their best customer was Britain, a boon for anyone engaged in international trade, since beyond its own shores Britain commanded a vast network of subsidiary colonies. Their worst customer was Switzerland, where consumers still preferred fresh, natural products.

The Page brothers demonstrated a flexibility that a single-product company like Nestlé could not match until the turn of the twentieth century. Milk is a raw material whose output fluctuates with the seasons, and this characteristic caused the factories to experience periodic surpluses of raw material; the brothers therefore began gradually diversifying their product range. In certain regions, they used surplus milk to make cheese and other innovative dairy products that sound almost too modern to have existed in the Victorian era — products one might associate with the Starbucks age rather than the 1860s: coffee milk, cocoa milk and chocolate milk. After four turbulent and profitable decades, they seized on the wave of corporate mergers in 1905, and the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company merged with Nestlé. Only from that point did Nestlé begin producing the milk chocolate for which it is now universally known.

The imperial age at the turn of the century spawned a vast network of canned milk markets. As part of the British colonies, farms and factories in Canada supplied consumers near and far. The Reindeer Condensed Milk Company, located in Nova Scotia, served the region’s fishing and logging communities, where the men working there had a pressing need for canned milk in their coffee cups. Mining stations in Alaska and the Yukon Territory also purchased the product. Milk from Canadian factories was shipped by sea to other far-flung territories of the British Empire, and traces of condensed milk could be found even in some cities in South Africa and Japan. (The Australian market had already been claimed by Nestlé, which by the turn of the century had made it the company’s second-largest market.) In 1912, Cuba was the largest single buyer from Canadian companies, where the tropical heat made dairy production extremely difficult. Worldwide demand for canned milk products never abated, compelling the cows of North America and Europe to continuously increase their output.

Yet it was not only North American and European cows that felt the pressure: condensed milk factories sprang up even in the Far East, producing from the milk of transported cows. After 1868, Japan, in the throes of the Meiji Restoration, was deeply influenced by Western foodways and culture, paving the way for the development of a domestic dairy industry. The introduction of coffee-drinking habits, in particular, provided an important pathway for the Japanese public to encounter milk and created a substantial gap in demand for dairy products. By 1890, Japan had begun investing in scientific research to promote the development of a domestic condensed milk industry. And then the familiar pattern emerged: in 1897, Japan occupied Taiwan of China and demanded that local conditions match those of the homeland; so they transported cows from Japan to the soil of Taiwan. (However, the habit of drinking milk had never been widespread in China, and the country’s dairy cow population actually shrank after the Second World War.) Meanwhile, domestic condensed milk production in Japan had reached saturation; after the First World War, mainland China and the South China Sea Islands became consumer markets for Japanese condensed milk. Judging by some incomplete evidence, these canned products were most probably used as infant food.

Meanwhile, dairy farmers themselves were striving to find ways of capturing the market by producing affordable, portable foods through industrial means. The cheese “workshops” contributed an operational model in which cheese products were mass-produced and dispatched in bulk to urban markets through commercial agents. In reality, this model was far less industrial than it sounds: although they used equipment capable of large-scale production, the workshops’ profitability lay less in mechanised manufacturing than in economies of scale. Factories purchased milk and cream from individual dairy farmers for centralised processing, which allowed them to sell dairy products in bulk at a consistent quality and specification — a model urban distributors preferred. In the 1840s, dairy farmers in New York State were the first to adopt this approach, and they achieved enormous success: before long their products were beating their greatest rival on the London market — English cheese. In terms of quality, their products performed well in the mass market, compelling farmers across the Atlantic to turn to liquid milk as their means of livelihood. Butter factories built on the same principle sprang up across Britain like mushrooms after rain, seeking to absorb surplus raw materials. In some areas, butter factories were combined with pigsties, and the livestock fed on the liquid by-product of butter-making — what we know as buttermilk — grew exceptionally plump.

Milk’s evolution followed the logic shaped by the experience that entrepreneurs had forged in practice and by the patterns of transnational migration. Key developments in the history of consumer culture emerged at this pivotal turning point: in the last decades of the nineteenth century, several highly successful milk-based products appeared. Malted milk — a blend of malt sugar and milk powder — was one such product, a food with the texture of infant formula but intended for adults.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the arrival of cold beverages and chocolate confectionery expanded the possibilities for milk to repackage itself and sneak into the market under new guises. Maltesers were one such example, made by “cutting strips of malted milk dried in a vacuum pan, dipping them in chocolate syrup, letting them dry, and wrapping them in tinfoil”. As disposable incomes among the affluent urban population rose, the history of food in the nineteenth century saw demand for milk become intimately and importantly linked to sugar. In the mid-nineteenth century, sugar consumption surged across Europe and America: in Britain alone, annual per capita sugar consumption leapt from 17 pounds in 1844 to 60 pounds in 1876. Coupled with the advent of powdered chocolate and block chocolate — both innovative products requiring extensive processing — the demand for milk, as the indispensable star ingredient in widely desired goods, naturally rose sharply.

The emergence of yet another product subjected milk production to a new wave of immense pressure: ice cream, often hailed as “one of the most successful products among all dairy foods”. The modern history of ice cream reveals a fascinating paradox that draws our attention to the commodification processes discussed in this chapter. Despite ice cream’s long multicultural history, the product ultimately acquired the characteristics of American food culture, becoming an “American” commodity.

What made American ice cream so successful? Perhaps simply that they had mastered the knack for mass-producing it at an early stage. As far back as the 1840s, Nancy Johnson had invented a hand-cranked churn — a device that allowed simple home production by merely surrounding it with a bucket of ice and some salt. This churn-based technique produced a markedly “lighter and softer” product, because large quantities of air were incorporated during the freezing of the cream. According to reports, in all varieties of American ice cream, the process of “churning” and “overrun” “can increase the volume of the finished product to 1.8 times that of the original cream”. By a happy coincidence, the ice cream-making process had itself replicated the nation’s signature characteristic — abundance.

Yet its success was not solely attributable to the quality and quantity of the product itself; the triumph of American ice cream owed much to shrewd marketing. The sales tactics of American street vendors are well worth noting: as early as the 1820s, cries of “I scream, Ice Cream” were already ringing through the streets of New York. At the start of the twentieth century, a new mass-market demand emerged. All credit should go to the legendary Syrian immigrant Ernest A. Hamwi, one of several men credited with inventing the ice cream waffle cone. At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, he served ice cream in a waffle cone, giving it a uniqueness of portability that had never been seen before.

Soon after, several other innovations quickly joined the competition in the North American market: in 1919, the chocolate-coated crisp ice cream bar appeared; the Good Humor brand ice cream bar, with assorted flavoured fillings and a crisp chocolate shell studded with chopped nuts, launched in 1920; and by 1923, ice cream served in the Dixie paper cup had already achieved success. Margaret Visser observed that the word “Dixie” sounded patriotic, musical, brimming with life, clean, and fashionable all at once. Visser’s account of American ice cream history is thoroughly entertaining, painting a picture of a consumer culture in which milk and the spirit of expansionist capitalism were tightly intertwined.

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