Who Put Milk on Our Table?

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Did you know? According to research published in The Lancet, two-thirds of the world’s population have some degree of lactose intolerance, experiencing bloating, diarrhoea and other symptoms after drinking milk.

And yet, why has milk become a daily drink enjoyed the world over? Since when did glass after glass of pure white, tempting milk find its way onto the dining tables of city dwellers across Europe and America?

●Mid-20th-century advertisement by a milk packaging company, The New Story of Milk, depicts milk as a food consumed by all of humanity throughout the whole of history.

In fact, although dairy production has a long history, drinking fresh milk is very much a “modern habit”. The Wellcome Collection gallery in London recently curated an exhibition entitled Milk: Health, Politics and Power, which, through more than 100 exhibits, traces how milk became synonymous with health and nutrition, and how political propaganda and commercial interests came together to drive its popularisation.

Every exhibit tells a story about milk. As consumers and caregivers, these stories are told to us – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not – ultimately shaping the way we think about milk.

●Poster from the first half of the 20th century in which the British government strongly recommended milk for infants and toddlers. Source: Wellcome Collection

I. From “Toxic” to “Clean”

From the nineteenth century onwards, the United States entered a period of rapid urbanisation, as large numbers of people – women included – began moving from the countryside to the cities. Once settled in urban areas, women were immediately swept up in another great historical wave: the professionalisation of women. This created a childcare dilemma – who would feed the children? Middle-class wives faced the same challenge. Though they had no need to balance work and family, in an era that prized large families, social etiquette demanded time for receiving guests and managing the household, so naturally they too needed to find a breast-milk substitute.

Local distillers and dairy farmers sensed the commercial opportunity. They began feeding spent grain and wastewater discarded by distilleries to their ailing and weakened cows. According to a calculation published in The New York Times at the time, cows fed on swill could produce 5–25 quarts (4.7–23.6 litres) more milk per day than those fed on hay. This milk was known as “swill milk”.

● Illustrations from investigative articles of the period depicted sickly cows crammed into filthy, cramped spaces. Source: online

Swill milk had an odd colour and taste, so producers would add chalk, eggs, flour and Plaster of Paris to mimic the texture of natural milk.

In 1907, The New York Times reported that inferior milk was killing thousands of infants every year.

The same situation played out in nineteenth-century London. At the time, milk preservation techniques were still immature. To meet the city’s demand for fresh milk, cows were kept largely in shops tucked away in urban alleyways. The milk was drawn and sold on the spot, making it easy to pick up dust and germs. Tuberculosis was frequently spread through milk, and the extremely high infant mortality rate was widely blamed on the milk supply.

● Dairymen in London alleyways in the 1820s, and a milk dust cover introduced by a nineteenth-century dairy company – the floral design on the jar suggests milk’s connection to nature and purity. Source (top image): British Museum

It was not until 1912 that the Board of Agriculture established the National Institute for Research in Dairying and issued the Code of Practices for the Production of Clean Milk. At the same time, the dairy industry resolved to optimise and upgrade its operations through scientific principles such as hygiene and efficiency. Through this process, milk production, testing and processing became ever more standardised and industrialised.

● The Code of Practices for the Production of Clean Milk set requirements for the health of cows, the siting of farms and cleaning procedures.
● Dairy industry equipment in the twentieth century. White work uniforms represented a scientific approach to production, while transparent glass bottles symbolised the cleanliness and purity of milk.

As demand for milk continued to rise, processing and transport in the dairy industry became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.

Take Express Dairy, founded in 1864. The exhibition features excerpts from a twenty-minute promotional film made by Express Dairy in the 1950s. The film opens with scenes of milkmen in white uniforms and housewives in white dresses buying and selling milk, and goes on to show the company’s entire process from milk collection, testing and pasteurisation to bottling and transport, in an effort to restore consumer confidence in the safety of milk.

● A glimpse of Express Dairy’s 1954 promotional film. At the time, the company not only had its own branded trains but also dedicated railway milk vans.

During this process of consolidation and modernisation in the dairy industry, “cleanness” became an important concept, one closely tied to food safety. Knowing how to – and having the means to – choose safe, clean food became a marker of modern living and social status. The white middle class, quite naturally, became the model consumers of milk.

● Left: a 1950s milk advertisement – the image of an affluent white family hints at the Eurocentrism of the era’s food ideals. Right: a mid-twentieth-century British milk promotion campaign advertisement, which succeeded in popularising milk among lower-income white working-class families and young white-collar workers.

II. Milk and Nutrition

As early as the 1920s, the National Council of Public Health advised housewives to spend 27% of their total food budget on milk – the single largest item of expenditure. In the half-century that followed, with war as the spark, and driven by advances in scientific research and government promotion, milk formally became synonymous with nutrition. Second World War conscription exposed the widespread malnutrition among the British public, prompting scientists to investigate the relationship between disease and diet in depth. Because milk contains protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and fats – all essential nutrients – it gradually emerged during this period as the optimal food, becoming an important component of wartime food rationing.

● Under the wartime food rationing system, the weekly allowance of milk, sugar, bacon, cheese, butter and chocolate available to two adults included 7 pints of milk (approximately 3.3 litres). Source: Imperial War Museum

From the food rationing introduced during the Second World War onwards, milk became an integral part of the British welfare system. From 1940, the government distributed powdered milk to mothers and children, a scheme that continued until it was replaced in 2006.

If you look at the dietary advice leaflets published by the British government in the mid-twentieth century, you will find that the star food – milk – is everywhere, providing adults with energy and protection while being essential to shaping children’s physical development.

● Mid-twentieth-century dairy advertisement. The left panel contrasts animals that drank milk with those that did not, intended to demonstrate milk’s remarkable effects. The right panel compares the walking postures of two young girls: the girl who drinks milk is full of vitality, while the one who does not cannot even bring her feet together.

As personal health and national prosperity became tightly intertwined, choosing milk as a nutritious food and cultivating a healthy physique represented not only a modern lifestyle but also responsible citizenship.

Moreover, choosing nutritious milk meant you were a competent caregiver.

In the late nineteenth century, the rise of paediatrics and new approaches to parenting influenced by the “scientific feeding” movement profoundly transformed every aspect of mothers’ lives. Weight became a key indicator of children’s development, and mothers’ breast milk came under strict scrutiny.

Experts of the time held that the quality of breast milk varied from mother to mother, whereas infant formula was a scientific product formulated to replicate the nutritional composition of breast milk. As the best substitute for breast milk, it therefore displaced fresh cow’s milk to become a vital safeguard of children’s nutrition.

● Promotional materials from the infant formula brands Glaxo and Gerber.
Infant formula advertisements from this period frequently featured branded developmental milestone charts for babies, even depicting an inverse relationship between infant formula sales and falling infant mortality rates… In short, they all sought to demonstrate the irreplaceable role of their product in children’s “healthy growth”.

III. Is Milk Still the Perfect Food?

After visiting the exhibition, we find that milk’s progressive image of purity, nutrition and modernity is the product of various forces constructed over the past hundred years. Behind it lie not only commercial interests but also political power, media discourse and nutritional science. Having unpacked all this, can milk still be considered the perfect food?

In fact, controversies surrounding milk have persisted in recent years. Nutritional research has shown that many green leafy vegetables, nuts and tofu can supply calcium – some even containing more than milk – so calcium need not come from drinking milk alone. Other studies have indicated that excessive milk consumption may lead to osteoporosis.

Critics have also raised objections from the perspectives of environmental protection and animal welfare, targeting the increasingly intensive and industrialised dairy sector. Inadequate management of livestock manure on concentrated farms causes environmental pollution, while high concentrations of ammonia and nitrogen also threaten biodiversity in surrounding areas.

The production environment behind the cheap milk on supermarket shelves in Europe and America is far from the verdant, idyllic pastures depicted on packaging; rather, it is the cramped enclosures of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As the documentary Cow narrates, a dairy cow on such a farm lives only to produce milk; once its life has been exhausted by relentless production, it ceases to hold any value.

● The documentary Cow attempts to tell the tragic lives of cows in industrialised farms from the cows’ own perspective. Source: documentary website
After the exhibition, I found myself wondering what the steady stream of visitors around me had taken away. Would they come to see that consumption is far more complex than a matter of individual choice? Would they begin to consider the social and environmental impact of what they consume? More specifically, would they care about where their milk comes from? At the very least, I felt more resolved in my own choices: I will pay closer attention to the source of my milk, opting where possible for milk that is locally produced, minimally processed, and attentive to animal welfare, with greater environmental responsibility from production through to packaging. And, like any food, there is no need to place blind faith in its nutritional virtues or to drink (or eat) it in excess.

References
1. Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat[M], University of Chicago Press, 20122. Alex Renton, Milk: A Local and Global History by Deborah Valenze – review, the Guardian, 2011-7-30

3. Linda Geddes, Everything you need to know about lactose intolerance, NewsScientist, 2015-7-23

4. Tyler Moss, The 19th-Century Swill Milk Scandal That Poisoned Infants With Whiskey Runoff, Atlas Obscura, 2017-11-27

5. Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: environmental battles in the antebellum city, Harvard University Press, 2014

6. Storhaug CL, Fosse SK, Fadnes LT. Country, regional, and global estimates for lactose malabsorption in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet. Gastroenterology & Hepatology. 2017; 2(10): 738–746.

7. https://www.yfanefa.com/record/24288

8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30909722/

9. Taming Manhattan: environmental battles in the antebellum city

Foodthink contributor | Lu Wanlin
PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and holder of a Master’s in Food Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Researcher at the SOAS Food Forum. Previously worked at an ecological agriculture social enterprise and a food-tech investment fund. Enjoys growing vegetables and cooking in her spare time.

 

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article were taken by the author at the exhibition.

Editor: Ze’en

Published by Foodthink