Pasteurization: An escape from The Jungle
Pasteurization: An escape from The Jungle
Louis Pasteur
The unfiltered history of pasteurization -- as opposed to the sanitized version glorifying its pioneer, Louis Pasteur -- recently
has come under intensified scrutiny as the Internet has given activists the ability to search 100-year-old medical journals, longforgotten media accounts and a larger context in which to understand the public policy shift toward pasteurized dairy.
Louis Pasteur
What led up to widespread pasteurization reads like a page out of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle at the turn of the 20th century.
Indeed, the filth and corruption that Sinclair exposed in the meat business was mirrored in the increasingly industrialized dairy
industry. Cows were confined to manure-laden stalls and fed the byproducts of an increasingly industrialized economy. Milk
was diluted with sewage-tainted water. Chalk, plaster, white clay and even animal brains were added to cover up for the
absence of cream, which had been skimmed and sold separately. There was little sanitation or refrigeration.
This was not the milk of our ancestors, who drank the stuff straight from the cow (or goat or ewe). This product was quite
different, and in many cases quite dirty. Sometimes it wasn't even milk.
Pasteurization was viewed by many as a short-term solution until the industry could be cleaned up. Although pasteurization
found a deep-pocketed advocate in Nathan Straus, the co-owner of Macy's who had lost a son to contaminated milk, many
physicians in the early 1900s recognized that heating milk destroyed vital nutrients and enzymes. In fact, Dr. J.E. Crewe,
founder of the Mayo Clinic, prescribed raw milk to his patients and claimed it cured a number of diseases.
As a result of this continued demand, an Essex County, N.J., doctor created the Medical Milk Commission in 1893 to certify
clean raw milk from cows free to roam and eat a species-appropriate diet of grass. Comprised of 42 physicians, the Medical
Milk Commission became a model for other cities and counties, and milk commissions popped up all over the country. The
legacy of that movement is still realized today in the regulations that govern the licensing of raw milk for retail sale in
California, Maine, Connecticut and New Mexico.
For a number of years, milk proceeded along parallel tracks. By 1936, half of the milk sold in the United States was
pasteurized and half was raw. As the Second World War drew to a close, a campaign to educate Americans about raw milk's
dangers took shape in national magazines, led by The Ladies' Home Journal. Many of the tales of death and disease attributed
to raw dairy later proved fictional, but the clamor for mandatory pasteurization laws proceeded unabated. Michigan became the
first state to outlaw raw milk in 1948. One by one, states began adopting the federal Standard Milk Ordinance (now called the
Grade A Pasteurized Milk Ordinance, issued by the FDA).
But by then the idea that milk was inherently dangerous and that a guy named Pasteur saved humanity was well ensconced, and
banning raw milk became scarcely necessary. Industrial dairy had been born.
By Suzanne Nelson