History blog posts

Public Citizen v. Heckler (1985, 1986) led to the 1987 federal ban on interstate raw milk sales, 21 CFR 1240.61. Sales within states were left to state law.

11 million US adults drink raw milk, ten times swill milk era New York. Twenty years of data show the 1850s death toll has not returned. Here’s why.

Pasteur’s 1857 memoir identified the living organism that sours milk. He named it lactic yeast, then spent his career on wine and beer instead.

From Bronze Age gold cups to a scholar’s field notes on a dying herd, three thousand years of writers described the aurochs before it went extinct in 1627.

From Mycenaean gold cups to a Macedonian king’s temple offering, the aurochs was a mark of status across Greece and Rome long before Caesar wrote about it.

Herberstein and Schneeberger left the last eyewitness accounts of the aurochs before its 1627 extinction, from a royal gift calf to a dying herd’s final count.

Caesar’s account of the aurochs in De Bello Gallico is among the earliest surviving descriptions of cattle’s wild ancestor. The full Latin passage, examined.

Founder of the Slow Food movement, the Ark of Taste, and Terra Madre, Carlo Petrini spent four decades defending artisanal food traditions, raw milk cheeses, and the right to good food worldwide.

Pasteur never used the word “pasteurization.” Others coined it as an honorific, first in French, then in English in 1881, applied to wine. The path to milk took another decade.

Every conventional milk carton bears his name, but Pasteur never pasteurized milk. His study of fermentation developed a heat-treatment for wine in 1865 and beer in 1871.

Harold J. Harris’s 1945 Coronet article “Raw Milk Can Kill You” shaped American pasteurization law on a fictional epidemic and survey data the author knew was misleading.

Milton J. Rosenau’s 1912 public health synthesis covered milk composition, disease transmission, certified milk, pasteurization standards, and infant mortality across 309 pages and six editions.