History blog posts

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.

Before pasteurization reached milk, it was applied to wine and beer. The chemist who first proposed heat-treating milk was Franz von Soxhlet, in Munich in 1886.

Imprisoned in Prussia for his role in the 1848 revolution, Abraham Jacobi arrived in New York in 1853 and spent the next six decades building the institutional foundations of American pediatrics and shaping the debate over how urban children should be fed.

Bavarian-born merchant and Macy’s co-owner Nathan Straus built a privately funded network of 297 pasteurized milk depots across 36 American cities between 1893 and 1920, accumulating the mortality data that drove mandatory pasteurization legislation across the United States.