What was the swill milk scandal?

The swill milk scandal was a 19th-century public health crisis in US cities in which industrialized dairies fed cows spent grain from alcohol distilleries to cut feed costs. The resulting milk was bluish, watery, and nutritionally deficient. Dairy operators adulterated it with chalk, plaster of Paris, starch, eggs, and molasses to restore its appearance, then sold it as pure country milk. The contaminated product caused widespread illness and child mortality in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. A major exposé was published by Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1858.

Why was pasteurization introduced for milk?

Milk pasteurization spread in American cities from the 1890s onward, after decades of illness and child deaths tied to contaminated urban milk. Nathan Straus opened pasteurized milk depots in New York in 1893, Chicago passed the first city pasteurization ordinance in 1908, and a 1908 federal report, Milk and Its Relation to the Public Health, linked impure milk to disease. The article argues that the real causes were industrial adulteration and distillery feed, and that germ theory was used to shift the blame onto raw milk itself.

Who invented pasteurization?

Louis Pasteur developed heat treatment for wine, experimenting in 1864 and patenting the process in 1865. He never applied it to milk. German chemist Franz von Soxhlet proposed pasteurizing milk in 1886, and commercial milk pasteurization began in the mid-1890s.

Swill milk was milk produced by cows fed the spent grain byproduct of alcohol distilleries, a practice adopted by 19th-century industrialized urban dairies to minimize feed costs. The distillery grain diet caused the cows to produce a bluish, transparent, low-quality milk. Producers added chalk, plaster of Paris, starch, eggs, and molasses to disguise the milk's appearance before selling it.

Bad business practices by newly industrialized concentrated dairies in the 19th century causes a surge of foodborne illness, and many deaths. Raw milk unfairly caught the blame.

The Swill Milk Scandal and how raw milk became a scapegoat for big business

May 13, 2021 · 6 min read

Most people have no exposure to raw milk. Modern perceptions around raw milk are crafted by corporate media and revolving-door careerists. However, there were real-world experiences that prompted the rise of pasteurization mandates.

Child deaths blamed on raw milk

This idea of dangerous milk never crossed our ancestors’ minds. Raw milk has long been revered as a life-giving, healing food. Some elevated milk religiously and saw dairy foods as a gift from God and Nature, or however they chose to narrate it. In fact most of that milk wasn’t just raw, it was unrefrigerated and often fermented. So what went wrong?

You’ll hear the higher tier of those who oppose raw milk reference an outbreak in the 19th century where many people became deathly ill after drinking raw milk. It’s true, this era occurred. People got sick by the thousands including many children.

That’s not the whole story though, there was something else going on around that period of history that might give us a better perspective on the situation.

Swill Milk – big business does raw milk

As people left their family-owned farms and acreage for the cities, ie urbanization, a new market emerged. Now there were more densely-populated markets to provide for, where mass amounts of milk needed to be supplied. Big business readily took to this emerging market.

Many concentrated farming operations were born to capitalize on this opportunity. Collaboration being older than business itself, some of these milk farmers began feeding their cows spent grains from alcohol distilleries, virtually eliminating feed costs.

Spent brewing grains, especially in bulk, are a long deviation from the animal’s natural diet and had a negative effect on their health. This reduced the quality of their milk, horrifically. The resulting milk was blueish in color and transparent compared to the butter-yellowed white milk produced by healthy cows, this blueish low quality milk became known as “swill milk.”

Adding insult to injury, the people in charge of these operations decided to cover up the visual indicators of their poor milk quality instead of making it right. They did this by adding chalk and plaster of Paris to whiten the milk, starch and eggs to thicken it up, and molasses to replace what would’ve been the buttery hue.

“Raw milk” and child mortality

From Smithsonian Magazine, on Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper‘s swill milk exposé published in 1858:

Sold by firms hoping to maximize their profits, so-called “swill milk” came from dairy cows that were fed the steaming remains of grain distillation. These cows lived in nearby stables amid miserable conditions–most only survived for a few months–and produced a sickly, bluish milk. To mask this ghastly color, the distilleries added chalk, eggs, flour, water, molasses, and other substances. Local distributors then purchased this toxic concoction from the distilleries and brazenly marketed it as “Pure Country Milk.”

…

In subsequent reporting, Leslie’s alleged that “the deaths of two-thirds of the children in New York and Brooklyn could be distinctly traced to the use of impure milk” and the normally restrained New York Times wondered how “the 8,000 children that died last year from the poison of swill milk” could not spur public health officials and local leaders into action.

It soon became clear that New York wasn’t the only city with problems: Thousands of children from Boston to Chicago to San Francisco died each year from the contaminated swill. Public outcry from these revelations eventually led many distilleries to close their deleterious dairies, or, at the very least, clean up their operations.

… wait for it …

The milk question grew to such dire proportions that it even attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1908, his Surgeon General released a 600-page report that attributed most childhood deaths to impure milk and argued that pasteurization was the best way to address the ongoing public health crisis.

The report Smithsonian refers to is Milk and Its Relation to the Public Health, published in January 1908 by the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service as Hygienic Laboratory Bulletin No. 41. It runs 758 pages and covers tuberculous cows, dirty water supplies on dairy farms, certified milk and pasteurization. Its pasteurization research was led by Milton Rosenau, who four years later wrote that “pure milk is better than purified milk.”

It should go without saying, pasteurizing milk won’t save you from the consequences of taking in substances like chalk added to milk. Pasteurization is supposed to be a solution to destroy microbes, but it won’t transmute gypsum powder into something that’s healthy to eat.

In a brilliant side-step by big business and the establishment, the blame was shifted away from this unreal concoction onto raw milk using the latest in scapegoating tech: germ theory.

Big misunderstanding, a profitable one

The public’s trust in store bought milk was damaged, public outcry emerged for the government to do something to protect them from dangerous milk. When they did, the concerns about milk safety didn’t go away overnight.

To this day, the stigma is still present. If you go to the doctor in the middle of an e. coli poop-lettuce outbreak and they find out you’ve been drinking raw milk, your doctor is will at least feel an urge to blame the raw milk.

Back then, the fear of store-bought milk was still heightened, and this fear was leveraged to the advantage of big business. It was very easy for the establishment to say, “well, maybe it wasn’t the chalk, maybe it was germs!”

Pasteurization arrived later than the story usually suggests. Louis Pasteur’s heat-treatment experiments in 1864, and his 1865 patent, were for wine, several years after the 1858 swill milk exposé. Pasteur never applied the process to milk. That step came from German chemist Franz von Soxhlet in 1886, and pasteurized milk reached New York’s poor in 1893 through Nathan Straus’s milk depots. Chicago passed the first city ordinance requiring pasteurization in 1908, and even that one exempted milk from tuberculin-tested herds. Statewide bans on raw milk sales came decades later: Michigan’s, in 1948, was the first. The full timeline is in Pasteur Never Pasteurized Raw Milk.

Big milk producers initially resisted but soon saw benefit, due not only to shelf life. While they possessed the means to build out pasteurization infrastructure, some of their smaller competition did not. The rise of pasteurization also created a collage of food processing companies who by their nature have an interest in mass-pasteurization laws. Through those laws they exist and perpetuate their power over farmers, bottle-necking the system, so it’s a fight they’ll never give up.

Image: Cows cramped into feeding stalls, 1858

Over time the portion of urbanized people who have ever tasted raw milk has dwindled, and the establishment’s education system has crystallized these fears in most people.

History being written by the victors, the raw-ness of raw milk eventually became the scapegoat for this swill milk disaster.

Update 2024: Noticed this video elaborating on the history of the swill milk scandal.