Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900

by Kendra Smith-Howard

too often efforts by environmentalists and environmental historians to reconnect consumers to the places from which their food came position the farm as a counterpoint to a rapidly industrializing urban America. Such histories and appeals, like the imagery on dairy labels, encourage consumers to associate milk with a timeless idyllic countryside.6 This romanticization of rural nature makes it easy to overlook that rural places experienced processes of industrialization in tandem with urban ones in the twentieth century.

Declensionist narratives tend to portray agricultural modernization as a force that corrupts natural purity, but in some cases, changing nature to be more artificial helped make milk more safe and pure. Farm people often had compelling reasons to modernize their operations in ways that dramatically altered nature. By breeding cows artificially, for instance, farm families reduced the real risk of being gored by a bull. Farm people did not uncritically champion all industrial solutions; many sought to adopt new technologies on their own terms.

It is tempting to believe that nature can be controlled and equally alluring to be inspired to go back to nature. Milk’s history reminds us that neither alternative is truly possible. Even at the moments when technology seems to guarantee new breakthroughs in managing and predicting processes of life on the farm, nature offers such challenges as storms, aborted cattle, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Similarly, even milk produced by pasture-grazed cattle, free of chemical inputs, carries residues from human activities. The pursuit of purity requires striking a balance between harnessing the raw materials of nature and allowing biological processes to thrive. To take milk’s history seriously is to understand the compromises, complexity, and challenges involved in our dependence on other organisms for our very sustenance.

Maintaining a profit margin on a mixed-income farm required economizing on the costs for dairy feed and housing. One University of Missouri study, for instance, noted that keeping cows in the basement of a horse barn would reduce building costs and help general farmers retain dairy profits.55 But urban health officials condemned basement barns and those who housed hogs and horses alongside dairy cows, viewing the practice as unsanitary. Faced with contradictory advice about keeping the farm profitable and meeting sanitary requirements, dairy farm people weighed their roles as protectors of public health with their roles as businessmen and -women.

Milk’s new image was not simply the work of dairy publicists. The food became safe to drink because agricultural and public health reformers urged farm families to change the practice of dairy farming—rebuilding barns, hauling manure, and testing cows to bring nature under control. Milk codes, campaigns to eradicate animal diseases, and pasteurization ordinances reconfigured the nature of dairy landscapes and milk itself.106

Pennsylvania’s Congressman Franklin Menges told of palm fruit chaff being “tramped by bare-footed natives” to extract the oil from which margarine was made.120 By contrasting tropical natives in the palm oil trade to American dairy farmers, a group whose racial makeup was predominantly white, Menges and Davis tied butter’s purity to racial ideologies.121 Their critique also cast butter as a more technologically modern product than margarine, for barefoot palm fruit-trampers were a far cry from the expert, white-coated creamery workers highlighted in butter ads.

Rather than seeing the rise of national manufacturing and a mass market as forces that eroded local rural economic vitality, many farm families viewed engagement with national markets as a path toward (not away from) economic independence in the 1910s and 1920s.

Chemurgy blended the commitment to an agrarian past and industrial future; it was a vision of modernity rooted in the continued economic viability of the farm. By basing industrial processes in nature—and especially in biological products that were renewable—scientists, industry leaders, and agricultural officials believed they could ensure a firmer foundation for the economy than the volatility of the stock market.15

the records of the Mallary farm lend insights into how farm families adopted AI in its earliest years.115 The Mallary family and others who used it needed more than a potent bull and ready cow. They also had to become further enmeshed in networks of technology and expertise. Farmers had to have access to telephones and good roads to take advantage of AI.116 Phones helped farmers quickly inform the veterinarian of a cow in heat and roads enabled the inseminator to reach the cow at the designated time. AI also required regular visits from technicians to “service” cows and advise farmers about how to overcome cows’ sterility problems or care for them during pregnancy.117 By extension, AI relied on educational institutions, such as agricultural colleges and veterinary schools, to train inseminators.

The built environment of agriculture, then, offers clues to the consequences of a mass consumption economy on nature just as revealing as the strip malls and split-level homes on the city’s fringes. To enable their milk to be nationally marketed, farmers rebuilt the milking rooms, dairy barns, and feed storage structures. Simultaneously, they remade the working landscape of the farm, removing cows from woodlands and turning land once devoted to cash crops into regularly harvested hay fields. The nature to which city dwellers fled was not just one of timeless respite, but one touched profoundly by technological change and economic modernization.

The turn to a technical fix for fallout-tainted milk also demonstrates that while consumers alarmed by radioactive fallout in milk were wary of contemporary technologies like the atomic bomb, they did not reject technology altogether. Rather, like earlier proponents of chemurgy or artificial insemination, those seeking to reduce fallout in milk believed that science and expertise could be harnessed to better human life.

While rhetorically effective, the sharp distinction raw milk enthusiasts draw between “traditional” and “industrial” milk misrepresents dairy history. Even seemingly natural and traditional processes, like pasture grazing, have been transformed over the twentieth century. Pastures were not and are not simply plots of native grasses, but carefully managed stands—fertilized, seeded, and fenced to promote the growth of the most succulent and nutrient-rich grasses.41 By the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, farmers carefully followed advice from modern experts to plant high-protein grasses, like alfalfa, to stimulate milk production. Industrial ideals—maximizing production and minimizing costs—guided interwar farmers planting pasture grasses just as fundamentally as they motivate managers of dairy feedlots today.

Hence, even in a political moment seemingly friendly to consumers’ power in the marketplace, the political and economic structures of contemporary society frame the kinds of choices consumers have in the marketplace, and in so doing, the environmental consequences of such choices.

Over the course of the twentieth century, however, consumers advocating change in the dairy industry have come to place greater emphasis on the rights of individuals to make choices in the marketplace, rather than on improving access and setting standards for all consumers to obtain pure and healthful food.