Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages

INFANT MORTALITY was high throughout the United States, but the rates were most appalling in cities, particularly Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Worse still, the mortality rate was rapidly increasing. In 1814, for example, 25 percent of the babies born in Philadelphia died before they reached the age of five years. By 1839, this mortality rate had increased to almost 51 percent. Over a similar time period, the infant mortality rate in Boston increased from 33 percent to 43 percent; in New York, it increased from 32 percent to 50 percent. By the 1850s, children younger than ten years accounted for 62 percent of all deaths in New York City; other northeastern cities were not far behind.¹ Medical professionals were unclear as to the cause of this spike in the mortality rate among young children. Many believed that it was something in city air, whereas others attributed the increased death rate to communicable diseases, such as cholera and tuberculosis.

Temperance advocate Robert M. Hartley, a successful New York City merchant with no medical background, came to the conclusion that the sharp increase in child mortality rates was caused by bad milk from dairies associated with urban brewing and distilling operations. Hartley believed that milk was nature’s perfect food, for adults as well as children—but not the milk that came from these urban dairies, where cows were fed poorly and stabled in filthy sheds. He circulated tracts, published exposés, spoke to large audiences, and set down his opinions in America’s first book on milk, published in 1842. The campaign that Hartley launched eventually succeeded in closing many dairies, which may or may not have affected child mortality rates.² Hartley’s campaign did affect milk consumption, however: as soon as Americans believed that milk was safe to drink, consumption skyrocketed.

From the beginning of European colonization, Americans drank milk. English colonists imported cows into Jamestown, Virginia, shortly after the colony was founded. Thomas West, Earl De La Warr (better known as Lord Delaware), an early governor and captain-general of the colony, proclaimed milk to be “a great nourishment and refreshing to our people, serving also (in occasion) as well for Physicke as for Food.”³ By 1634, all the “better sort” of plantations of Virginia, proclaimed a visitor to Jamestown, had “plentie of milk.”⁴ Virginia plantation owner Landon Carter enjoyed marshmallow root boiled in milk and sweetened with brown sugar.⁵ The Virginia planter William Byrd reported in his diary that he “ate milk for breakfast” almost every day. He drank it between meals, frequently flavoring it with barley, tea, hot corn pone, strawberries, apples, and rhubarb. When he was ill, he drank warm milk.⁶

Milk was plentiful in colonial New England. Cows arrived at Plymouth Plantation in 1624.⁷ In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, established around what would become Boston in 1630, the colonists drank milk on its own and also used it in maize-based dishes, such as hasty pudding, samp, and suppawn. A favorite dish of the colonial period was baked pumpkin filled with milk and eaten with a spoon.⁸ A rich combination of “curds and cream” was rated a delicacy throughout the colonies.⁹ Milk porridge was frequently served for breakfast and supper.¹⁰

The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (later New York) were strongly committed to dairy farming. Unfortunately, the growth of the human population outpaced that of the dairy herds, leading Reverend Jonas Michaëlius to complain that milk “cannot here be obtained” except at a “very high price.” He urged the Dutch West India Company to send more farmers and dairymen to the colony. The Dutch did so, and milk, cream, butter, and cheese became staples—as they had been in the old country. Herds of dairy cattle flourished on the island of Manhattan and in the settlements that were established north of the city in the Hudson Valley.¹¹ When the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm visited the Hudson Valley in 1749, he found milk in abundance: farmers added milk to their tea, drank buttermilk, and enjoyed bowls of bread moistened with milk for breakfast and supper.¹²

A Swedish minister, Israel Acrelius, found that milk with water was “the common drink of the people.” Milk was also used as a base to make a summertime punch with rum, sugar, and nutmeg grated over the top. This punch was also used as a medicinal preparation for dysentery. Barley was often boiled in milk, and bread was added to the mixture for a dinner dish. For supper, milk was poured over broken bread. Milk was also sometimes added to chocolate and drunk with a spoon.¹³

Americans served milk at meals and between meals. During the summer, it was served with ice.¹⁴ Milk was also combined with staples such as rice, potatoes, and corn pone; added to coffee, tea, and hot chocolate; and employed in numerous desserts, such as curds and cream, fools, trifles, and floating islands. Syllabubs were rich milk or cream desserts flavored with wine and spices.

Milk spoiled quickly in the South and commercial dairying was limited, but most plantations and farms had a cow for milk for the children. Excess milk was converted into butter. The liquid byproduct leftover after making butter was called buttermilk, which was used as a drink—especially by southerners, who preferred buttermilk or sour milk to regular milk.¹⁵ Soured milk was also used to make milk biscuits, pancakes, and waffles. It could also be boiled, with molasses added to make the drink sweeter.¹⁶

In the countryside, almost every small farm had at least one cow that supplied milk for the family’s needs. Dairies also were established in most cities, but as the urban population mushroomed in the early nineteenth century, the demand for milk increased beyond the capacity of city dairies. In New York, private individuals tied cows to stakes in city streets and fed them garbage. Property owners charged for the privilege of herding cows in their streets. According to dairy historian John Dillon, “the disposition of the manure was a provision of the lease contract,” and at the time there was an unlimited demand for manure to fertilize Manhattan’s farms and gardens.¹⁷

For those who did not want to bother keeping cows in Manhattan, milk was available from street vendors who dispensed it in uncovered wooden pails.¹⁸ These vendors commonly carried several gallons of milk at a time by employing a wooden yoke

In colonial days, most of New York City’s milk was produced in urban dairies. As the city’s population grew, the demand for milk increased. The business of distributing milk became more profitable; dealers multiplied and competition became intense. In the 1820s, some ambitious New York City dairymen adopted a British system that exploited another popular beverage—beer—to support milk production. Eager for larger profits, they built large stables near breweries. Mash or slop—the watery byproducts of brewing with grain—was siphoned from the breweries directly to cows’ mangers through wooden chutes. By the 1830s, an estimated 18,000 cows in New York City and Brooklyn were being fed almost exclusively on brewery mash.²⁰ Distillers and brewers saved money by not having to cart away the brewery waste, and they enjoyed substantial profits from the sale of milk (as well as manure). They also made money selling the meat when the cows died. Moreover, at the time, milk was in great demand in cities, in part because of efforts by the temperance movement to discourage the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

It was the connection between breweries and distilleries and dairies that interested that Robert M. Hartley. He had been born in England in 1796, but his family had immigrated to the United States in 1799 and settled in upstate New York, where evangelical churches flourished. Hartley was particularly influenced by temperance views. He became a wool merchant in the Mohawk Valley, and then moved to New York City, where he expanded his operation.

Although he was a successful businessman, Hartley never lost his devotion to temperance. In 1829, he founded the New York Temperance Society and was elected its corresponding secretary in 1833. At the time, the temperance movement encouraged parents to give their children milk—a wholesome alternative, or so everyone believed, to alcoholic beverages. When considering ways to reduce alcohol consumption, Hartley investigated the brewing and distilling operations in the city and decided to attack one of its main profit centers—milk production. The cows ate the mash that came from distilling and brewing, and therefore the companies did not have to pay to discard it. The cows produced milk, which was in great demand because breastfeeding was declining. Breweries and distilleries made additional profits by selling manure to farmers; when the cows died, they sold the meat to butchers. Hartley believed that the profits of the dairy operations were so substantial that New York’s alcohol industry would collapse if they were eliminated.²¹

So Hartley investigated the dairies, and what he uncovered was shocking: the milk produced in the brewery and distillery dairies was not rich in butterfat. Instead, it was extremely thin with a pale bluish cast. Brewers and distillers, as well as other milk distributors, adulterated their milk to make it appear wholesome and make more money. They added water for increased volume; brightened it up with chalk, carrot juice, and annatto; sweetened it with molasses to make the kids happy; and occasionally broke in a raw egg for creaminess. The dairies also were poorly managed and badly kept. Cows were frequently diseased; some cows could not even stand and had to be winched up so they could be milked.

Hartley concluded that poor quality and adulterated milk was the major reason that New York City’s infant mortality had increased so steeply during the 1830s. He wrote to the dairy owners, threatening them with exposure in the press if they did not clean up their operations. When they failed to comply, Hartley launched a campaign against “swill milk” and “slop milk,” publishing a series of pamphlets and articles opposing its sale. In 1842, he compiled his views and published America’s first book about milk, An Historical, Scientific, and Practical Essay on Milk, as an Article of Human Sustenance. In it, Hartley affirmed his beliefs that milk was nature’s perfect food and that drinking milk was part of God’s design, but that the slop milk was killing the city’s babies and children. To support his arguments, Hartley quoted and cited scripture throughout his book.²²

Scriptural references might have been helpful for religiously oriented New Yorkers, but the medical profession considered his campaign a temperance rant and evangelical propaganda. Despite the extensive statistical data also published in Hartley’s book, medical professionals generally disregarded his views. City officials were financially rewarded by the breweries and distilleries to turn a deaf ear to protests, so they also ignored his campaign. This did not stop Hartley. He funded the publication of still more circulars signed by physicians attesting to the deleterious effects of slop milk. However, most medical professionals still failed to support his theory that the milk produced by the dairies was the cause of the increase in infant mortality.²³

Despite Hartley’s exposé, the number of breweries exploded in New York during the 1840s and 1850s, and so did the number of dairies. But Hartley’s efforts had raised alarm and attracted the interest of newspapers, which began investigations of their own into the atrocious conditions in the dairies. In 1847, the New York Tribune reported on “one of the largest and filthiest swill milk stables and urged the city to act.” The exposés pressured the New York Academy of Medicine to establish a committee to investigate the controversy in 1847, but that group attacked Hartley’s credibility. Still, the committee proclaimed that the dairies were nuisances due to the effects of diseased and adulterated milk, but they had no evidence that these dairies caused the spike in child mortality. The New York Tribune published another exposé in 1849.²⁴ Yet another series of exposés ran in the New-York Evening Post during the early 1850s; newspaperman John Mullaly collected these articles in a book, which was published in 1853.²⁵ The newly launched New York Times began featuring articles on swill milk in 1854.²⁶

Despite the barrage of exposés, lectures, pamphlets, books, newspaper articles, and magazine articles, the sale of swill milk continued unabated. The brewing and distilling industries were just too ingrained in New York City’s political system to permit anything more than superficial modifications. This changed in 1858, when Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper “declared war” on the brewery dairies of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The first article, “Startling Exposure of Milk Trade of New York and Brooklyn!” reported that the stables surrounding the distilleries were “disgusting,” “dilapidated and wretchedly filthy.” The article described crude wooden shanties, thickly hung with cobwebs in which the cows were “arranged in double rows, their heads to the swill troughs and their tails, or rather the remnants of their tails, towards each other: so close that sometimes one cow actually lies on the other.” The swill rushed from the brewery through chutes, foaming and “boiling hot and reeking with subtle poison it splashes into the troughs.” At first, the cows refused the swill, “but after a week or two they seem[ed] to have a taste for it and in a short time we [found] them consuming from one to two or even three barrels of swill a day.”²⁷

Leslie continued the series of articles, and the controversy heated up when one of the newspaper’s reporters was murdered while developing a story.²⁸ This death prompted the New York Academy of Medicine to form another committee, which blandly acknowledged the “unwholesomeness of slop-fed milk” and recommended that it “not be used as a diet by the infant population.” But the committee once again demurred when it came to stating why or how milk from these dairies would have caused the increase in child mortality rates.²⁹

The press coverage and medical reports finally forced New York City’s Common Council and its Board of Health to hold hearings on the controversy, but thanks to pressure from brewers and distillers, the impact of swill milk on public health was effectively whitewashed. Eventually, however, Frank Leslie and others convinced the New York State Legislature to pass the Act to Prevent the Adulteration and Traffic of Impure Milk, which was enacted in 1862. Massachusetts had passed similar legislation in 1859, and other states soon followed.³⁰ Although enforcement of these laws was deficient, escalating land prices in cities and increasing competition from rural dairies made urban dairies less economical; one by one, the sources of swill milk closed.

Swill dairies were not the only cause of high infant mortality rates. City water supplies, for instance, were also deficient, and urbanites were more exposed to contagious diseases. Health professionals slowly improved city water supplies and better understanding of contagious diseases decreased infant mortality rates. However, urban infant mortality rates remained high and many believed that milk remained a major cause. Milk from swill dairies had been fresh because it was usually distributed quickly and efficiently, but swill milk’s replacement from rural areas was often less so.

During the early nineteenth century, rural dairies had played little part in supplying milk for fast-growing cities, primarily because of the cost and difficulties of transporting milk into the cities.³¹ This changed, however, as a result of improved transportation. The steamboat in the early nineteenth century made it possible for dairy farmers along navigable rivers, such as the Hudson, to ship milk to cities at relatively low cost.³²

Expanding railroad systems enabled rural dairy farmers to ship fresh milk into cities on a daily basis, even if their farms were far from rivers. By 1842, for instance, the Erie Railroad had been extended as far as Goshen in Orange County, New York, which is northwest of New York City. To undercut the city dairies, Robert Hartley had visited upstate farmers and encouraged them to send milk to New York City.³³ Two years later, farmers in Goshen and neighboring communities organized the Orange County Milk Association to do just that. Unfortunately, the early operators of the Erie Railroad provided irregular service, and the Orange County farmers still had a lot to learn about shipping milk.³⁴ Milk trains often took as long as thirty-six hours to reach the city from Orange County, and then more hours were expended distributing the milk in the city.

Unrefrigerated milk was a problem during cold weather, but it was a disaster in hot weather. Initially, farmers would strain the milk and pour it into tall tin pails; these pails were then carted to the train station, where the milk was transferred to fifty-gallon cans. Later, creameries for handling milk were established within convenient distances along railroad routes. Farmers delivered milk to a creamery, received credit for their delivery, and then returned home. The creamery employees cooled the milk with ice and then shipped it to depots, from which trains carried it to cities.³⁵ By the 1850s, one-third of all New York City milk was brought in from surrounding counties. Although rural cows were not fed on swill, as in urban dairies, there was still no guarantee that the milk shipped into the city from upstate New York was pure and wholesome.

Hygiene was not a high priority during the milking process in either cities or rural areas. Cows’ udders were often caked with mud, and dairymaids and dairymen were not always paragons of cleanliness. Milk cans, pails, and bottles were often unsanitary; when they were washed, it was often with dirty water. The cows themselves were often ill—some had tuberculosis, which could be passed on to those who drank the milk. The practice of adulteration was common. Because milk was sold in bulk and the supplier could not be easily identified, dairy farmers frequently skimmed off the cream and topped up the remaining milk with water. Middlemen also added water to the milk to increase profits; this water often was unsanitary, infected with cholera and other waterborne diseases. In addition, because refrigerators did not yet exist and domestic iceboxes were not yet common, milk often spoiled in the home.

By the late 1860s, medical professionals had a better understanding of nutrition and the importance of milk in the diets of infants and young children. Many acknowledged that the composition and quality of milk could indeed be related to child mortality. Physician Austin Flint’s medical text, A Treatise on the Principles and Practices of Medicine, first published in 1866, concluded that adulterated or poor-quality milk was responsible for the increase in child mortality rates. In response, chemists developed tests to identify adulterated milk.³⁶

Concern about the quality of milk encouraged lawmakers to pass laws against adulteration. Beginning in the 1880s, both cities and states passed ordinances against the sale of watered-down or adulterated milk. In 1888, Newark, New Jersey, became the first American city to require inspections of dairies. Subsequently, other cities began doing the same.³⁷ By 1905, most states had such laws. Milk dealers strongly opposed such legislation, however, and adulteration continued to be widespread. In 1896, New York City required milk purveyors to be licensed, established standards for milk, and hired inspectors to examine milk to make sure that dealers complied with the law. Large milk companies could easily comply with these requirements, but many of their smaller competitors were driven out of business.³⁸ Thus began the consolidation of the dairy industry in the United States.

Although the enforcement of laws increasingly prevented milk adulteration, there was yet another problem to resolve before the safety of the milk supply could be ensured. By the mid-nineteenth century, milk was a suspected culprit in the increased child mortality rates—and not just because of adulteration. However, no one knew exactly what the problem was.

The work of Louis Pasteur, a French scientist, led to an understanding of bacterial contamination of foods, including milk. Cholera had swept through Europe and the United States beginning in the 1830s, but it was not until the 1850s that the water supply was suspected of spreading the disease. During the following decade, Louis Pasteur focused his scientific research on what is now called bacteriology. His experiments demonstrated that beer, wine, and milk soured or spoiled because of microscopic living organisms. His discovery led to the germ theory of disease, which posited that microbes caused illness. Beginning in the 1880s, researchers isolated and identified various microbes that caused disease. First water and then milk were identified as potential transmitters of various infectious diseases, such as typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and diarrhea.³⁹

Pasteur developed a process to kill the bacteria in wine and beer by heating the beverages to temperatures exceeding 158°F. When this process was applied to milk, however, it changed the taste of the milk; pediatricians worried that it also changed the nutritional content. It was finally discovered that heating milk to 145°F degrees for thirty minutes killed microbes without greatly affecting the milk’s flavor or nutritional content. This process (today called pasteurization) was introduced into commercial milk production in 1889. However, cities did not begin to require milk to be pasteurized until 1908, and it would be two decades before pasteurization was widely mandated and enforced. In fact, it was not until 1920 that milk was pasteurized in most large American cities. The adoption of pasteurized milk was accompanied by a steep decline in child mortality rates.⁴⁰

Bovine tuberculosis can also be transmitted to humans through milk. In the 1890s, tests were introduced to determine which cows had the disease.⁴¹ Cities and states soon passed regulations requiring regular testing of cows for tuberculosis and the destruction of animals that had the disease. Many dairy farmers, unexpectedly faced with the loss of a large proportion of their herds, were outraged. But the enforcement of these regulations greatly decreased the incidence of tuberculosis among infants and children.⁴²

The dairy industry made great strides during the late nineteenth century. In 1899, Henry E. Alvord, chief of the dairy division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, proclaimed, “No branch of agriculture has made greater progress than dairying during the nineteenth century…. It is now regarded as among the most progressive and highly developed forms of farming in the United States.”⁴³ Despite such assurances, cookbook authors, such as Mary Ronald, warned mothers in 1899 that milk was “one of the most subtle of disease-carriers. Hence every careful mother, before giving it to her children, subjects it to the sterilizing process, which is simply raising it to the degree of heat which destroys the germs.”⁴⁴

Despite the aforementioned problems, milk consumption continued to increase in the United States. When Walter Gore Marshall, an English traveler, visited America in the 1880s, he reported that milk was very popular, writing, “I have often been filled with wonder and admiration upon seeing the amount of milk an American will drink at one meal, without apparently getting bilious.”⁴⁵

Traditionally, milk was distributed in forty- to eighty-quart cans. Drivers would cart the cans along city streets and then dip the milk from the cans into small milk cans brought by customers. This was not ideal. On rainy days, water poured into the milk cans from the dippers. As a New York milk company executive pointed out, on a rainy day, water went into the milk cans from the drivers’ hands and clothes and “on a dusty day, when all sorts of dust, and especially the dust of horse-dung—which is the principal dust that we have in New York—is flying, the milk is not in good condition, will not keep as well, and there is abundant evidence in the flavor.”⁴⁶ Milk began to be bottled in the 1880s, and this improved cleanliness.

With the introduction of pasteurization, per capita consumption of milk surged.⁴⁷ Americans not only drank milk by the glass but also used it in other ways as well—adding cream to their coffee, moistening their breakfast cereal, guzzling milkshakes, and feeding babies commercial infant formula. Nutritionists praised milk as the “perfect food,” and the dairy industry launched a series of advertising campaigns to promote the health benefits of milk. The robust, happy children pictured in milk advertisements fostered the belief that milk was essential, nutritious, and pure.⁴⁸

Until the mid-twentieth century, milkmen delivered dairy products directly to homes, and children were offered milk during the school day. To encourage children to drink milk at home, sweetened syrups and powders in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry flavors appeared on the market. Lectures, songs, and plays that extolled the virtues of milk were performed in schools in an attempt to urge children to drink more milk, and teaching units developed by dairy councils were employed in the curriculum. School superintendents also required teachers to talk with students about the importance of drinking milk. To promote sales of milk to mothers, dairy councils advised pediatricians to urge mothers to give their children more milk.⁴⁹ Philanthropists, such as Nathan Strauss, owner of Macy’s department store, established “milk stations” where the poor could receive free milk. City governments considered this to be such a good idea that they set up similar operations in communities across America.⁵⁰

As a result of these promotional efforts, per capita milk consumption skyrocketed during the early years of the twentieth century. Homogenized milk arrived in 1927, resulting from a process that prevents the cream for separating from the rest of the milk. Five years later, the milk industry fortified milk with vitamins A and D, which further increased public perception of the healthfulness of milk. By 1950, the average American drank the equivalent of 600 glasses of milk per year. Although this consumption gradually declined in the years that followed—largely because of fear of the fat, calories, and cholesterol in whole milk—low-fat and nonfat milk and dairy products more than made up for the decrease.⁵¹ Milk has regularly been combined with other beverages and ingredients, such as cereal. It is often added to coffee, tea, and chocolate drinks. In the twentieth century, a number of products with milk, such as milkshakes and smoothies, were popularized.

Although the swill dairies closed more than a century ago, controversies have continued to swirl around milk. The most significant concern is with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which is injected into dairy cattle to increase milk production by 5 to 15 percent. The genetically engineered rBGH is secreted into milk and also is found in meat products; some evidence has shown that rBGH may have a detrimental effect on the human body. Based on this evidence, twenty-five European nations have banned rBGH, as have Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. It is still used in the United States, and many milk brands and milk products contain rBGH.⁵²

Others are concerned with the type of milk offered today. Anne Mendelson, author of Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (2008), believes that

taking plain milk and putting it through technological hoops to create an extraordinary diversity of products like fat-free, .5%, 1%, or 2% milk-fat, and supposedly “whole” homogenized milk, with or without other wrinkles like added skim milk solids or reduced lactose content, does nothing of the kind. It has left consumers with a barrage of gimmicky niche-market choices but no access to true (unhomogenized) whole milk.⁵³