On November 20, 1967, Philadelphia resident Edna Irwin wrote to the President’s Special Assistant on Consumer Affairs, Betty Furness, with a question inspired by the label on her milk carton. “Would you please tell me what the word ‘manufactured’ means in the processing of milk? If milk is a product of cows, how can humans manufacture it?”1 Irwin’s questions cut to the heart of a paradox that this book explores. From the turn of the twentieth century, milk and dairy foods have simultaneously been presented to consumers as pure products of nature and as products remade by human intervention and modern technologies. To make milk readily available as a staple food, dairy farm families, health officials, and food manufacturers have simultaneously stoked human desires for an all-natural product and intervened to ensure milk’s safety and profitability.
Glance at the cartons in the dairy aisle of the nearest supermarket and you will encounter the same phenomenon that perplexed Edna Irwin. On the milk label peddled by Stonyfield Farms, three cows graze on a verdant pasture, backed by a deciduous forest and an undulating hillside. On another, a cow’s wide-eyed face, graced with a wreath of meadow flowers, beckons the thirsty drinker. Store-brand dairies festoon their milk bottles with images of red and green barns at sunrise to proclaim the product’s wholesomeness.2 However, the same labels in the dairy case that flaunt meadow flowers and red barns betray a different history, one of human manipulation of milk between farm and supermarket. Words on the carton indicate that milk is “Grade A,” “pasteurized,” “homogenized,” and “vitamin fortified.” Multicolored plastic caps help purchasers distinguish between whole, 2 percent, 1 percent, and skim milk, while the nutritional fact panel calculates the meaning of such designations in fat grams and calorie content. The cartons carry expiration dates and advise consumers to keep the product refrigerated. These adjectives and numbers convey a different reality than images of happy cows: harnessing cows’ lactation cycles and preparing milk for sale require an extraordinary amount of human intervention. On behalf of pure and plentiful milk, Americans have become as reliant on inspectors to monitor cows for diseases and suppliers to keep milk cool as on idyllic agricultural landscapes. Though often conceived of as a pure product of nature, milk’s nature must be perfected for it to become a healthful human food.
While many Americans buy milk without giving it a second thought, an increasing number approach the act of purchasing food with trepidation. As they assess package labels, consumers consult their taste buds and pocketbooks and consider their nutritional requirements and moral commitments. Despite straightforward recommendations from nutritionists, advertisers, and food reformers, decisions about what to eat are rarely simple. What one eats has become a battleground for environmental politics and the fight against childhood obesity. Perplexed shoppers wonder whether the nutritional or ecological benefits of organic milk justify its premium price. They deliberate whether milk from a local dairy will be fresher or spoil more quickly than ultra-pasteurized milk shipped from a greater distance. They puzzle over how a product sold to add creaminess to coffee can be billed as “fat free.” The paradoxes facing consumers in the dairy aisle point to the broader complexities of seeking health and maintaining a sustainable relationship with nature in modern America.
Milk is not the only food long lauded for its natural origins. Nor is it the only food that reaches the marketplace in an altogether different state from that in which it originated.3 But no other food has so stolidly symbolized natural purity, while simultaneously undergoing dramatic transformations to its material form. How and why has milk been conceptualized as wholly natural, even as it has been churned into manufactured foods like butter and ice cream, and incorporated into products as artificial as Cheez Whiz and wood glue? What ideas and values drove the modification of milk so that it became a staple food for Americans? How have consumers’ changing expectations for milk affected the dairy farmers, cows, and rural landscapes central to milk production? This book explores these questions, connecting the development of dairy farming and changing practices of buying milk products from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. It traces the biological and economic processes through which milk has been produced and consumed, and it chronicles the meanings people made from those processes through the stories of four different dairy products: fluid milk, butter, ice cream, and the leftover waste of dairy processing (whey, skim milk, and milk proteins).
Two forces were especially important in making milk, paradoxically, a modified “natural” food: the food’s role in the diet of children and its capacity to be transformed into a broad array of consumer products. Milk’s status as a staple food for American children stimulated advertisers to stress its “natural” origins and also to modify its biological form. At the turn of the twentieth century, when infant formulas were commonly designated as “artificial” foods, calling cows’ milk “natural” helped assuage parents’ concerns about the shift from breast- to bottle-feeding. At the same time, the material properties of cows’ milk and the biology of cows’ bodies defied its safety and availability for infant feeding. One challenge was the seasonality of milk production. Most cows calved in the spring and thus produced more milk in the spring and summer months than in the fall and winter. Cows needed adequate feed to keep lactating, and as pastures dried up in the fall, their milk production dropped off. Another feature of milk that posed a challenge to its use was its propensity to spoil. If left unrefrigerated, milk sours within forty-eight hours of leaving the cow. Getting fresh milk to faraway residents, then, required sophisticated systems of cooling and quick transportation, in an age before electric refrigerators and automobiles. A final challenge to the use of milk as a food for the masses was that the fluid could serve as a medium of deadly communicable diseases, including typhoid, scarlet fever, and bovine tuberculosis. Children’s vulnerability to milk-borne diseases drove efforts to reform the substance of milk, remake cows’ bodies, and restructure the landscapes from which it came.
If milk’s physical properties posed challenges, they also promised possibilities. Transforming milk into other products allowed farm families and manufacturers to transcend some of the natural obstacles that limited the sale of fluid milk, such as spoilage or seasonality. Few foods were so innately well suited to morph into other products as was milk. After being drawn from the cow, milk could be whipped into ice cream, churned into butter, coagulated into cheese, incorporated into candies and breads, or fed to livestock and reach the market as meat. In time, chemists found ways to alter milk even more dramatically, powdering it for long storage, weaving its proteins into cloth fibers, and channeling its sugars into the manufacture of penicillin. Just as milk drinkers needed inspectors and milk companies to guard milk’s safety, so too did farm families come to rely upon these manufacturers to transform the raw materials of their farm into salable goods.
Even before milk left the countryside, farm people manipulated its nature, altering cows’ bodies and the farm landscape to maximize its production. By bringing greater regularity to cows’ feeding and breeding schedules, for instance, farm families could boost cows’ capacity for lactation. Supplementing bovine diets with silage or fodder crops helped sustain milk production through the fall and winter months. Mating cows with promising udders to potent bulls increased the likelihood of young calves that would produce record quantities of milk. By modernizing their farms, farm people aimed not just for profits, but also to replace some of the most toilsome farm tasks and to bring order to the unpredictable vagaries of nature, like drought, disease, and insect infestation. In the postwar era, they turned to antibiotics to treat infectious diseases in cows’ udders and sprayed pesticides to keep biting flies from irritating their animals. As farm people tweaked the processes of bovine reproduction and lactation, a biological process devised to provide sustenance for young calves simultaneously became bound to a cultural process designed to supply human markets and improve rural comforts.
This book is not the first to discuss the transformation of milk and dairy foods in the twentieth century.4 What this book contends, however, is that the twentieth-century transformation of milk required not simply changes to the food itself, but also to the farms from which milk came. Growing out of works in environmental history, this book links consumption and production, helping to explain how changing consumer practices and retail techniques changed rural nature.5 It examines the passage of new public health laws to improve urban milk safety and also traces the implications of these laws for the human and animal inhabitants of the farm. It details the development of new dairying technologies on farm practices, and the challenges such technologies posed to health officials charged with maintaining a safe and plentiful food supply.
Environmental historians have done much to elucidate the relationship between production and consumption. But 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. Modernizing milk was not simply a process that took place once the white beverage reached the city; rural and urban people alike transformed it.
When historians narrate the ways that farm people specialized and adopted capital-intensive methods to increase production, many depict these processes of industrialization as the driver of environmental ills or as a force that erodes authentic rural communities.7 Such accounts make it difficult to explain why farm people willingly embraced industrialized agriculture. 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. Paying attention to the ways in which they evaluated and understood rural industrialization as it unfolded provides a clearer picture of the human interests served by the manipulation of natural organisms in working landscapes.
To explain why and how dairy farm families understood and reacted to the processes of rural industrialization and assessed its consequences, this book incorporates evidence from farm diaries and records housed in state archives in each of the country’s well-established dairy regions: the upper Midwest, New York and New England, and California. But because dairy farms dotted the landscape throughout the nation, and because the problems facing farmers differed by locality, the book also draws on sources gleaned at state archives outside these regions, such as Virginia and Montana, and from interviews of dairy farm families profiled by the Southern Agriculture Oral History Project. Seen together, the archival records illuminate farm practices on a wide variety of operations from small-scale cream producers to large-scale specialized dairies.
Despite the ubiquity of dairy farmers and the admirable efforts of archivists to preserve their records, many state archives hold only a handful of farm diaries that discuss dairy production. Even states with rich agricultural collections tend to focus on the most well-heeled or politically active farm people. I aimed to draw out the experiences of other kinds of farmers into the story with other sources, but the perspectives of specialized and successful farmers appear more prominently than those who struggled. To round out the economic, technological, and environmental trends in the industry, I have consulted the records of milk and agricultural regulators, agriculture experiment station reports, industry records—such as the records of the Badger Cooperative Creamery Company and national trade magazines, Hoard’s Dairyman and Creamery and Milk Plant Monthly.
One of this book’s aims is to catalogue the environmental history of rural industrialization. A second is to explain the ways that milk, dairy foods, and the cows and farm landscape from which they came involved a delicate interweaving of human technologies with elements of the nonhuman environment. That Rita Irwin had difficulty understanding whether milk was the product of cows or of humans was for good reason: milk and the cows that produced it were a hybrid of nature and culture. They were products of economic and technological innovations, cultural attitudes, human and animal labor, and environmental forces and structures—soil, plants, water, sunshine, and air.
In this, milk, the cow, and the dairy farm were not unique. Over the past forty years, environmental historians have explicated the processes by which spaces have been marked by human intervention and yet maintain natural qualities.8 Richard White’s Organic Machine captures this idea powerfully, revealing how even as people modified the Columbia River to fish and to generate electric power, the river’s flow and salmon’s migratory journeys remained formidable forces.9 Other historians challenge perceptions of the city as apart from nature, demonstrating the centrality of natural resource flows to their development and cataloguing the geomorphological transformations of the very ground and water on which urban environments stand.10 Some historians have even taken environmental history indoors, to examine the natural histories of the factory floor and office space.11 Together, these works make visible and render significant human-environment interactions not simply in seemingly pristine wild places, but in all spaces in which people live, work, and play. Further, many of these works challenge interpretive frameworks once popular in histories of the environment and technology, depicting technological transformation neither as a fall from wilderness nor as a symbol of humanity’s mastery over nature.
More recently, historians have begun to look closely at the blended histories of nature and technology in rural and agricultural spaces.12 The most provocative contribution of these studies is the idea that nature is not wholly apart from technology, but that nature itself constituted technology, particularly as humans manipulated the bodies of animals and plants. Thus, historian Edmund Russell has urged historians to recast Leo Marx’s idea of the “machine” intruding upon “the garden” and instead to explain how the garden (nature) formed the machine (technology).13 This book takes up Russell’s call, paying attention to the ways that the farm landscape, cows’ bodies, and dairy foods were standardized and modified by human action, and yet their natural attributes remained critical to dairy production. Whether through the stories of bacterial cultures used to flavor butter, the cement milk tank whose cooling waters were pumped up by a windmill, or the sturdy, barrel-bodied cow being led to a breeding stall, readers will encounter a host of examples of the ways that the material environment acted and, combined with human intentions, produced forms difficult to classify as either creatures of nature or artifacts of culture.
Furthermore, this book explores the ways Americans conceptualized the relationship between nature and technology by calling attention to the central word used to describe milk: purity. No concept was more important in capturing the mix of biological and human processes necessary to make milk a safe and viable human food than this one. Americans’ ideals about milk purity shifted over time, in tandem with their changing ideas about nature and modernity. Over the twentieth century, Americans identified a different role for nature in purifying milk. At the turn of the century, what imperiled milk’s purity was its nature. Its perishability made it difficult to transport. Its tendency to spoil and carry bacteria threatened those who drank it with digestive and communicable diseases. As pasteurization and refrigeration minimized these risks, the perceived threats to milk shifted from elements of nature, such as bacteria, flies, and spoilage to human technologies, such as pesticide residues and radioactive particles. Nature, once conceived of as the primary threat to milk’s purity, was envisioned by postwar Americans as the food’s primary source of purity. Ironically, as Americans revised what constituted “pure” milk, the very technologies that once promised to protect milk from the hazards of nature, such as antibiotics or pesticides, became threats to milk’s purity themselves.
Americans’ turn to nature as the source for milk’s purity was itself a modern phenomenon. Only when consumers came to believe that the food on which their lives depended was somehow unnatural and alienating could Americans seek to get back to nature through their diets. The kind of milk Americans put on their tables reflected their cultural expectations for purity and convenience as much as their physical needs for sustenance.
Finally, this book investigates the ways in which changing consumer practices and consumer culture transformed the physical spaces of dairy farms and perceptions about them. Although the field of environmental history has traditionally done more to elucidate how the activities of economic producers (like farmers, anglers, or miners) remake the landscape than those of consumers, in recent years, environmental historians have begun to think more about the effects of consumer behavior on the environment.14 These creative studies have charted the changing economic and cultural processes through which plants and animals became desired commodities, and documented the ways that the food industry and advertisers transformed consumers’ views of nature.15
Although concerns about “the consumer” came to have increasing influence in twentieth-century politics, and the collective actions of consumers fundamentally altered the physical environment, the actions of individual consumers can be difficult to track.16 To get at how and why consumers purchased dairy foods and the meanings they made from those transactions, I have relied upon the papers of consumer organizations, government bodies, surveys of consumer behavior conducted by dairy organizations, cost-of-living surveys, and women’s magazines and advertisements. It is easier to read from these documents what health officials and dairy manufacturers believed consumers needed and desired than how consumers expressed these needs and desires themselves. My aim in this book, then, is less to uncover the motivations of individual purchasers of milk, butter, ice cream, or cheese than it is to explain physical settings, economic structures, and political mechanisms through which those purchases took place and became meaningful. As historian Ruth Oldenziel explains, industry, state agencies, trade unions, and other groups mediated the ways that consumers exerted power in the marketplace.17
New practices of food retail and distribution altered the way that dairy consumers and producers made decisions. Over the course of the twentieth century, strategies of mass retailing, state policies, and expert recommendations came to play a greater role in shaping actions on the dairy farm and in the grocery aisle alike. The development of chain stores, and later supermarket retailers, altered the very form by which foods like butter and ice cream reached consumers and encouraged the development of quality standards on the farm. State agencies defined milk purity and legitimized some dietary practices in ways that privileged some foods and farming practices and denounced others. Farm people and consumers often reacted to these processes. Farmers who relied heavily on butter sales protested when government nutritionists presented margarine as a nutritious food. Consumers argued for more detailed labels on ice cream and other manufactured dairy foods. That the president had a Special Assistant on Consumer Affairs to whom Edna Irwin could address her puzzlement over milk is indicative of these broader changes.
The structures and institutions of consumer society did not simply alter how Americans understood food; they also reframed how consumers came to know nature. As women shifted from breast to bottle, the act of ingesting milk remained an embodied experience. People tasted the cool, creamy fluid on their tongues and sniffed off-flavors in a bottle that had soured. But with the development of mass consumer society and scientific theories about milk’s role in disease transmission, consumers began to consider elements difficult to ascertain from merely seeing, tasting, or smelling, such as bacterial counts, vitamin content, or parts per million of pesticide residues, as they assessed milk’s healthfulness. After World War II, when concerns about milk safety began to focus on the bioaccumulation of pesticide residues and strontium-90, farm families altered cows’ diets and crop-raising practices to minimize cows’ exposure. Employees of state and municipal health departments and federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took on an ever-more important role in reassuring milk drinkers of the product’s freshness and safety. Herein lay the impetus for supermarket milk cartons laden with nutritional facts and words like “Grade A pasteurized” inscribed on their labels.18
Over the course of the twentieth century, consumers revised their vision of the appropriate way to achieve milk purity. In the Progressive Era, consumers insisted on the establishment of local, state, and federal standards for food purity. Purchasers of dairy foods became ever-more reliant on the state as arbiter of food’s wholesomeness during the interwar period, pushing state agencies to guard the safety of manufactured dairy foods as well as fluid milk. By the 1920s and 1930s, consumers assessed the labels, looking favorably on phrases like “USDA approved.” After World War II, consumers increasingly relied on federal standards crafted in Congress and upheld by the FDA, to ensure milk’s purity as it crossed state lines. Since the 1970s, consumers’ trust in the state as an arbiter of food safety has declined. Still seeing themselves as part of a “consumer movement,” many milk and dairy purchasers in recent times reject state inspection and seek to monitor food safety themselves. Consumers’ push for transparent measures of food’s contents and for a role in defining food safety constituted an important way of adjusting to the products of modern agriculture.
To make milk pure and modern required changes to the urban milk supply and dairying landscape. It involved the actions of public health officers and delivery truck drivers, farm families and food chemists, lawmakers and consumer activists, pediatricians and parents, bacterial cultures and dairy cows. To understand milk’s twentieth-century transformation requires traversing the commodity chain, seeing the relationships between changes in consumer choices and farm practice. What emerges from such a history is not a simple story about milk, but a history of the evolution of consumer society, the development of governance over food and agriculture, the role of industrial technologies in organizing modern life, and the ways in which these processes engendered new ways of understanding nature.
Concern about food purity is not merely a historical phenomenon. Despite efforts by farm families, food processors, and state regulators to protect food safety, impurities continue to plague the nation’s food supply—from spinach laced with E. coli to eggs contaminated with salmonella. Worried by disease outbreaks and increasingly distant from the farm, many Americans have, in recent years, taken renewed interest in learning more about the food system on which their lives depend. Their curiosity has turned books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle into best-selling tomes.19
Contemporary food writers such as Pollan and Kingsolver tend to characterize the food system as one of multiple paths: one of modern industrial agribusiness and another in which farming takes place “close to nature.” The history of milk, though, reveals that the values and practices guiding industrial agribusiness and small-scale farming have not always been separate and distinct. Whether they fertilize fields with manure or synthetic fertilizers, farm families feel the forces of nature acutely when droughts or insect pests threatened to wipe out a hay crop. When raw milk devotees travel hundreds of miles seeking an unpasteurized product, their quest is just as embedded in the technological system and complex calculus of consumer demand that brings pasteurized milk to the nearby supermarket.
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.