The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk.
The milk from swill-fed cows, produced in dense urban areas and often priced as low as 6 cents per quart, was affordable to most of New York City’s poorest residents.
Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases.
Sound familiar?
The Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as “Butcher Mike”, defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation… Tuomey assumed a central role in the ensuing investigations and … shielded the dairies and turned the hearings into one-sided exercises designed to make dairy critics and established health authorities look ridiculous.
Sound familiar? However people were so enraged that eventually laws passed regardless, and then finally at the federal level.
Most people don’t know about it, but this was basically THE incident that led to the modern FDA. It keeps coming up too. Recently we’ve had the raw milk fad, but also various melamine adulteration incidents (melamine is used to fool modern protein assays, but is basically the 21st century version of swill milk). There’s also occasional “grass roots” efforts to loosen the regulation on milk labeling, ostensibly for plant based milks, but I am suspicious this is astroturfing by the dairy industry because it’s exactly what they’ve been fighting for since the Pure Food and Drug Act passed.
I’d like to specifically highlight the Swill Milk Scandal also.
Sound familiar?
Sound familiar? However people were so enraged that eventually laws passed regardless, and then finally at the federal level.
Most people don’t know about it, but this was basically THE incident that led to the modern FDA. It keeps coming up too. Recently we’ve had the raw milk fad, but also various melamine adulteration incidents (melamine is used to fool modern protein assays, but is basically the 21st century version of swill milk). There’s also occasional “grass roots” efforts to loosen the regulation on milk labeling, ostensibly for plant based milks, but I am suspicious this is astroturfing by the dairy industry because it’s exactly what they’ve been fighting for since the Pure Food and Drug Act passed.