The vast majority of milk consumed in the world today is pasteurized, even though it is less nutritious after pasteurization and it’s harder to digest. So why do we pasteurize? To answer that question, we will time travel to New York in the 1890s. Let’s rediscover the controversies of milk as we now know it (pasteurized) and the stories of the men who made it—the communist Abraham Jacobi, the entrepreneur Nathan Straus, and educator Henri L. Coit.
Heated Milk Controversies
In the time of Jacobi, Straus, and Coit, people considered heated pasteurized milk a poor alternative to fresh milk from healthy cows. Pediatrics correlated pasteurized milk with scurvy and rickets well into the 1920s, when pasteurization was already common practice.
Consumers mistrusted the heated stuff, because it had no cream layer. A thick cream layer let the consumer know the milk was of high quality. A thin cream layer signaled that the milk could be diluted or less nutritious. With pasteurization, consumers were suddenly dependent on the claims of milk-sellers concerning the milk quality and safety. The first pasteurized milk was sold cheaply or given for free to get people to drink it.
Government regulators saw milk pasteurization as an alternative to educating the whole dairy industry to follow safe practices and an alternative to combating the common practice of milk dilution. Milk was often diluted with unsanitary water. New York alone depended on thousands of milk farms delivering to the rapidly expanding city. Clearly, it was much easier and cheaper to regulate a few pasteurization stations.
Some credit pasteurization with a significant drop in child mortality rates of 24.6 percent in New York in the 1880s, according to medical information website Neontology on the Web, run by Ray Duncan, MD.
Wholesalers welcomed the improved shelf-life and profitability of pasteurized milk over the hassle of fresh milk, which turns sour in a few days.
Pediatrician and Revolutionist Jacobi
