The tripartite revolution of industrialization, urbanization, and the commercialization and increasing productivity of agriculture had dramatic consequences for food production and consumption. Enough food was produced to fuel enormous population growth, with increasing proportions of that population ceasing to be agriculturally productive. Urban dwellers, as net food consumers, depended on food being brought in from producing areas. Throughout the nineteenth century, this took place not only on a national but an international scale, until most parts of the world became integrated into a global network of food trade, principally geared toward feeding Europe. Thus, surplus dairy producers sent huge quantities of cheese and butter, increasingly manufactured in factories, to northern Europe.
At the same time, there was a growing demand for liquid milk in urban areas, and nearby dairy producers began to concentrate on its supply, partially to offset the competition in manufactured products. Yet, accompanying this expansion of production was an increasing consumer concern about the quality of the milk supply, particularly toward the end of the nineteenth century, when milk was implicated in questions of infant mortality. In the elaboration of a range of measures to control problems of milk adulteration and unhygienic procedures, dairying was completely transformed into a highly mechanized manufacturing and distribution activity, which steadily undermined its traditionally feminine nature. Such a pattern recurred throughout the nineteenth-century developing world - commercial, industrial dairying geared toward a manufactured dairy market, paralleled by the development of liquid milk production in urban areas, which, in turn, gave rise to concern about milk quality.
During the eighteenth century, northern European agriculture became much more productive, with novel crop rotation techniques, new machinery, better land management, and the more intensive methods achieved with enclosure. Dairying benefited from greater attention to fodder crops, which allowed cows to be fed more adequately throughout the winter. Yields still fell during winter months, but more cows survived, and yields quickly recovered with the spring grass (Fussell 1966). Thus, the potential arose for year-round dairying.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, increasing food production was supplying not only a steadily growing rural population but also, in Britain, an explosive increase in urban populations. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the sources of Britain’s wealth gradually shifted from agriculture and the landed estates toward manufacturing and indus-try. This was symbolized by the repeal in 1846 of the Corn Laws, which saw landed and agricultural interests supplanted by the demands of industry for free trade. Yet, as Britain ceased to be agriculturally self-sufficient, free traders had to cater not only to the requirements of industry but also to the need for imported foodstuffs to feed urban industrial workers (Burnett 1989).
Across the globe, producers of agricultural surplus geared up to meet this need (Offer 1989). Australia and New Zealand sent butter and meat to British markets; Ireland and Denmark developed dairying to meet British demand. Danish farmers, recognizing the likely requirements of their rapidly urbanizing neighbor across the North Sea, organized in cooperatives to develop highly efficient methods for producing butter and bacon. In the process, Denmark’s national economy became modernized and export driven, yet still based on agriculture (Murray 1977; Keillor 1993).
Ireland had been characterized by very high dairy production and consumption patterns from medieval times, although by the eighteenth century, the continued reliance on dairy foods may be seen as a mark of poverty. As was the case in Denmark, nineteenth-century Irish dairying became more commercialized to supply Ireland’s urbanized neighbor, though at the expense of an important source of animal food for its own consumption (O’Grada 1977; Cullen 1992).
In the United States, between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, westward expansion had brought new, high-yielding agricultural lands into production. By midcentury, cheese was being shipped down the Erie Canal from upstate New York. But across the vast open spaces of North America, rail transport was the key to the development of dairying. Also crucial was the hand cream separator (Cochrane 1979), which allowed even small farmers to cream off the butterfat that railroads could then take to regional factories to be made into cheese and butter. Industrial methods for manufacturing these products spread across the northeastern and north central states (Lampard 1963; Cochrane 1979). By the second half of the nineteenth century, production and transportation were such that cheese manufactured in the United States or Canada, and butter made in New Zealand, could reach British markets at lower prices than those required by British farmers (Burnett 1989). In addition, an outbreak of rinderpest in England during the 1860s wiped out most of the urban cows, which helped North American dairy products gain a prominent place in British markets (Fussell 1966).
As in the United States, railways in Great Britain were fundamental in enhancing the importance of liquid milk as a beverage. From the 1840s, liquid milk could be brought from the countryside to the towns and sold before it became sour. The perishability of milk had always restricted its scope as a drink. But speed, together with the development of coolers and refrigerated railway cars, increased its viability, and in all areas within reach of an urban center, dairying was increasingly concerned with liquid milk supply. By the second half of the nineteenth century, milk was being carried to London from as far away as Derbyshire, and Lancashire and Cheshire emerged as major dairy counties to supply the conurbations of Liverpool, Manchester, and Stoke (Whetham 1964; Taylor 1974, 1976, 1987). Effectively, the whole of Britain could now be regarded as an urban area, which had an enormous demand for milk.
In North America, the manufacturing of dairy products was concentrated in the lake states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, whereas liquid milk to supply major urban areas was produced in the northeastern and Atlantic seaboard states (Lampard 1963; Cochrane 1979). Thus, better communications and large-scale manufacturing prompted a functional division in dairying. Although manufactured goods, such as cheese, could be carried long distances to urban markets more cheaply than those of a small, local producer, dairying in urban areas enjoyed a protected market for liquid milk that was not susceptible to more distant or foreign competition.
In England, toward the end of the nineteenth century, liquid milk came to be seen almost as an agricultural panacea, and not just for hard-pressed dairy farmers in urban areas. During the great depression of English farming from the mid-1870s to the 1890s, when the full economic impact of imported food began to be felt, farmers increasingly turned to the naturally protected production of liquid milk. More acres reverted to pasture, which was condemned by commentators bemoaning the apparent decline of cereal-based farming, but liquid milk production provided farmers with a welcome respite from foreign competition and helped alleviate the agricultural slump, furnishing a regular cash income throughout the year, helping to clear debts, and bringing some semblance of profitability (Taylor 1974, 1987).
Although few other nations relied so heavily on imports as Britain, by the end of the century, farmers in many countries were feeling the effects of competition in the international food market. In the United States, grain farmers of the mid-nineteenth century found themselves threatened by even higher-yielding lands opening up in the west and sought to diversify, notably into dairying. Delegates were sent from the north central states to study Danish methods, and many Danes forged new careers in the United States, ultimately to the consternation of the Danish government, which feared rivalry for the British market (Keillor 1993). State agricultural colleges and the new experiment stations also sought to improve upon the (popularly perceived) low standards of American dairying. Scientific “book farming" popular with progressives, found an ideal outlet in dairying, with rational and efficient farming methods based on calculated feeding plans, milk recording schemes, and analyses of butterfat content (Johnson 1971; Peagram 1991). Dairying was becoming self-consciously modern.
Some of the grain states, where there has been an overreliance on single crops, saw dairying as a useful means of diversifying. The North Dakota agricultural experiment station, for example, tried in the early twentieth century to offset the state’s reliance on spring wheat by promoting dairying. Although for a while North Dakota did become a notable butter producer, it seems that cereal farmers did not adjust happily to the rather different demands of dairy farming (Danbom 1989).
Ultimately, the general pattern of dairying common to urbanizing countries was established in the United States. Liquid milk was the mainstay of farmers with access to urban markets, and the manufacture of other dairy products was concentrated in the north central states (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) on the principal rail routes to the East (Haystead and File 1955;Lampard 1963; Cochrane 1979).
The growing industrialization of dairying and the manufacture of dairy products steadily eroded the femininity of dairying. Butter production, especially, had remained an essentially female activity throughout most of the nineteenth century, occupying an important role not only in the domestic economy but also in the wider social relations and status of women in farming communities. Household manufacture of milk products, however, was increasingly replaced by the transportation of milk to railways and factories and by industrial production (all male spheres of activity), and a marked decline occurred in the number of women involved in dairying. In a typically paradoxical process, the more natural, feminine state of liquid milk gained greater prominence, but only through the intervention of mechanical artifacts operated by men. As dairying left the household, an important element of rural female employment, skill, and authority went with it (Cohen 1984; Osternd 1988; Nurnally 1989; Bourke 1990;Valenze 1991).
Also embattled were milk consumers, increasingly concentrated in urban centers, subject to the vagaries of transport systems for their food supply, and suffering the appalling conditions of massive urban expansion. Many people living in towns simply did not have enough to eat; what was available was of indifferent to abominable quality and, frequently, heavily adulterated. Milk and dairy products were part of the diet, but their supply was highly uncertain. The principal sources were urban milk shops, with cowsheds that provoked bitter condemnation from health reformers. Such places were notorious for squalid conditions, with the cows fed on slops and refuse (frequently the spent grain from distilleries), and disease rife among them (Okun 1986; Burnett 1989). Moreover, milk, whether from urban shops or from roundsmen coming in from the country, was routinely adulterated in the mid-nineteenth century (Atkins 1992).Arthur Hill Hassall, investigating for the Lancet in the early 1850s, found that milk was diluted with from 10 to 50 percent water, with that water often from polluted wells and springs (Burnett 1989).
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, urban diets in Britain improved noticeably, both in quantity and quality. This was primarily a result of the rise in real wages as general economic prosperity began to percolate down the social strata, but it was also because of an increasing availability of cheap imported food. Food had always been the principal item of expenditure for urban workers, and so any extra real income was invariably spent on food first, both to extend the variety of the diet and to obtain greater quantities. Thus, from the 1890s, more meat, eggs, dairy produce, and fresh vegetables appeared on the tables of the urban working classes (Oddy and Miller 1976,1985).
The quality of food was also addressed in a more effective fashion. During decades of revelations by such individuals as Frederick Accum about the extent of food adulteration, a series of food purity laws were introduced in Britain. These were initially rather ineffective, but the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act, and the Public Health Act of the same year, began to bring about real improvements in the basic quality of foods (Burnett 1989). This story was a familiar one in most major urban nations during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the United States, for example, reformers (also stimulated by Accum) launched investigations and turned up their own evidence of food adulteration. Effective legislation was introduced by cities and states by the end of the century, culminating in the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act (Okun 1986).
Urban populations probably benefited from the volumes of liquid milk brought in by the railways, but fresh milk still became less than fresh very quickly, and although gross adulterants were being eliminated, the problem of the keeping properties of milk remained. Dairy-producing countries had sought means of preserving milk throughout the nineteenth century. During the 1850s, developments in condensing techniques, especially by the. American Gail Borden, brought about the formation, in 1865, of the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company, which soon had factories across Europe. Tinned milk consumption rose rapidly after 1870, and in the early twentieth century, several methods for making dried milk encouraged the emergence of a powdered-milk industry. In New Zealand, a dairy exporter developed the new Just-Hatmaker process of drying milk and this, in turn, gave birth to the giant corporation Glaxo (Davenport-Hines and Slinn 1992). In England, the pharmaceutical company Allen and Hanbury’s used a method of ovendrying evaporated milk (Tweedale 1990). Condensed and powdered milk were both popular, as they kept longer than fresh milk; moreover, tinned milk could be diluted more or less heavily according to the vicissitudes of the family economy.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, adult diets had improved (although women remained less fed well into the new century), and the worst excesses of urban squalor, poverty, and deprivation were being addressed. These improvements of diet, sanitation, and housing were reflected in the general falling of mortality rates (McKeown 1969), but infant mortality rates remained stubbornly high. The problem was particularly noticeable in France (which also had a declining birth rate) after 1870 and in Britain during the 1890s. Yet concern for high infant mortality was also expressed in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. The underlying issue was the same: With an increasingly tense international situation brought on by the formation of rival power blocks in Europe and the imperial maneuverings by the United States, greater significance was accorded to the health of a nation’s people. Populations began to be seen as national assets, and both their sizes and quality were viewed as of national political, economic, and military importance. Attention was focused on the health of urban populations and, particularly, the health of infants who would be the soldiers, workers, and mothers of the future.
Beginning in France in the 1890s, governments, charities, and local authorities campaigned to promote breast feeding, primarily, but also to provide subsidized milk to mothers with new children (Fildes, Marks, and Marland 1992).There were also increasing demands to improve further the hygiene of the dairy industry and milk supply. Bacteriologists had been studying the flora of milk to investigate its keeping properties and the transmission of infectious disease from animals to humans, with special attention to tuberculosis (TB) and the question of whether bovine TB could be passed to infants in milk. In Britain, the problem was thoroughly examined in a series of royal commissions on TB that effectively created a semipermanent body of bacteriologists investigating questions of milk and meat hygiene. In 1914, the Milk and Dairies Act was passed to prevent the sale of milk from tuberculous cows, while giving local authorities considerable powers of inspection (Bryder 1988; Smith 1988; Atkins 1992).
Similar measures were pursued in many other countries. In Australia, milk institutes were established in Brisbane and Melbourne in 1908 to ensure clean milk supplies (Mein Smith 1992). The same year saw the Canadian Medical Association devise a system of standards for milk hygiene in the dairy industry, which was implemented by local authorities. Toronto and Hamilton established pure milk depots before
World War I (Comacchio 1992). Free or subsidized milk was available in the Netherlands from Gouttes de lait - modeled closely on the pioneering French milk depots (Marland 1992). In American cities, the emphasis was more on ensuring the quality of milk supplies than on providing subsidized milk, and schemes for regulating standards were devised by many cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Memphis, and the state of Illinois, with particular emphasis on eradicating TB and promoting the pasteurization of milk (Helper 1986; Shoemaker 1986; Meckel 1990;Peagram 1991).
Such attention given to infant welfare was incorporated into the wider schemes of social welfare developing in the early twentieth century (Lewis 1993). Enthusiasm for the provision of free milk seems to have been relatively short-lived and was replaced with an increasing emphasis on the education of mothers on matters of child care and good housekeeping. But the public-health principles underlying campaigns for clean milk persisted, and the ever-increasing volumes of liquid milk coming into the towns were carefully scrutinized.
World History
