The twentieth century was marked by a massive expansion in the production and consumption of dairy commodities, particularly liquid milk. Rationalized, scientific dairy farming, based on calculated feeding, careful milk recording, and artificial insemination, has produced cows that are virtually milk machines. The production, manufacturing, and distribution of dairy products has become ever more concentrated, yet the continual growth of dairying has required equally prodigious efforts to find markets for the produce.
Around midcentury, milk was viewed as one of humankind’s most important foods. Advertisers and scientists alike had convinced the public that milk was a supremely healthy, nourishing, even life-giving substance. Its almost mystical whiteness was, for perhaps the only time in its history, matched by its hygienic purity and popular appeal. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, health problems connected with milk drinking were uncovered, and inappropriate Western marketing schemes involving milk were exposed as highly detrimental to infants’ health in developing countries.
In the early twentieth century, however, dairying appeared to have a glorious future and, with ever-expanding urban populations, more and more farmers turned to liquid milk production. For particularly hard-pressed British farmers, dairying had become the cornerstone of agriculture, outstripping the economic return from cereals (Taylor 1974). In the United States, too, dairying was a fallback for farmers on relatively low-yielding land and a common means of diversifying a narrowly based state agriculture (Cochrane 1979; Danbom 1989). Such a recourse to dairying, however, carried with it the danger of overproduction. Several strategies were pursued in an effort to deal with dairy surpluses, but by far the favored means was to promote demand. This had expanded on its own in prosperous times as increasing numbers of people with surplus income were able to extend the scope of their diets to include more fresh meat, vegetables, and dairy produce. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, a concerted effort was made to encourage consumption of dairy goods and, especially in Britain, the drinking of milk. Such an effort, however, required that the commodity be safe.
Experiments with various types of heat treatment had been conducted to extend the keeping properties of milk (Dwork 1987a). The principle had been established by Louis Pasteur in his studies of beer and wine, and bacteriologists and inventors were not slow to follow up on it. Well into the twentieth century, however, there was significant resistance to the heat treatment of milk (Pyke 1968). It was commonly believed that heating destroyed most of milk’s essentially nutritious and health-giving properties, even a vitalist life force (McKee, personal communication).At the same time, there was a school of opinion within the dairy industry that a certain level of natural contamination was necessary to make milk into cheese or butter, and that pasteurized milk was unsuitable for dairy manufacture (Davis 1983). Although the arguments for pasteurization were accepted more readily in the United States than in Britain, debate continued into the 1930s (Meckel 1990). Opponents argued that heat treatment was a technical fix for sloppy procedures and an excuse to produce unclean milk (Davis 1983). Ultimately, however, an increasingly concentrated dairy industry cut through the controversy by routinely pasteurizing all milk it received, which was becoming a necessity because of the large volumes handled and the long distances now covered by milk distributors (Whetham 1976).
A considerable amount of research on nutrition and health was done during the interwar years, particularly in depressed areas of Britain. Experiments by Corry Mann and Boyd Orr on school children showed that groups given milk for a certain period put on more weight, had higher hemoglobin blood counts, and, according to their teachers, demonstrated a greater attentiveness at school; their parents commented that they were also livelier at home (Burnett 1989). In the controversial debates about diet in depressed Britain, milk was an important factor. It was thought that although welfare could not provide a sufficient quantity of food to maintain good health, this goal might be achieved with food supplements, such as milk, needed in fairly small quantities (Webster 1982).
By the 1930s, a culture of dairy consumption was well established in the major dairy manufacturing countries. On the Continent, this primarily involved manufactured butter and, to a lesser extent, cheese; in the United States and in Scandinavia, where liquid milk consumption had a high profile, there was a sound base upon which marketing campaigns could expand demand (Teuteberg 1992). In Britain, although dairying was a major sector of agriculture (and one in which liquid milk was particularly prevalent), people neither ate as much butter as continental Europeans nor drank as much milk as Americans and Scandinavians. Milk was chiefly something to put in tea or give to children, old people, or invalids; indeed, throughout Europe, liquid milk was associated with sickliness or effeminacy (McKee, personal communication).
Thus, one task of the Milk Marketing Boards for England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, set up after the act of 1933, was to overcome prejudices against milk and stimulate demand for the products of an industry now suffering the consequences of overproduction from the decreasing prices that manufacturers were paying for milk. The Milk Marketing Boards (MMBs), as producer organizations, tried to regulate the dairy market like benign monopolists. Farmers were paid a fixed price for their milk, which was in turn sold to dairy product manufacturers at one price and to liquid milk distributors at a higher one, thus evening out the differences in income that depended on farmers’ access (or nonaccess) to a liquid market. As the MMBs undertook to buy all the milk produced by dairy farmers, they had to find markets for it. From the start, a tariff was levied on each gallon to pay for advertising, and a massive campaign was launched, following American models. It stressed the value of milk for health, strength, and beauty, and featured sportsmen and women, manual laborers, and film stars (Jenkins 1970;Whetstone 1970; Baker 1973).
The emphasis on naturalness, whiteness, and purity reflected the contemporary concern for light, space, and healthy living. Milk was marketed to youth through futuristic, American-style milk bars - all chrome, steel, and modernity. The marketing of ice cream was another area in which the British copied from America and the Continent in trying to improve sales (McKee, personal communication). In 1934, drawing on recent discoveries of the vitamin content of milk, the company Cadbury launched a new advertising campaign for its dairy milk chocolate, which was marketed as a food as well as a treat (Othick 1976;Horrocks 1993).
Throughout the 1930s, the virtually unique retail system of doorstep deliveries was established in Britain. Derived from the roundsmen of the eighteenth century who pushed churn-carrying carts through the streets, milk distributors between the wars developed the service of daily deliveries of pint bottles of pasteurized milk to the doorstep (Baker 1973). The MMBs promoted the system and, until recently, the image of the milkman doing his rounds and the bottle on the doorstep were central to the culture of milk in Britain, elevating the milkman to the status of folk hero or comic character. Only with the 1980s or so was there a notable decline in the importance of milkmen, as the greater prevalence of automobiles, refrigerators, and supermarkets have resulted in British consumers joining Americans and other Europeans in buying cartons of milk from stores (Jenkins 1970).
Milk remained important for children during the 1930s, with the Milk Act of 1934 providing subsidized milk for British schoolchildren. The act also continued the practice of baby clinics begun at the turn of the century, which encouraged the habit of drinking milk at an early age (Hurt 1985). Milk for pregnant women and new mothers was also a priority, and the welfare state distributed nourishment for mothers, as well as infants and children, until the program was discontinued in 1972 by the British parliament. The efforts of the MMBs were significant - so much so that as the 1930s came to a close, British people were drinking, on average, a pint of milk more per week than they had in the mid-1920s. Moreover, such a trend continued through the 1950s, when British per capita milk consumption exceeded that of the United States; only Sweden and Ireland had higher levels (Jenkins 1970).
In the last decades of the twentieth century, dairying and dairy products continued to hold an ambiguous status. The market for milk in the major dairy areas of the developed world seemed to be saturated and was even showing signs of diminishing. Consumption peaked sometime during the 1960s and then, depending on place, stabilized or began to shrink (OECD 1976). Nonetheless, dairying has continued to be a significant factor in industrial agriculture throughout the last half of the twentieth century. In Europe, the world’s principal dairy-producing region, milk products accounted for between 11 and 35 percent of total farm sales (Butterwick and Rolfe 1968). Such regular cash income is a lifeline for farmers, but the vast sums paid out in subsidies have helped to swell the milk “lakes” and butter “mountains” of surplus production to the absurd point that butter has been used as a feed for the cows that produced the milk to begin with. Since the interwar period, dairy farming has been maintained only by subsidies and tariffs, with overproduction the unhappy outcome (Johnson 1973; Cannon 1987). Developing countries seem to be repeating the experience of the developed West, with liquid milk sectors emerging to supply urban areas (Kurien 1970; Chang 1977;Mahias 1988).
Although dairy farming has been sustained at considerable economic cost, other, more insidious problems have emerged for milk products. The high food value, which made it so important for infants and children until the mid-twentieth century, lead to more or less serious health problems in the overfed late twentieth century. The high-fat content of milk has been implicated in the modern Western illnesses of obesity, coronary artery disease, and a host of digestive and allergic conditions. As a consequence, there has been a marked trend toward skimmed milk and milk powders, and even toward the exclusion of milk from the diet. Similarly, butter has been a victim of concerns about heart disease and body weight and has been steadily replaced by an increasingly more palatable margarine during the twentieth century (Cannon 1987).
To combat health worries, marketers of milk and milk products have focused on their energy-giving properties and high calcium content. Although milk could not realistically be promoted as a slimming aid, as it had been in the 1930s, the industry was still aiming for a pint per person per day, and advertised milk as a provider of instant vitality (Jenkins 1970). Some dairy marketers in recent years have undermined the ground of critics by deliberately proclaiming the richness and luxury of specialized products, such as fresh cream or ice cream. In an ironic reversal of healthy eating advice, cream has been lauded as “naughty - but nice!” and recent advertisements have been aimed at subverting any associations of ice cream with notions of childhood or purity.
A rather more sinister turn of events, however, has also tarnished the pure-white reputation of milk. In the early 1970s, the issue of inappropriate marketing of canned milk and milk powders among developing-world peoples began to receive public attention. In Yemen, for example, a study showed that dried milk and canned milk, provided as part of general food aid, were being fed to babies. This occurred in a country where Western medicine and high-technology goods had high social cachet and where the natural capacities of women were commonly denigrated. The result of the aid was that women neglected to breast-feed their babies and turned instead to proprietary baby foods or artificial milk. Many of these women were unable to read the instructions and had no access to the necessary sterilizing equipment to keep bottles clean, let alone to an adequate supply of fresh, clean water, with the result being an increase in infant mortality. Although resolutions have been made by dairy manufacturers in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) recommendations not to promote goods that might be used as substitutes for breast milk, contraventions continue (Melrose 1981).
Milk remains a singularly, almost uniquely, nutritious foodstuff, invested with elementally significant cultural and nutritional value. Yet milk has a Janus-faced nature - as it nourishes, so can it harm. Its whiteness evokes purity, but may also conceal corruption. Thus, as a commodity made widely available, milk has sometimes attacked the health it was intended to support and killed infants it was meant to nurture.
Keith Vernon
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World History
