'Embalmed Milk' and Other Challenges Prompting the Early 20th Century Food Laws

An interesting read by Deborah Blum on tainted milk before the days of pasteurization and the Pure Food Laws.  At the turn of the 20th century, milk could be found loaded with bacteria, watered down using contaminated water, plaster dust, or pureed calf brains, or have formaldehyde added as a preservative.

Undark.org
https://undark.org/article/battling-scourge-embalmed-milk/
Battling the Scourge of ‘Embalmed Milk’
How an obscure Indiana public health official pioneered the campaign against tainted dairy products at the turn of the 20th century.
10.05.2018 / By Deborah Blum



At the turn of the 20th century, Indiana was widely hailed as a national leader in public health issues. This was almost entirely due to the work of two unusually outspoken scientists.

One was Harvey Washington Wiley, a one-time chemistry professor at Purdue University who had become chief chemist at the federal Department of Agriculture and the country’s leading crusader for food safety. The other was John Newell Hurty, Indiana’s chief public health officer, a sharp-tongued, hygiene-focused — cleanliness “is godliness” — official who was relentlessly determined to reduce disease rates in his home state.

"..... he and many of his colleagues found that milk — messily adulterated, either teeming with bacteria or preserved with toxic compounds — posed a particularly daunting challenge.

"....dairy producers thinned milk with water (sometimes containing a little gelatin), and recolored the resulting bluish-gray liquid with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust."

"They also faked the look of rich cream by using a yellowish layer of pureed calf brains. As a historian of the Indiana health department wrote: “People could not be induced to eat brain sandwiches in [a] sufficient amount to use all the brains, and so a new market was devised.” 

"Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals. "