this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
255 points (96.7% liked)

Today I Learned

17777 readers
1229 users here now

What did you learn today? Share it with us!

We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.

** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**



Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Pasteurization didn't even arrive in the US until the 1890s so even if these cows had unadulterated milk, it would still be killing massive amounts of infants by feeding it to them.

In a place like New York City, without adequate pasture and no refrigeration in the first place so nessicating literal factory farming, there was no way to market milk that wouldn't be lethal at the time.

It's frankly baffling that anybody was drinking raw milk at all at the time. Usually you'd process it into yogurt or cheese unless you directly lived on a farm or had a breastfeeding problem (which would likely result in the death of an infant). This was known since ancient times. It's why raw milk consumption was mostly associated with peasant farmers for a very long time.

I guess they saw a market of poor rural immigrants who had lived on a farm and decided to swindle them to death.

One thing to keep in mind with this time period and public health, of course is life was still cheap in cities. This is the age of King Cholera.

Edit: As an interesting aside, distiller's grains are nowadays more popular with beef cattle farmers. They're high in protein since they've been spent for making ethanol and so are better for producing muscle than milk. They've also been suggested as a good human supplement since it's got all the good stuff of grain without the sugar, so here comes bachelor chow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

The reason they were raising cows in the city in the first place is the wet grain will spoil if you try to transport it too far from the distillery. They were trying to make a buck on trash.