Today I Learned

Libertarians will tell you that even this isn’t cause for government regulation and that the market will weed out the bad businesses by not buying their product.

That’s because the market is babies and they’d all be dead, Jim!

My God. That is absolutely vile, on many different levels.

Sooo... just capitalism working as designed.

Humans, man. We really are the worst plague this planet has ever seen.

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.

So phisticated

There is a behind the bastard episode where they talk about milk. I think the one aboud FDA. It's really disgusting.

Frank Leslie's exposé caused widespread public outrage and local politicians were strongly pressured to punish and regulate the distillery-dairies, which were formally complained to be "swill milk nuisance".[9] The Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as "Butcher Mike", defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper staked out distillery owner Bradish Johnson's mansion at 21st and Broadway, and reported that in the midst of the investigation, Tuomey was observed making late night visits.

Tuomey assumed a central role in the ensuing investigations, and, with fellow Aldermen E. Harrison Reed and William Tucker, shielded the dairies and turned the hearings into one-sided exercises designed to make dairy critics and established health authorities look ridiculous, even going to the extent of arguing that swill milk was actually as good or better for children than regular milk.[9] With Reed and others, Tuomey successfully blocked any serious inquiry into the dairies and stymied calls for reform. The Board of Health exonerated the distillers, but public outcry led to the passage of the first food safety laws in the form of milk regulations in 1862.[10]

Tuomey became known for his attempts to block the new regulations, and earned the new moniker "Swill Milk" Tuomey.[11] In addition to Tuomey's assistance in clearing up the unclean image milk developed, Robert Milham Hartley, a social reformist, aided in the restoration of milk being a nutritional and safe-to-drink beverage. During the mid to late nineteenth century, Hartley utilized Biblical references in his essays to appeal to the urban community. He asserted that universal milk consumption could help alleviate society's "sins", poverty, and alcohol consumption.

Dang so they had soulless knuckle-dragging politicians then too

An thats why I support anti speciesism.

Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.

Got Swill?

Were they drunk AF?