Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900

Product Description

Americans have never been more concerned about their food’s purity. The organic trade association claims that three-quarters of all consumers buy organic foods each year, spending billions of dollars

“Dairy farm families, health officials, and food manufacturers have simultaneously stoked human desires for an all-natural product and intervened to ensure milk’s safety and profitability,” writes Kendra Smith-Howard. In
Pure and Modern Milk, she tells the history of a nearly universal consumer
product, and sheds light on America’s food industry. Today, she notes, milk reaches supermarkets in an entirely different state than it had at its creation. Cows march into milking parlors, where tubes are attached to their teats, and the product of their lactation is mechanically pumped into tanks.
Enormous, expensive machines pasteurize it, fortify it with vitamins, remove fat, and store it at government-regulated temperatures. It reaches consumers in a host of forms: as fluid milk, butter, ice cream, and in apparently non-dairy foods such as whey solids or milk proteins. Smith-Howard
examines the cultural, political, and social context, discussing the attempts to reform the production and distribution of this once-perilous product in the Progressive Era, the history of butter between the world wars, dairy waste at mid-century, and the postwar landscape of mass production. She
asks how milk could be conceptualized as a “natural” product, even as it has been incorporated into Cheez Whiz and wood glue. And she shows how consumer’s changing expectations have had repercussions back down the chain, affecting farmers, cows, and rural landscapes.

A groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history, this book reveals the complexity and challenges of humanity’s dependence on other species.

Review

“Smith-Howard’s book is a must-read for everyone interested in the transformations of rural economies, especially when it comes to a view from the farm” — Beat Bächi, Institut für Medizingeschichte, Universität Bern,
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von

“Smith-Howard’s archival research for this book, truly prodigious, brings forth fascinating new evidence, particularly from dairy farm organizations and individuals from across diverse regions, revealing complex strategies in response to commands from the state, agricultural science, and modernizing
trends in the industry, including refreshingly candid personal recollections regarding methods of work and managing livestock…
Pure and Modern Milk is an exciting, groundbreaking scholarly achievement, full of important revelations and nuanced insights. By attending to the environment, Smith-Howard
has put the farm back at the center of food history.”–Deborah Valenze,
Environmental History

“Smith-Howard gives us the best examination yet of why people in rural environments, particularly farmers, willingly embraced industrial agriculture….Smith-Howard’s meticulous attention to evidence and nuance in her case studies should be applauded…”–
Journal of American History

“Smith-Howard succeeds as both historian and storyteller in developing an essential narrative about American industrialization and how both nature and technology have been romanticized. Her coherent and complex view of the 20th century is both informative and enjoyable.”–
Publishers Weekly, starred
review

“From cream and cheese to milk bottled, dried and lurking in everything from cake to glue, ‘dairy’ is ubiquitous. Yet getting the highly perishable, machine-pumped product of lactating cows to consumers has been a hugely complex technological, cultural and political saga. Kendra Smith-Howard deftly
traces that trajectory in the United States since 1900.”–
Nature

“As a former dairy technologist in three countries and after spending 30 years in university teaching and research in dairy science, this reviewer thought he had read all of the dozens of books that frame the edifice of dairy science. But in
Pure and Modern Milk,