A Brief History of Milk

Bossie, genus Bos, a hollow horned bovine ruminant, well-fed and well-bred, was America’s first factory, producing a surplus of fertilizer, leather, power, and most importantly, milk: “Nature’s most nearly perfect food.” In the 19th century and well into the twentieth, milk trains delivered fresh raw milk and uncommonly good nutrition in ice-cooled cars to growing urban northeastern markets.
Soon, however, as more raw milk was pooled, poured and pumped, risk of contamination and disease increased dramatically. For three decades well into the 20th century the nation struggled with “the Milk Problem” before arriving at a rational public policy: Pasteurization, the greatest public health measure of the 20th century in U.S. Today, Americans may still buy a safe, wholesome food at a fair price anywhere.
A portion of the narrative line unfolds along the bank of the Connecticut River Valley where the Williams family has farmed since 1775, and where a family diary penned in 1865 launched the family onto the vanguard of herd improvement and vast gains in productivity based on the modern understanding of genetics. The story of milk pricing reveals how farmers sacrificed the ability to set the price for their product in return for market stability.
The final three chapters John Keats and a dairy maid reveal another role of cows in public health; cows horn into medical history as revealed in a new pun on the birth of Shakespeare's MacDuff, and finally, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Dr Samuel Johnson describe “winter butter”.