TIL about "Swill milk" where cows were fed distillery waste causing cow teeth rot and disease. It was also adulterated with raw eggs, burn sugar, etc. Swill milk lead to over 8,000 infant's deaths
TIL about "Swill milk" where cows were fed distillery waste causing cow teeth rot and disease. It was also adulterated with raw eggs, burn sugar, etc. Swill milk lead to over 8,000 infant's deaths
I'm glad that nowadays we mistreat animals and let them live horrific lives in their own waste in a way that doesn't kill human babies specifically.
But that breeds diseases like avian flu and swine flu that will eventually kill loads of humans when they become human transmissible. It's all just a bit delayed this time.
Thank vegans for that. Progress.
Surely the free market solved this, right? /s
This sort of thing still happens
I've had a chat with a farmer in Australia where they were feeding dariy cows boiled sweets (He got access to some sort container load of factory seconds, still with the plastic on, farmer wasn't going to remove the plastic from millions of boiled lollies)
Yep, for a source for others about the plastic bit
The system that strips off the plastic wrappings can’t capture it all, and so in the UK a limit of 0.15% of plastic is allowed by the Food Standards Agency. The official EU level for plastic permitted in animal feed is zero although in reality many other countries operate within the same 0.15% limit.
Yikes, that's disgusting on so many levels, from the animal torture to the poisoning babies to the evil politician who tried to cover it up.
Tbf, I've read the wiki article and couldn't see any consequences for those doing this. It remained legal, no one was punished, they even succeeded in cleaning the image of milk so… it seems that the evil politician succeeded?
Yes, they got away with it. It remained legal for another 4 years, but the investigative journalism reached so many people that the public eventually won some laws:
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.
It was grinding up scabies infested sheep into bonemeal then feeding to cows that caused the bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) in the UK in the late 80s
Not scabies (caused by tiny, parasitic bugs), but scrapie. Scrapie is the sheep form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and it's caused by an abnormal protein in the brain--nothing to do with parasites. The misshapen protein can be found in the brain and spinal cord, and it turns out that grinding animals up wholesale to turn them into meat and bone meal can spread those abnormal proteins to the animals eating their ground up cousins.
Similar illnesses are found in other animals like elk (chronic wasting disease) and humans (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru). If I remember right, spongiform encephalopathies are usually rare conditions that come from gene mutations. That's why BSE (sensationalized as "mad cow disease") made headlines 30-40 years ago--these sick sheep and cows were showing up in unexpected numbers because of consuming tainted feed, and there was a lot of uncertainty around whether or not humans could develop CJD from eating tainted beef and mutton. It's really, really unlikely to happen--the last I'd read about it, the people who were confirmed to have contracted CJD all had a super uncommon genetic quirk that made their normal proteins less able to maintain their healthy shape and increased their risk for disease.
Not scabies (caused by tiny, parasitic bugs), but scrapie.
Bah.... That's my phone autocorrect and not proofreading my comment before posting!
Luckily we learned from our mistakes and began filling milk with formaldehyde: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-fight-bacteria-ridden-milk-embalming-fluid-180970473/
cw: milk atrocities-
spoiler
But there were other factors besides risky strains of bacteria that made 19th century milk untrustworthy. The worst of these were the many tricks that dairymen used to increase their profits. Far too often, not only in Indiana but nationwide, 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.”
“Surprisingly enough,’’ he added, “it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee.”
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.
Woo boy that's disgusting.
That's the kind of fun historical fact I like reading about, much like the stuff in the horrible histories books.
Yeah, I think most of the infant deaths had more to do with unpasteurized milk adulterated with raw eggs and not the cow's diet.
Edit: 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).
I guess they saw a market of poor rural immigrants who had lived on a farm and decided to swindle them to death.
Swill Milk would be a sick Grincore band name
I'm pretty sure some of my ex roommates would be completely fine with this.