That Tasty New Gilded Age Milk

As I’ve said again and again, the policy positions of the Trump administration are to return the U.S. to the Gilded Age, repealing the 20th century. Maybe it would help if Americans stopped watching the Nazi documentaries and remember that their own country is at fault for many of the problems in the world and that to understand what is happening in the U.S. today, focusing on our own history makes a lot more sense. For example, milk:

Staffing issues at the Food and Drug Administration have led to the suspension of a program that ensures the quality of milk and other dairy products. According to Reuters, the agency announced the suspension in an internal email sent to employees Monday and viewed by the news agency.

Starting Monday, the FDA suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade “A” raw milk and finished products. Grade “A” is given to products that meet the highest sanitary standards.

The decision to suspend the program came after the FDA’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory said it “is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis.” That center is part of the FDA division that oversees food safety, according to Reuters.

By destroying the government capacity to keep the milk supply safe, what kind of nation are we returning to? This one:

At the turn of the 20th century, Indiana was widely hailed as a national leader in public health issues. This was almost entirely due to the work of two unusually outspoken scientists.

One was Harvey Washington Wiley, a one-time chemistry professor at Purdue University who had become chief chemist at the federal Department of Agriculture and the country’s leading crusader for food safety. The other was John Newell Hurty, Indiana’s chief public health officer, a sharp-tongued, hygiene-focused — cleanliness “is godliness” — official who was relentlessly determined to reduce disease rates in his home state.

Hurty began his career as a pharmacist, and was hired in 1873 by Col. Eli Lilly as chief chemist for a new drug manufacturing company the colonel was establishing in Indianapolis. In 1884, he became a professor of pharmacy at Purdue, where he developed an interest in public health that led him, in 1896, to become Indiana’s chief health officer. He recognized that many of the plagues of the time — from typhoid to dysentery — were spread by lack of sanitation, and he made it a point to rail against “flies, filth, and dirty fingers.”

By the end of the 19th century, that trio of risks had led Hurty to make the household staple of milk one of his top targets. The notoriously careless habits of the American dairy industry had come to infuriate him, so much so that he’d taken to printing up posters for statewide distribution that featured the tombstones of children killed by “dirty milk.”

But although Hurty’s advocacy persuaded Indiana to pass a food safety law in 1899, years before the federal government took action, he and many of his colleagues found that milk — messily adulterated, either teeming with bacteria or preserved with toxic compounds — posed a particularly daunting challenge.

Hurty was far from the first to rant about the sorry quality of milk. In the 1850s, milk sold in New York City was so poor, and the contents of bottles so risky, that one local journalist demanded to know why the police weren’t called on dairymen. In the 1880s, an analysis of milk in New Jersey found the “liquifying colonies [of bacteria]” to be so numerous that the researchers simply abandoned the count.

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.

Indianapolis at the time offered a near-perfect case study in all the dangers of milk in America, one that was unfortunately linked to hundreds of deaths and highlighted not only Hurty’s point about sanitation but the often lethal risks of food and drink before federal safety regulations came into place in 1906.

Returning to America to this is the goal. Maybe we should know about it.

As for the pushback about this fascist-Gilded Age thing I get from commenters, much of it revolves around “Americans don’t know about the Gilded Age so we are using the comparisons that matter.” I have two responses to that. First, we’ve called Trump a Nazi for a decade and all its down is convinced so few Americans that he’s been elected president twice. Second, I’m not communicating these issues to the American people. I’m communicating them to the readers of LGM, who are smart and educated and should know better. There is value in the fascist comparisons–Vance and Miller are outright fascists after all. But if we aren’t talking about the Gilded Age as much as we are talking about the Nazis, we are really blind to what is happening here.