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The Industrialization of Milk in America During the Antebellum and Civil War Eras
Davis, Steven Bradley
Davis, Steven Bradley
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Abstract
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Americans harvested the milk they needed for food and medicine from their own or a neighbor's cow. By the end of the nineteenth century, most Americans purchased milk from peddlers or grocers, without ever seeing, much less feeding and caring for, the animals that furnished their favorite comfort food. During that same one-hundred-year period, Americans witnessed the transformation of milk from a variable and often dangerous fluid into a standardized, sanitized commodity that came packaged, and in some cases, dehydrated, in glass bottles, cans, and even boxes. This dissertation uses methodologies and models borrowed from a number of fields – among them environmental history, envirotech, social and cultural history, urban history, medical history, military history, animal studies, food history, agricultural history, and gender studies – to explain how and why these transformative processes occurred and with what consequences for consumers. It does so in three steps. First, it explains how and why Americans of the era inscribed cow’s milk with culinary, medical, and symbolic value, even as they struggled to make large quantities of the fluid and move it over any distance. Second, it describes Antebellum Americans’ (often disastrous) attempts to shrink the distance between rural cows and a growing urban milk market, culminating not only in the “swill milk” crisis of the 1840s and 1850s, but also in the commercial success of less-perishable milk products, among them Gail Borden Jr.’s canned sweetened condensed milk. Third, it draws these narrative threads together during the Civil War years, noting that Borden’s invention gave Union medical officials and civilian aid workers an unprecedented ability to move life-saving milk to hospitals, aid stations, and the very front lines of combat, reducing the time that sick and wounded soldiers had to wait for aid from days to hours to minutes. On returning to their homes, Union veterans and aid workers were more inclined to trust milk harvested on distant farms, giving a crucial boost to the Borden Company, specifically, and the growing industrial milk industry more generally.
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2023-05-31
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University of Kansas
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987648_1.pdf
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History, American history, Agriculture, Animal Studies, Civil War, Environmental History, Food, Industrialization, Medical History