![]() ![]() ![]() They also faked the look of rich cream by using a yellowish layer of pureed calf brains. 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. The worst of these were the many tricks that dairymen used to increase their profits. In the 1880s, an analysis of milk in New Jersey found the “liquifying colonies ” to be so numerous that the researchers simply abandoned the count.īut there were other factors besides risky strains of bacteria that made 19th century milk untrustworthy. 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. Hurty was far from the first to rant about the sorry quality of milk. 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.”īut 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. 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.”īy 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. 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. Eli Lilly as chief chemist for a new drug manufacturing company the colonel was establishing in Indianapolis. Hurty began his career as a pharmacist, and was hired in 1873 by Col. 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. 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. In this installment, Undark publisher Deborah Blum shares a story that was left out of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (Penguin). WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts.
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