04/30/2026
Louis Pasteur did not save us from raw milk. He saved us from Swill Milk. There were not thousands of deaths attributed to raw milk; there were thousands of deaths attributed to swill milk. He solved a problem for the unsafe living conditions of people and animals being crammed into cities during the shift from agrarian to industrialism. For centuries, humans drank raw milk, without refrigeration, without dropping like flies.
This time period also aligned with a shift in "Polite Society" standards of the time, where middle-class women were to be present in society; brunches, charities, balls, etc. combined with the notion that men didn’t like their wives nursing…it was an inconvenience 😒 It also became perceived as something "poor" people had to do.
Thus, women in cities were weaning babies sooner and giving infants dairy earlier than ever.
Louis Pasteur was assuredly a bright scientific mind who did amazing work in the field of germ theory. However, his work on pasteurization of wine and beer to prevent spoilage made him a convenient recruit to solve the issue created by capitalist corporate greed.
After the Industrial Revolution resulted in the shift from family dairy cows to commercialized dairies that were often placed next to breweries so they could utilize their byproducts, they were crammed into small lots and fed subpar feed (leftover from distilleries), resulting in dirtier living conditions and subpar milk. The milk was blue or watery (due to higher sickness rates and malnutrition), so they began adding various things to make the milk appear "good" and stretch it further. Additives used were things like chalk, molasses, egg whites, cornstarch, flour, plaster, and formaldehyde.
Yes, formaldehyde.
They then bottled it and drove it, often in open trucks, through dirty city streets and left it on doorsteps for an unknown amount of time, to houses that didn't always have an icebox. Swill milk made up more than half of all milk consumption in the Northeast by the 1830s.
This shift also coincided with hundreds of people dying, including hundreds, thousands, of children and babies. Pressure was put on mayors and governors to solve the issue, and instead of going back to the healthy balance of pasture-raised dairy, instead of looking at the distilleries profiting off of a lucrative scheme and addressing poor animal husbandry, they hired Louis Pasteur to figure out how to make swill milk nonlethal.
Yet another example of society’s tendencies in choosing to treat the symptoms (milk) instead of fixing the system (how it was produced), and then villainizing anyone who opposes the solution.
