8: PROCESSING OUT THE SINS

"The proper process of unsinning sin is to begin well doing."

--ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1899),

The Ring and the Book. Pt. iv, 1. 285Except what the infant gets directly from the breast, all other foods come processed to avoid bacteria and to improve their shelf-life and quality. The processing of cow's milk includes mechanical milking, pooling, pasteurization, homogenization and bottling or canning. At each of these steps the quality of the milk changes, perhaps for the worse. This chapter reviews the nature of these processing techniques and how they affect milk quality.Commercial milk trade began with the advent of dairymen who could raise and milk large herds efficiently. The cordial relationship developed between man and cow over eons deteriorated when cows were exploited exclusively for commercial purposes. There was gross disregard for sanitation in raising and milking cows in the early 19th century. Cows were kept in filthy pens, deprived of fresh air and exercise and supplied with poor-quality feeds. The most notorious of these feeds was distillery-slop found in abundance wherever there were grain distilleries. (Distillery-slop is the refuse of grain diffused through water after it has undergone a chemical change, the alcohol and farina being extracted by the process of fermentation and distillation.) The refuse of the grapes, equally damaging to cattle health, was also used.

In the early 1800's there were in the vicinity of New York 500 dairies, averaging about 20 cows, most of them supplied with distillery-slop, while only a few received brewers' grain, the good quality feed.

The cows were conditioned to drink distillery-slop by first depriving them of water and food, then giving salt to incite thirst, followed by cold distillery-slop until they become dependent on it and then were fed freely on hot distillery-slop.

Several cattle diseases were attributed to distillery-slop feeding, including, in the language of the day, dry-murrain, bloody-murrain, wolf-in-the-tail, diarrhea and pleurisy. The situation was best summarized by an English medical reporter in a letter to London dairymen: "They force the milch cows with swill so that they literally become drunkards, and send the milk to rear our children--thus sowing the seed of disease in the cradle, and poisoning the fountain of life at its source."

There was a great uproar in the middle of 19th century from physicians and other leaders against distillery-slop feeding practices. An interesting anecdote relates to the guarantee given by the owner of one of the largest dairies to his milkmen that "I fed no slop." Upon a visit to the dairy, however, it was found to be totally untrue. The owner of the dairy promptly replied: Every word I said was true, sir; I told you I fed no slop; and by the help of the gutter, you see, which leads from the still-house to the stables, my cows feed themselves.

The slop-feeding practice were ended only after the public insisted their legislators stop cruelty to cows--perhaps there was still some warmth left in the relationship between man and cow. Soon, in the middle of the 19th century, municipal legislations required healthy diets and airy quarters for cows.In the same century, the public learned other disturbing facts. While in Europe between 1730 and 1830, the infant mortality rate had decreased from 75 percent to 30 percent during the first five years of birth, in the U.S., during the period from 1810 to 1840 the infant mortality rate increased from 30 percent to over 50 percent. The reasons for this disparity could only be ascribed to the use or non-use of cow's milk. "The staple diet of the manufacturing population in England, is potatoes and wheaten bread washed down with tea or coffee. Milk is but little used," stated a noted physician of the era. The average consumption of milk in England was less than one quart per week, in New York it ranged from one to three quarts per day.

It was, however, not until the early 20th century that all causes of mortality due to milk were fully understood. For example, in 1905, 12 percent of all deaths were attributed to tuberculosis accounting for about 150,000 to 160,000 deaths per year in the U.S. The major cause of tuberculosis was, of course, (non-pasteurized) milk, a discovery made by Danish professor Gustav Bang in 1890. The battle to pasteurize milk was fought in the early 20th century. Lina Straus's book on the work of her husband, Nathan Straus, is an excellent account of how he almost single handed, against all odds, advocated pasteurization. The politics and economics of this subject were extremely complex at that time and Nathan Straus, who established his "Pasteurized Milk Laboratories" in 1892, followed by a chain "milk depots" all around New York was loathed and criticized as a selfish entrepreneur only to be recognized later as one of the most noble humanitarians of this century. Modern children owe a lot to Nathan Straus, whose name is synonymous with safe-to-drink milk. Straus' Laboratory also developed formulas for infants that became highly popular, and sold for $1.50 home pasteurization kits which consisted of a sterilizer can and a holder for milk bottles.Pasteurization involves heating milk to 94 degrees and then quickly cooling it down. This inactivates all disease-causing bacteria, especially those causing tuberculosis. Pasteurization has saved millions of lives.

However, pasteurization also destroys some of milk's valuable nutrition. Pasteurization destorys almost all vitamin D, half of all vitamin C and half to three-quarters of vitamin B-complex. The essential enzymes and growth factors destroyed during pasteurization are irreplaceable, unlike vitamins A & D.

The phosphatase enzyme in milk is necessary for the absorption of calcium. Pasteurization destroys this enzyme making pasteurized milk a poor source of calcium.

Despite the disadvantages, pasteurization is perhaps the only way to assure safety of milk on a bulk-production basis. For example, without pasteurization, we would need dairy bacterial counts, weekly anaerobic tests, monthly streptococci and brucella tests, blood tests on cows every 60 days and T. B. skin tests made every six months, all of which can be very cumbersome to institute and prohibitively expensive to practice.The CERTIFIED RAW MILK label indicates that the milk is produced according to the controls and standards of the American Association of Medical Milk Commissions. Some claim that certified raw milk causes less disease than pasteurized milk. However, given the cost and risks involved, no state, except California, allows the sale of certified raw milk.

Milking the 24 million cows daily in America today is no easy chore without the help of milking machines. These mechanical contraptions cause additional risks of contamination due to their rubber parts which leach out many hazardous chemicals.

Automated machines packaging milk under extreme hygienic conditions assure protection from contamination. Yet, when accidents happen, as in August 1985 in Chicago when many people were infected with salmonella, they affect a vast number of people. Despite an intense search, the exact source of that 1985 contamination could not be traced. It was, however, blamed on contamination from milk processing machines.

The bottling and packaging processes also expose milk to additional chemical contamination from the components of packaging equipment or from detergent residues remaining after washing the equipment. Instituted mainly to discourage unethical milk distributors from skimming the cream off the milk, the homogenization process involves "beating" the milk to break down its fat to very small particles reducing separation of milk fat. Recently, a controversy has arisen whether homogenization enhances the uptake of xanthine oxidase, an enzyme implicated in the heart disease. Later chapters of the book discuss these topics in detail.

Pooling of milk from different dairies evens out any variability in milk composition but it also spreads bacteria and chemical contaminants.Past 100 years have seen many improvements in the techniques of bringing milk from cow pens to grocery store shelves. Scientific knowledge of microorganisms, chemical contamination and other scientific advances have made drinking milk much safer. However, in the process of making it safer, we have, perhaps, added things to milk that did not exist a 100 years ago. Today when we talk about the hazards of drinking milk, our main concern is how the chemicals in milk cause cancer, or how milk-fat produces atherosclerosis or how alteration of xanthine oxidase exacerbates plaques in our arteries. A hundred years ago our main concern was protecting children from tuberculosis.

The dairy industry claims that milk is much safer today. Undoubtedly, improved milk hygiene has made milk safer to drink and infant mortality has declined. Unfortunately, such decline is not reflected in adult mortality. At the turn of this century, if you lived to be 40, you had an average chance of living to 70; today if you are 40 years old you would probably live to be 74--an improvement of merely four years despite the discoveries of antibiotics, vaccinations, CAT-scans and cat and mouse third-party hospital payment plans.Milk, a hundred years ago, was killing our children, today it is killing our adults.