architecture of thought

The Milkman Cometh

It’s quite possible that America’s modern fear of unpasteurized dairy products would not exist if it weren’t for a long, narrow building that was opened on June 1, 1893 at the foot of Manhattan’s East Third Street Pier—the heart of the tenement district—by Nathan Straus, the co-owner of Macy’s. It was divided into four rooms where milk was poured into sterilized bottles, lowered into hot and cold baths, stored in ice water, and sold, subsidized by Straus, for four cents a quart or a penny a glass. The customers, many of them women from the tenements, could lounge under nearby awnings and feed their babies while enjoying the East River’s fresh air.

“This process,” wrote The New York Times, describing the workings of Straus’s so-called milk depot, which resembled similar establishments in Europe, “is called Pasteurizing, being named for Pasteur, who determined that this heat was sufficient to destroy the disease…”—the tuberculosis and other pathogens that thrived during the summer months. Straus’s words were more dramatic. “I am asking nothing for myself,” he wrote, “but I do ask, for the defenseless babies that they be shielded from the milk that kills.”

(via the-feature)