According to evolutionary history, the modern human has lived on this planet for about 200,000 years and has only been consuming dairy milk for the past 8,000 to 10,000 years. Hence, consuming dairy milk is not instinctive behavior nor it is essential to our well being.
This begs the question – who was the brilliant ancestor of ours that saw a cow’s udder, licked their lips, and started suckling?? And why did the others join?
Relative to human existence, the history of milk is considerably short – yet it is truly riveting. Power, corruption, greed, mass manipulation—all are present in the evolution of milk in our modern-day society.
Thanks to the bizarre thinking of that early human, most of us are guzzling down a substance not meant for human consumption. It’s time to leave cow’s milk to the textbooks, and of course, to baby cows.
Fast-forward through the evolution of lactase persistence in European regions (yes, all early humans were lactose intolerant past their toddler stage), domestication of dairy cows, the invention of cheesemaking, millions of people who died from milk-borne illnesses prior to the invention of pasteurization (a fourth of all food-borne illnesses in the US were attributed to cows’ milk prior to the early 1900s), and the invention of the glass milk bottle, and we find ourselves in 1922 with the seminal passing of the Capper-Volstead Act
It wasn’t until the 1950s that skim milk received some commercial attention, though this was in the form of a dry, powdered, ‘just add water!’ mix.
As awful as instant milk powder sounds today, we can’t blame our grandparents – instant was all the rage back then.
The industry also had plenty of skim milk to get rid of, as much of it was leftover from WWII when dry milk powder was used as a relief food. To chisel down this surplus, the industry employed skilled marketers to position skim milk as a weight-loss food.
Milk dealers received backing from physicians to pedal this product as a health food, and by the 1950s, skim milk had transformed from a waste byproduct to a trendy weight loss beverage mostly consumed by affluent society
In reality, farmers just need a way to get rid of (and profit of off) the skim milk they had made during the war effort … which tends to be a theme in milk’s history: made too much? Turn to clever marketing.
Let’s hop back to WWI – the global event that catapulted America’s century-long milk surplus into existence.
The US government started sending canned and powdered milk to soldiers overseas, and dairy farmers responded by ramping up production.
They invested in the latest equipment and even abandoned other forms of farming to dedicate their work to the war effort.
While the war ended, the milk production did not – creating a surplus and dangerously low milk prices. Throughout the 1930s, dairy farmers staged several strikes and unionized to demand a fair price for their milk. To appease these farmers, the government created federal programs to artificially drive demand.
The first of these programs included the 1940 Federal Milk Program for Schools and federally subsidized milk advertising under the Works Progress Administration. In 1946, President Truman passed the National School Lunch Act, which mandated each lunch include between one and a half to two pints of whole milk.
World Animals Voice 