On April 21, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will be suspending its oversight of the labs that conduct safety and quality testing on the nation’s milk supply. The move comes as raw milk is ascendant in federal public health policy. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for the end of what he deems the “aggressive suppression” of raw dairy by public health authorities, meaning that more deregulation may be on the way.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Today’s raw milk evangelists like Kennedy claim that it has more nutrients, benefits the immune system, and that kids are healthier when they consume raw milk rather than pasteurized dairy. Public health authorities have debunked these claims while highlighting thousands of illnesses linked to raw milk. Nevertheless, raw dairy is increasingly popular with American consumers. It fits nicely into the “tradwife” aesthetic, personified by Ballerina Farm influencer Hannah Neeleman, who feeds her children raw milk on Tiktok for millions of viewers. Yet, like the rest of the aesthetic, the mainstreaming of raw dairy relies on consumers forgetting our history—in this case, a history in which kids got sick from raw milk.
The history of children’s health in the U.S. reveals an important truth. The U.S. government adopted a robust apparatus for regulating and monitoring the milk supply after an epidemic killed thousands of kids at the turn of the 20th century. This history offers a grim warning about what a future without milk regulation could hold for America’s children.
Nineteenth-century Americans recognized the dangers of an unregulated dairy industry. In 1843, the domestic writer Catharine Beecher warned parents that “diseased” milk was “the cause of extensive mortality among young children.” Yet, even after the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur patented the technology of pasteurization, or heating liquids to kill microorganisms, in 1865, Americans largely continued to consume raw milk for several more decades.
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They did so despite increasing fears about the dairy industry, driven by the way young children were consuming an increasingly dairy-centric diet. As America urbanized in the late 19th century, many mothers moved away from families who could have supported them in breastfeeding, while also working at Gilded Age jobs like textile factories without labor protections. The technologies of pumping and refrigeration, so essential to balancing work and breastfeeding today, were not yet widely available. This combination of barriers to breastfeeding proved insurmountable for many mothers.
Bad advice from their pediatricians compounded the situation. At the time, pediatrics was a new specialty trying to prove its worth, and practitioners mistakenly believed in sticking to a strict schedule for breastfeeding, which actually limited breastmilk supply. Hampered by this erroneous guidance, health authorities and the American public began to believe that women were physically incapable of producing enough breastmilk.
The result of both inadequate support for new mothers and poor medical advice was that more and more mothers bottle-fed their babies cow’s milk. Young children drank lots of milk, too. Medical authorities like the pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, whose 1894 The Care and Feeding of Children would become the most popular parenting manual of the early 20th century, advised parents to feed their toddlers milk at every meal.
But for kids at the turn of the century, milk came with dire risks. Amid the unbridled capitalism of the Gilded Age, the milk supply was a nightmare of corruption and contamination. On the farm, poor sanitation enabled cows and dairy workers to introduce tuberculosis, typhoid, and other pathogens into milk. Farmers or middlemen also frequently adulterated milk, watering it down to stretch supplies—with impure water likely to introduce further pathogens—or adding toxic substances, like formaldehyde or chalk, meant to conceal spoilage or make milk appear whiter. The milk was then shipped in open, unrefrigerated containers no matter the weather, vulnerable to even more contamination and spoilage.
This poisoned milk threatened America’s most vulnerable consumers: young children. Infant mortality skyrocketed in the second half of the 19th century, up to 20% nationally and closer to 30% in urban centers. Tens of thousands of babies died every year of gastroenteritis known as “the summer complaint,” an epidemic of diarrhea that worsened in the warmer months. Gastrointestinal infections were the third leading cause of death across all ages, but particularly impacted small children’s fragile immune systems.
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Parents, many mourning dead children, pushed for lawmakers to clean up the milk supply. They joined a movement of Americans calling for government regulation of the food industry. Progressive Era reformers chronicled the lax food safety and labor conditions that put Americans at risk. In 1902, a Department of Agriculture chemist named Harvey Wiley launched a brilliant but dangerous public relations campaign dubbed “The Poison Squad” dosing human test subjects with food additives like formaldehyde and chronicling their alarming effects on the body. In his famous 1905 novel The Jungle, the journalist Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking plants and the threat they posed to Americans.
This activism prodded state and federal authorities to enact a flurry of public health legislation. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading to the creation of the FDA. In 1910, New York State mandated the pasteurization of all milk sold for human consumption. As an extra layer of oversight, public health authorities began testing cows for diseases like tuberculosis, to ensure that milk remained safe for American consumers.
Public health historians credit the cleanup of the milk supply as one of the major drivers of the dramatic decrease in child mortality over the course of the 20th century. Within two generations of the pasteurization mandates, “the summer complaint” had become a memory, so much so that Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose parenting advice defined childcare in mid-20th-century America, had to explain its history to the parents of Baby Boomers. In the 1964 edition of his bestseller Baby and Child Care, Spock described the terror of early 20th century doctors and parents who watched infants suffer “serious intestinal infections that afflicted tens of thousands of babies yearly.” Spock confidently asserted that pasteurization had made such suffering a thing of the past.
Yet as Kennedy’s attacks on dairy regulation illustrate, the memory of the infant mortality crisis has receded too far into the past. Unlike their turn-of-the-20th century forebears, most 21st century parents will never know the agony of losing a child, as infant mortality rates have fallen below 1%. Many Americans are unaware that government regulation of industry helped bring us these precious gains in children’s health, by keeping tuberculosis, E.coli, and yes, bird flu out of the milk people drink. If this important regulatory work is undone, Kennedy’s calls to “Make America Healthy Again” could bring back an infant mortality crisis previous generations of Americans thought they had overcome.
Carla Cevasco is associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is writing a book on the history of feeding children in the U.S.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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