Note: All items pictured on this website are in the personal collection of Frank W. Reiser. Please contact me if you wish to discuss displaying the collection at your institution or need additional information about the topic.
Frank Leslie’s 1858 expose’ on the feeding of distillery waste, termed swill, to dairy cattle until they died by unscrupulous profiteers. The inferior milk they produced was sold to the public in and around New York City. The paper had a reporter trace the sale of swill milk from the local grocery store to the milking barns, where it was derived from the livestock.
Front Page Story Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Saturday, May 5, 1858. The paper’s editor described the milking of sick cows as “collecting cow pus.”
Microscopy and the Swill Milk Scandal
The Swill Milk Scandal was an adulterated food scandal in New York State during the mid to late nineteenth century. An article in an 1860 issue of the New York Times exposed the practice of feeding the leftover waste from the commercial fermentation used for making whisky and beer. The paper could not determine precisely when distillery waste products, called swill, were first used as fodder for dairy cattle. Nor could the paper find similar examples of a distillery’s swill being fed to dairy cows at any other time or place.
When a swill-fed cow could no longer stand because of disease and insufficient nutrition, a state exacerbated by poor air circulation, high temperatures, and physical abuse, workers would suspend them using mechanical means and continue milking them until a corpse. The practice was a working policy ordered by the dairy’s bosses to maximize profits. But sucking out the cow’s last drop of milk is not enough. The animal’s corpse was sent to a processing plant for creative conversion into various beef products.
Nevertheless, using distillery swill for cow fodder proliferated. Soon, dairymen built dairy barns next to distilleries to shorten delivery time. The swill could be fed to the cattle so quickly after being cleaned from the distillery’s boiling vats that it was still steaming as it sloshed through the barn’s feeding troughs – too hot for the cows to eat. By the 1850s, swill milk became the majority of milk supplied to New York City. It wasn’t until Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News exposed the cruel and disgusting conditions of swill-milk dairy practices that there was public awareness. Two years later, in 1860, the New York Times estimated that 8,000 of NYC’s children had died from malnutrition by consuming milk from swill-fed cattle.
Physicians, faced with a rising demand for advice from the press and public, stepped up to address the Swill Milk Scandal. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive investigation, the New York Academy of Medicine established a commission in 1859. Dr. Samuel Rotton Percy (1816 – 1890), a medical doctor and veterinarian, was entrusted with the task of investigating the health effects of a diet of distillery waste on milk cows, the nutritional value of the milk the cows then produced, and an assessment of the risks faced by those, primarily children, who consumed the milk. The Academy published Percy’s report in its journal and as a separate booklet to be disseminated to political agencies, health departments, and the press, instilling trust in the public about the thoroughness of the investigation.
Percy, a skilled surgeon and artist, was an early pioneer in using a microscope for medical diagnosis. In a journal article, he argued that accurate drawings are the most effective method for conveying information about the arrangement and relationships of material forms as viewed through a microscope. He stated that language, although a powerful tool, was subject to misinterpretation, even among experienced observers.
As expected, Percy capitalized on the artistic talents he honed earlier in life to illustrate his investigation into the health effects of milk from swill-fed cows with sketches of his microscopic findings. about swill milk and the blood of cows feeding on the waste material.
Frank Leslie’s newspaper called it Cow-pus!
It was Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News that exposed the dangerous and unethical practice of swill milk production and rallied the public to demand politicians ban the sale of swill milk. The paper assigned reporters to follow milk distributors to find the source of what they were selling. It exposed adulterants, such as plaster powder and spoilt eggs, being added to the milk to make it appear milk-like by unscrupulous merchants. The milk was monikered “cow pus!” Frank Leslie’s expose forced the New York Legislature to ban the use of distillery waste, which it did in 1862. Nevertheless, the practice of feeding distillery swill to dairy cows did not end immediately. Unscrupulous profiteers do not abandon a profitable scam quietly. Apparently, cash can “buy a blind eye,” and milk tampering continued, although to a lesser degree, until the federal Whole Foods Act was passed in 1902.
The NYS Legislature passed a bill to ban the sale of swill milk in 1862. Enforcement was lackadaisical until the nationwide Clean Food and Drug Bill was passed in 1906.
Reference:
Percy, S. R. (1860) Containing a Report of the Committee on City Milk, The Transactions of the New-York Academy of Medicine, Vol. II, Part IV,
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