Forrest Maready

One of the first things that changed 200 years ago that made milk dangerous? Silos. Yes, silos.

Before I started researching "The Germ in the Dairy Pail," I had no idea silos played a part in the downfall of milk. But they did.

Wanna know how? It's a crazy story...

Raw/unpasteurized was the only way humans drank milk from other animals for all of Creation. Every mammal drinks milk that way. Until the last 150 years, there wasn't a single mammal on the planet that made it past infancy without drinking raw, unpasteurized milk.

What changed?

The first big change came in the form of silos. Silos began appearing in the early 1800s &amp; allowed farmers to store food to be eaten later by their cows. Summer has plenty of grass. Winter? Not so much.

So farmers stored up food for their animals in silos.

Why's that a problem? 

Silos changed the nature of cow manure. "Silage"—the fermented feed that formed in silos made a sloppy, slimy mess. The stables where cows slept &amp; were milked became extremely filthy once they began to eat silage.

Before silos, cow manure was easy to control. After? Not so much. 

With cows eating fermented grass from silos, their manure became impossible to manage. The stables where they slept and were milked became filled with disease. Filth got into the milk and children—mainly infants—started getting sick from it.

They had no idea what was happening. 

Filthy stables from silo-fed cows became a real problem in the 1800s, but something else changed that made the milk even worse: corn.

Farmers used to grow wheat. Wheat served as bedding for cows, keeping their stables clean. It was extra winter food.

Corn changed everything. 

Wheat was the perfect farm product and could be used for all kinds of things. But corn made more money. It could be used for all kinds of things OFF the farm.

So farmers grew it. It made for horrible bedding. Even worse food for the cows.

Milk quality began to really suffer. 

Milk—the healthiest, most nutritious food on the planet began to change. Industrialized farming practices changed this miracle food into something very dangerous.

Infants drinking the milk began to die every summer. People still weren't sure why. But milk began to be suspected. 

Silos and corn changed the nature of milk for the worse, but nothing could compare to the way milk began being produced in the 1840s/50s.

They used the waste and slop from distilleries called "swill" to feed the cows. The milk from these pitiful animals was basically poison. 

The cows in these "swill" stables were diseased and sick, often unable to stand. They'd use cranes to lift them off the ground so they could continue milking them, even as death was near.

Infants drinking the "swill" milk began dying by the thousands each summer. Yes—thousands. 

You might think of polio as being the worst disease ever to affect children. This "swill" milk scandal was far worse. FAR worse.

In a single year, up to 20,000 infants might die from diseased swill milk. That's more infants in one year in the U.S. than polio ever killed. EVER. 

By the way, if you're interested, I cover this whole thing in a book I wrote called "The Germ in the Diary Pail." It's available in print, digital, &amp; audiobook—an incredible story of what happened to milk.

It's available on Amazon (&amp; soon my website).
https://a.co/d/iYa1MUm 

So with the horrid poison—the stuff they called "milk"—killing thousands of infants each year, people began to look for solutions.

Rather than fix the actual problem—industrialized dairy farming—they figured out they could "nuke" the milk with heat &amp; kill everything inside it. 

Pasteurization became commonplace. Through industrialized farming, milk had become poison. Heating the milk seemed to help. But there was a problem.

Milk was no longer nutritious. It no longer worked as medicine, something people had used it for forever. 

It turns out, milk was far more nutritious than people realized. For instance, pasteurization destroyed Vitamin D. Children started getting rickets from malnutrition.

The solution? "Fortified Milk." They added Vitamin D back into it to counter the effects of pasteurization. 

Again, rather than fix the problem, they addressed a symptom. Milk was filthy and full of disease. So rather than clean things up, they "nuked" the milk into a chalky white water. That destroyed the vitamins. So they manually added them back in.

Mistakes every step of the way. 

There's lots more to the milk story but if anything, you should know that raw, unpasteurized milk was perfectly healthy. Perfectly safe. Absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Milk was like medicine. In fact, it was better than medicine.

But we ruined milk starting in the 1800s. 

Fast forward to over 150 years later and government health officials are still terrified of raw milk. They have no idea it was so nutritious.

Farms are being raided &amp; shut down RIGHT NOW because they know God made milk safe to drink while the FDA &amp; others refuse to believe it. 

If you're still curious about the true nature of milk—&amp; what people are doing to bring raw, unpasteurized milk back—the book I wrote called "The Germ in the Dairy Pail" tells the whole story.

https://a.co/d/aiT0xte 

As if the death and destruction of infants through industrialized milk production wasn't bad enough, we corrupted what was once another natural phenomenon:
Breast feeding.

Mothers who drank the diseased, industrialized milk inevitably passed it on to their children. 

With nursing children consuming diseased milk from their mothers, their health plummeted.

Rather than blame the actual problem—industrialized milk—health officials blamed breastfeeding. THAT was the problem according to them.

Wanna know what their solution was? Infant formula. 

What had sustained all of humanity since the dawn of Creation somehow became unhealthy. Dangerous. A thing to be feared.

From the silo, then corn, then swill—we demonized one of the most precious of all human acts: a mother feeding her own infants. 