From caveat emptor to caveat venditor: debates about milk falsification in France and Britain, 1850-1925

Peter Atkins and Alessandro Stanziani

P.J. Atkins, Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom p.j.atkins@durham.ac.uk A. Stanziani, IDHE-Cachan, CNRS, 61 Avenue du Prsident Wilson, 94235 Cachan, France stanzian@idhe.ens-cachan.fr Note: this paper is unpublished. The copyright remains with the authors Peter Atkins and Alessandro Stanziani 2005

2 From caveat emptor to caveat venditor: debates about milk falsification in France and Britain, 1850-1925

Abstract Present day concerns with food safety have thrown into relief the history of quality and authenticity in food systems. This paper seeks to add a comparative dimension to our understanding of the emergence of a food supply free of adulteration and falsification by discussing the historical similarities and differences between France and Britain. They were amongst the vanguard of countries seeking to act against food frauds in the half century or so before the First World War and we consider the impact of their legislative and regulatory regimes. The commodity we look at is milk because this was seen by contemporaries as the most liable to manipulation by actors in the food chain, from the cowkeeper through to the wholesaler and retailer. Our conclusion is that the seller of milk was compelled, by a combination of improved technologies of detection and tighter state controls, to modify the mode and reduce the amount of falsification. In addition, we note that the normative ambitions of the authorities led, particularly in Britain, to a need to define what was meant by genuine whole or separated milk and thereby to introduce a regulatory and administrative commentary on the natural. Such definitions and the legal consequences that followed were strongly contested on both sides of the Channel.

3 From caveat emptor to caveat venditor: debates about milk falsification in France and Britain, 1850-19251 What is adulteration, and what does it mean? It means the lowering of the physique of the nation, the poisoning of the people, the deterioration of our constitutions, and morally a fraud practised by the seller on the buyer a cheating to which we have become so callous that it has hardened our conscience for honesty in bigger things. Phillips Bevan, quoted in The Anti-Adulteration Review, I (1871), 4. The definition of adulteration is obvious is it not? It is cheating; adding or subtracting from natural food in a way designed to defraud the consumer. So much seems to be common sense. But, as this paper will show, adulteration, and falsification in the broader sense, were by no means obvious or easy to deal with for the authorities in either France or Britain.2 Fraud and falsification are at the intersection of law and economics, commercial rules and health care. Our main aims are to understand how these different elements came to be articulated together in a market economy; how they meshed with scientific knowledge and expertise; and how legal frameworks of regulation were established through legislation and case law. We will concentrate on liquid milk because there are few articles of food mor e liable to adulteration and also because milk in our chosen period was particularly interesting as both a commercial and a medical product. 3 The health implications of dirt and disease in milk meant that it came to be regulated differently from other foodstuffs in both degree and kind. Further complications arose from its position on the frontier between natural and manufactured products, that is, between agriculture and industry. The definition of true, pure milk was, and still is, important in societies and economies confronted with the industrialisation of agriculture. This last question also explains why a comparative approach is required: urbanization and the industrialisation of agriculture took shape differently around Europe, even in neighbouring countries. Concerning milk, a comparison between France and England is pertinent in that it was at the core of debates, particularly about health and quality, in both countries. Policies about food frauds adopted in one country were discussed in the other, and with a mutuality of influence, but different outcomes need to be explained as well as the similarities. Our paper will address six themes. First, by way of background, we will describe the milk industries of the two nations. These were divergent, although the levels of fraud appear to have been similar in their large cities. Second, it is necessary to give a brief account of the early history of falsification and relate it to the growth of public awareness and of the political will to act. The

4 third and fourth sections will deal with technical issues related to measurement and traceability. To this day, these remain major concerns of food scientists and technologists.4 Fifth, we look at the clarifications and complexities introduced by the involvement of science and, sixthly, the legislative and regulatory responses will be raised.5 Finally, the impact of the regulation of falsification upon the milk trade will be considered. In addition to these points, we wish to acknowledge two other aspects of milk quality that we will not have time to address in depth in the present paper. The first relates to the cleanliness of milk in the sense of the absence of dirt, and the second concerns disease spread through infected milk. Both are important aspects of quality and have been discussed elsewhere.6

I Across western Europe the process of food system modernization since the mid-nineteenth century has brought with it problems of organization, food safety and quality, especially for the commissariat of the rapidly growing metropolitan centres. With regard to the state regulation of these evolving systems, it is our contention that comparative histories yield valuable insights into the ways in which different polities have developed their views on risk, trust and the need for public intervention. Food is of course the bundle of commodities that absorbed the largest portion of consumers budgets and, throughout the period under review, it also posed a major environmental challenge to their health. Food politics therefore remained lively and there were vigorous debates on whether governments should step in with frameworks of guidance and control. The market for milk was increasing rapidly throughout our period (Table 1), with an acceleration in both countries towards the end of the nineteenth century. This increase correlates on the supply side with technical progress on production and preservation; and on the demand side with two factors: a rise in real wages for working people, and the substitution by many working mothers of cows milk for breast feeding. < Table 1 > At times there was a mismatch between supply and demand. In hot summer weather, for instance, there were two problems. First, pasture occasionally became scarce and milk yields fell, causing shortfalls in supply, which could be as much as twenty-five per cent lower in the late summer than in the spring.7 Second, where there was an absence of cooling facilities, hot weather made it difficult to deliver such a perishable commodity in perfect condition. There was

5 often a temptation on the part of farmers, especially if they were subject to contractual targets, and also of middlemen and retailers, to stretch the milk available to them on any day when supplies were short, either by using chemical preservatives to prolong its shelf-life, or by adding water or skimmed milk. The major British cities varied in their access to fresh milk. Manchester, for instance, was fortunate to be close to the numerous small dairy farms on the flanks of the Pennines, whereas Liverpool relied more upon city-based cowkeepers. In both cases, the advent of the railways eased the friction of distance and opened up hitherto specialist dairy manufacturing districts such as Cheshire.8 From the 1850s onwards, farmers who had traditionally produced butter and cheese woke up to the market opportunities presented by the increasing numbers of urban liquid milk consumers. So many switched a part or all of their enterprise over to city supply, that this may justifiably be seen as one of the most fundamental structural changes of British agriculture in the period of study, especially in the decades when the profitability of cereals was under threat from cheap imports.9 Distance remained a factor, however, with farmers being at a disadvantage if they were located far away from a railway station.10 In France the railway system took longer to develop and network connectivity with livestock farming areas was less convenient than in Britain.11 As a result, Paris in 1900 continued to rely on milk from the many cowsheds still present in its built-up, whereas in London urban milk production had declined rapidly from the 1880s.12 But Paris did have two other sources of supply. The first is what we might call the peri-urban milk that could be delivered by the producer to customers houses within three hours of milking. This came by road or by short train journey from the environs of the city. Second, there were individual farmers or groups, whose milk was transported in special wagons over distances of up to 100 kms.13 This was finally sold to the consumer a long time, sometimes days, after milking and often having undergone chemical preservation. Ironically, in Paris the urban cow-keepers therefore survived because of their image of producing fresher, healthier milk than their more distant rivals. The concentration of production and technical progress in the French liquid milk industry was stimulated by the rise of cooperatives. In 1902, there were more than 3300 such dairy establishments nationwide collecting twelve million hectolitres. 14 By then sharp practice was on the wane but, with so many players in the market, there remained scope for unscrupulous profit-making. In Britain cooperative dairying was never as significant as on the Continent. The Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) was a channel for some farmers and local retail cooperatives were also involved, largely in working-class industrial districts, but the bulk of the market was dominated by large, privately owned dairy companies, some of the largest in Europe

6 at that time. The United Dairies, for instance, controlled sixty-five per cent of the London milk supply in 1922 and handled an annual total of 4.9 million hectolitres.15 These large companies built their reputations on the speed and efficiency of their delivery, and also on quality of their milk, untouched by any form of falsification. The Aylesbury Dairy in London led the way, followed later by the CWS and United Dairies. In conclusion, the evolution of the two milk industries was somewhat different in kind and in pace of development. Yet Britain and France experienced similar pressures in their perishable food systems and, in the case of milk, it was not so much the overall spatial structure of their filires as local imperfections and seasonal factors that encouraged fraud of one kind or another. II In Britain, falsification was a coping mechanism for many small, financially-challenged corner shopkeepers, particularly with regard to commodities such as milk, where even substantial tampering was difficult to detect by eye.16 It was one of the many forms of petty crime that, in societies where the power of the regulating authorities is weak, may be seen as inevitable by traders and consumers alike, either due to the meagre resources allocated for inspection, or because of technical problems with detection. Such falsification became so universal and so routine that, for the farmer, trader and retailer at least, it was an everyday means of making a marginally legal living through those little victories of daily life famously explored by Michel de Certeau.17 By way of example, a dairy manager in London with twenty years experience reported in 1914 that: It is almost impossible to secure a carrier wh o will give proper measureGiving short measure is considered by the carrier to be almost their right and a carrier is not considered a Milky by [his] fellows unless he can make 3d per barn gallonby giving each customer a shortage.18 In France it is not by chance that the first debates about milk falsification started soon after the Napoleonic wars, when the question was whether ersatz foods and the emergency solutions adopted at that time, such as milk with added water, were legal or not. Rules adopted between 1791 and 1810 (laws on fraud in the penal and civil codes) forbade these practices, but the regulations were evidence-based and fraud had to be proved to secure a conviction. It was in this context that science and the scientists were called upon to provide technical solutions.

7 British interest in the falsification of food was first aroused in 1820, with racy revelations by Friedrich Accum.19 The British attention span was short, however, and it was not until the 1850s that the well-publicised efforts of Arthur Hill Hassall and his Lancet Analytical Sanitary Commission rekindled the publics indignation.20 According to Hassall, he found: that the adulteration of articles of consumption had been reduced to a system, to an art, and almost to a science; that adulteration was the rule and purity the exception21 Alphonse Chevallier was responsible for a similar surge of interest in France from 1850 and his book went into seven editions over the next half-century.22 A particular French concern with the plastering and watering of wine gave the issue momentum and contributed to the growth of a substantial scientific and polemical literature. Estimating levels of falsification at this time is problematic because identifying a fraud depends fundamentally upon a definition of the real product but the natural composition of milk and its variations did not emerge reliably until the early twentieth century. Adopting the conventions of the day, however, Peter Atkins has calculated that between 1850 and 1872 approximately three-quarters of the milk supply of London was adulterated to a greater or lesser extent, with an average dilution of one quarter of added water and one third of butter fat abstracted.23 This was probably the all-time peak of falsification but the crude watering of the mid-century was later replaced, from the introduction of the mechanical separator in 1878 onwards, by the extraction of cream. At that point there arose the strange phenomenon of British cities becoming producers of butter, a sure sign of widespread fraud.24 From the 1890s, a third phase was ushered in by the toning or blending of whole milk with separated fresh milk or skimmed, condensed milk. This simple form of compositional manipulation became so widespread in the twentieth century that it eventually ceased to be thought of as fraudulent. This periodization was similar to that in France. The watering of milk was widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by the extraction of cream and finally the addition of colourants. As a whole, 35.4 per cent of milk samples examined in 1907 in the main French towns and Dpartements were judged as falsified to some extent. 25 This percentage fell to around 20 per cent as a more effective system of public food analysis and policing was adopted. The extraction of cream was the most widespread adulteration: 50 per cent of the samples examined in some areas.26 In Britain, the annual reports of Medical Officers of Health published the results of food analyses and these became an important part in the accelerated circulation of knowledge about

8 falsification that was also assisted by the development of a scientific literature in journals such as the Proceedings of the Society of Public Analysts (1876), which became The Analyst (1877- present). Also in the 1870s, a trade press started in London with the Milk Journal (1871-2), followed by the Dairy (1889-1938), and the Dairyman (1876-1900), which eventually merged with the Cowkeeper and Dairyman's Journal (1879-1904).27 Other column inches on milk issues were to be found in the general farming press and specialist producers publications such as the Journal of the British Dairy Farmers' Association (1877-1962) and the Dairy World and the British Dairy Farmer (1898-1939).28 In France LIndustrie Laitire was founded in Paris in 1876 by E. Chesnel and F. Delahonde, who sought to popularize the best manufacturing methods and apparatus and, thanks to their newspaper, in 1878 the French Society for the Encouragement of the Milk Industry was created at the time of the World Fair of 1878.29 Others appeared after 1884 when professional associations were legalized, among them Le Laitage (1889) and La Laiterie et les Industries de la Ferme (1891-1939). On the other side of the fence, covering the world of the regulators, there was also the varied and authoritative Revue dHygine et de Police Sanitaire (1879-1939). In Britain, there were also a number of journals that reported on adulteration issues. The Anti-Adulteration Review ran monthly from 1871 to 1886 but it was little more than a means of reprinting cuttings from other sources, especially concerning court cases. Its successor, Food and Sanitation, a weekly paper (1892-1900), had the added dimension of campaigning journalism. The editor, M. Henry, was enthusiastic about the system in France but bitterly critical, as we will see later, of Somerset House, the chemical court of appeal in London. By the end of our chosen period, even the popular daily and weekly press were reporting incidents of milk falsification, usually court proceedings. The rapidly evolving structure of the print media Britain and the relatively high rates of literacy and of newspaper readership meant that public awareness was raised more quickly there than in France, but in Europe as a whole the politics of food reform were still less driven by demands from consumer citizens than was the case in America.30 This raises the still relevant question of the production and circulation of information concerning product quality: Producers, traders, consumers and scientists definitions of quality are not necessarily the same; the question is how to conciliate such a diversity within an increasingly international market and above all with an international scientism. III What is natural milk? In retrospect the lack of an answer to this question was an obstacle to early discussions about falsification. In Britain, official committees in 1894, 1896 and 1901 gathered evidence and eventually concluded that it was both possible and desirable to set presumptive

9 standards of milk composition. These were enshrined in the 1901 Sale of Milk and Cream Regulations as minima of 3.0 per cent butter fat and 8.5 per cent solids-non-fat.31 The regulations assumed that milk below these standard thresholds was adulterated until the contrary could be proved. Britain was not the innovator in this field, however. In Belgium, analysts of the State Agricultural Laboratory had already decided in 1895 upon a 2.8 per cent fat standard and 8.7 per cent for solids-non-fat, and in the same year the Rotterdam authorities in the Netherlands settled on 2.5 per cent and 8.5 per cent (Table 2). In Denmark 2.5 per cent fat was the minimum for the supply of Copenhagen, and in France in 1897 a Municipal Commission on milk had concluded that 3.0 and 8.5 per cent respectively were appropriate for Paris.32 < Table 2 > Both France and Britain had their internal debates about the need for compulsion concerning compositional standards but there was also an important international dimension. For instance, there were discussions at the International Congresses that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These provided a meeting ground for scientists and regulators on general issues such as hygiene or demography, and on specialist medical or industrial topics. Milk issues were an important element within these meetings, usually discussed from the perspectives of regulation and dairy science. At the International Congress of Hygiene in Brussels (1902), for example, there was a collective attempt to agree a definition of milk and, from there, a distinction between whole milk, skimmed milk and condensed milk. The point of departure was a paper by Frdric Bordas that proposed a definition of milk under three headings. First, he urged the banning of added chemicals.33 In France there was already a general opposition from the hygienist lobby to the penetration of chemistry into the agro-food sector. They disliked the notion of preservatives and artificial colouring matter but some went further and argued against the use of any compositional standards that required scientific analysis. Thus Bordas did not want to admit minima, at least for France, because of regional differences, climatic variations, and different breeds of cow.34 Delaye (from Lige) supported him and remarked that milk is a natural product and we must accept it as presented by nature, which is very capricious about the products that it provides us. 35 The same argument had been used for bread in the eighteenth century and for wine throughout the nineteenth century. It was said that such a natural product could not have a constant chemical composition and so the classification of milk and its components did not make

10 sense. Such a definition of a natural product explains the hostility of many contemporary hygienists towards the use of disinfectants and preservatives in food. Their ideal of a natural product excluded at the same time both chemicals and any heavy administrative intervention. According to this point of view, imposed standards would cause unfavourable selectivity and would facilitate fraud. This was why Delaye proposed the following definition: milk, a liquid such as nature provides coming from healthy animals.36 But would hygienists have accepted fixed values differentiated by country and region? One answer was that it was not so much a question of regional differences as that of the food of the cow influencing milk and its composition. We will address this issue in the following section. These differing definitions of milk indicate that in France different actors had varying perspectives on falsification. The advocates of a generic definition of milk primarily feared institutionalised chemistry and the industrialization of agriculture and they sought to ban or heavily control margarine and skimmed milk; whereas those in favour of fixed compositional standards focused on traditional commercial frauds such as watering and cream abstraction. Eventually, the Congress voted on and adopted the first approach, based on the definition of Bordas. However, the deliberations were far from over. The definition of skimmed milk, necessary to supplement the approved proposal, was an explosive issue. Indeed Bo rdass second proposal was that the bye-products of the milk industry, such as skimmed milk, partially skimmed, centrifuged milk, and poor milk, should not be used for the food of new-born babies, patients and old people.37 Skimmed milk would thus not have been prohibited, but it could only have been sold as such and only for certain categories of consumer. Inevitably, this definition contained several elements of uncertainty, as shown by the debate that followed, in which arguments concerning commercial fraud cross-cut with those related more directly to public health. Thus, enthusiasts for compositional minima thought it necessary to require a threshold for practical purposes and that skimmed milk had therefore to be prohibited or given its own standards. Others (Chassevant, for example) observed that by monitoring the production of milk in the cattle shed it is possible to avoid fraud.38 The Congress eventually approved Bordass second proposal and moved on to discuss his third point, that these bye-products represent a food value which cannot be neglected, but they should be on sale only in special shops or after they have been given a particularly distinctive description. He justified this definition on the grounds that since skimmed milk is used t o dilute whole milk; it must be sold in special shops.39

11 This proposal attracted three kinds of criticisms; first, there was no standard, in France and several other countries, which made a distinction between these two products. 40 Second, the fraud of which Bordas spoke was actually legal in large French cities; so in the towns and in the countryside the separation of the two types of trade would have presented a major difficulty. Third, skimmed milk is a dairy product; so those who consider only whole milk as a food miss the point. Because of these criticisms, the sub-section of the Congress dealing with questions of food safety rejected Bordass proposal. However, by a sleight of hand, it was reintroduced and approved with a very narrow majority in a plenary session.41 The British delegates at the Brussels Congress spoke in favour of their own Sale of Milk and Cream Regulations that had been adopted in 1901.42 Despite the complex and changing nature of knowledge in dairy chemistry, these standards (3.0 per cent fat, 8.5 per cent solids-nonfat) stood the test of time throughout most of the twentieth century. This was certainly not because milk politics were any less colourful than in France; it was more that the nature of the debate in Britain was different. The strand of thought that we have here called international hygienism held less sway than on the Continent, for a number of reasons bound up with the development of somewhat different scientific and bureaucratic contexts under the influence of a faster and more intensive urbanization and industrialization than in France. The Second International Congress for the control of food fraud, held in Paris in November 1909, mostly confirmed the decisions made at Brussels.43 It passed a resolution calling for skimmed milk to be stored, transported and sold in appropriate receptacles and clearly labelled. This reflected judgements in law courts around Europe condemning mixtures of whole and skimmed milk. In addition, the Congress confirmed the general hostility of hygienists to chemical and industrial means of preservation.44 However these resolutions did not solve the problem of a link between the quality of milk and cow management. A question remained as to whether falsification, as a technical and juridical category, was possible only after the act of milking or before. We will investigate this in the next section. IV The ingenious livestock management practices of certain Parisian and London cow-keepers show why hygienists called for preventative measures and for the prioritisation of natural foods. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards it seems that milch cattle in both cities were fed on watery rations such as brewers grains. Dr Ritter of Nancy revealed evidence of this practice in 1878 in a paper to the Society of Public Medicine in which he discussed analyses of milk having a high proportion of potash salts, five times that of normal milk. His research made it possible to

12 establish that these values were the consequence of the cows being fed wi th beet and brewers grains. Ritter concluded that there was thus no fraud, but the food of the cows was bad.45 In 1882 Charles Girard, Director of the Municipal Laboratory of Paris, challenged this conclusion by insisting that to say that the milk has not been watered was mere semantics. He claimed that the cow-keepers cannot pretend ignorance. These are acts of a regular and guilty practice, an intentional act for money, to enhance quantity at the expense of quality. In fact everyone knows, and cow-keepers better than anybody, that the quality of milk is connected and proportional to the health of the dairy animal.46 Traceability, in the sense of the relationship between the inputs and the output, was by no means as straightforward as Girard implied, however. Unlike industrial production, the relationship between the cows food and the end product was not well -known. Several experts at the time even doubted the existence of close links between the two.47 Thus, Robin wrote that among milk producers in France generally there is respect for advice on good feed but the closer to Paris, the food of dairy cows is rich in farinaceous food and ordinary water is replaced by brewers grains. However, it was not proven that these changes affected the quality of milk, which was strongly related to the breed of cow. In fact, throughout our period popular notions of intensive breeding of livestock rested upon the conviction that animals had inherent characteristics that were more significant than environmental variables such as fodder. As a result, the legal implications become extremely difficult to determine. Could one speak of a milk fraud when only the cattle feed had been modified? This example raises not only the problem of defining real and intentional falsification but also the issue of how to regulate to prevent frauds of a marginal nature that were scientifically detectable only indirectly. We will now turn to the efforts by legislators and administrators in the two countries to improve the authenticity of their respective milk supplies. V In France a proto-science of food emerged out of debates about hygiene, with two initial purposes: first, to refine the measuring instruments and the levels of traceability and, second, to ask for the prohibition of certain products or substances even when there was some scientific uncertainty about their harmful character. The precautionary principle, in the presence of scientific uncertainty, values the normative ambitions of scientists over those of Parliament and the judiciary; and, in the eyes of scientists, this principle was essential because, in the economic arena, it was the supply-side that conditioned and formed demand. The consumer would otherwise be defenceless vis--vis the producer.

13 As in Britain, different laboratories had different technical specifications and so analytical control was effectively decentralized at first. Following the lead of the City of Paris Laboratory, but with the difference of Bordass suggestion approved by the Intern ational Congress of Hygiene, minimum values of the principal components of milk were identified and attention was also given to the hygienic conditions of production. There was a dance between the methods employed by falsifiers and analysts. Girard, the Director of the Municipal Laboratory in Paris, had in the 1880s given the composition of natural milk in terms of density, cream, percentage of water and he had extracted butter, lactine, casein, salts and albumin. He declared that the thinnest whole milk gave 122 grams of dry extract per litre. One could consequently consider that all the milks whose dry extract did not reach this minimum, must be regarded as falsified.48 He thought that severe regulation was necessary. The increase in the personnel of the laboratory in 1883 and 1885 made it possible to increase the sampling programme. Each dealer or cow-keeper in Paris was visited at least once per annum (in general twice). Inspectors were provided with a lactometer and a thermometer and took samples of milk that seemed suspect by their low density or bluish appearance.49 The rate of sampling had increased in 1881 and 1884, and after that the figure was constant at between 350 and 440 per month. Two chemists were alternately in charge of this service, each one analysing all of the milks that arrived on his day of service within forty-eight hours. Girard was satisfied with the results: the quality of milk has improved in Paris. Since 1884, the percentage of watered milks had fell from thirty-one to fourteen per cent. We count milk as bad that contains less than 108 grams of extracts.50 In Britain the state analytical services were only modestly funded and it was the large dairy companies that undertook the vast majority of milk sampling and testing. Their unwillingness for commercial reasons to reveal information about any falsified milk delivered to them by their suppliers is perhaps understandable. Unfortunately the techniques of adulteration evolved as quickly as the science of detection and any definition of falsification based on the components of the product was likely to be overtaken quickly. For example, milk watering was the most widespread fraud in France at this date. The Revue dHygine reported in 1897 that a doctor in Lyon had noted the following adulteration of milk: when the cream starts to rise, milk gradually loses its sweet taste. If the top of the milk is decanted this modification of the taste of milk is very noticeable; moreover the milk gains density when the cream is removed, because that is the lightest part. In addition, water containing seventy-five grams of cane sugar per litre has exactly the same density as pure milk. Therefore, by replacing a volume of cream by an equal volume of water sweetened to sixty-five per cent, the milk recovers its taste and its normal density.

14 Many British writers admired the French approach to detecting falsification and punishing the perpetrators.51 The editor of Food and Sanitation, M. Henry, was enthusiastic about the system across the Channel but bitterly critical of Somerset House, the chemical court of appeal in London.52 He spoke, for instance, of the existing wretched, ignorant, and utterly untrustworthy system of food analysis at Somerset house'.53 It was a poor, bungling department struggling to perform work for which it has not got the skill or knowledge, and scientifically the Somerset House chemists are dead, and there exists no shadow of an excuse for their remaining unburied. The nub of his complaint was that, from the 1870s onwards, the government scientists adopted a low standard of butter fat (2.5 per cent), which meant that many frauds went undetected. They wished to rule out false negatives and err on the side of generosity in cases where there was a possibility that the cow had given rather thin but nevertheless genuine milk. Analysts employed by local authorities and the larger and more reputable dairy companies used substantially higher standards (3.0 per cent fat or higher) and it was by no means unusual for cases of falsification referred on appeal to Somerset House to be dismissed, infuriating the prosecuting authorities.54 Food and Sanitation complained in 1894 that pure milk in London is at the present-day practically unobtainable, save from the Aylesbury Dairy Company...the article vended generally as pure milk consists of some seven or eight gallons of separated milk practically deprived of its fat and a gallon of water added to each twenty gallons of genuine milk. This gives an average of 8.5 per cent solids-non-fat and 2.5 per cent fat, which would have passed at Somerset House. This compared unfavourably with the Aylesbury Dairy Companys average analysis of its milk at 8.77 per cent and 3.91 respectively.55 Part of the problem seems to have been a lack of political will at the centre. According to Henry, when we began this journal nearly two years ago, it seemed hopeless to arouse Parliament, local authorities, or even the penny dreadful press to the realization of the enormous importance of the subject. No member of the House of Commons knew or cared a rap about the question....56 < Table 3 > The uneasy relationship between politics and technology was an issue here. Politicians are rarely willing to back tentative science with laws and regulations, yet the history of the nascent system of food analysis in our period was replete with examples of scientific uncertainty. Table 3 lists the main techniques employed to detect falsification but, what may appear at first sight to be a

15 simple narrative of technical improvements, hides rivalry and significant disagreements about the validity of results. James Wanklyn in his well-publicised analyses for the Milk Journal in the early 1870s, for instance, had used the tough standards of 9.3 per cent solids-non-fat and 3.2 per cent fat to identify fraud, and the Society of Public Analysts (SPA) standard adopted in 1874 was only a little easier at 9 per cent and 2.5 per cent. A decade later, when Dr Adams of Maidstone devised a more efficient laboratory method of fat extraction, the SPA had to adjust their limits to 8.5 per cent and 3.0 per cent respectively because Wanklyns method was shown to have seriously underestimated the amount of fat.57 Both were subject to alarming variations in results between laboratories (Table 4) and this operator error continued to be a problem, although to a lesser extent, with the improved solvent and wet extraction methods. < Table 4 > In both countries scientific knowledge was an uneasy partner for the analysts and regulators. Despite their best efforts, the inventors of techniques of physical and chemical analysis were unable to devise methods that were both accurate enough and sufficiently fool-proof, firstly to eliminate the possibility of false results leading to the conviction of honest farmers and traders, and, secondly, to outwit the sophisticated methods used by the real fraudsters. As a result, the situation remained unresolved at the end of our period, emphasizing the impact that scientific uncertainty has had on the definition and the enforcement of rules and regulations. VI The rows at the Brussels Congress were inspired by international hygienists. They were in essence similar to disputes in both France and Britain about the general relationship between commercial legislation and the protection of the public health. The debate was among, on the one hand, those who were convinced that the market could, either alone, or with some corrections, offer the best possible food, and, on the other hand, those who thought that direct administrative control was needed. These views were complicated further by differences between those who were content with the natural quality variations of agricultural produce and opposed any attempt at standardization, while others, on the contrary, insisted upon a role for science. In France in 1896, the mayors of Lyon and Bordeaux both published decrees based on Article 97 of the Law of 1884. This article declared that the municipal police force was responsible for inspecting the honesty of the trade in food products sold by weight or measurement and of the healthiness of comestibles exposed for sale. They also required that

16 skimmed milk had to be in cans with a label carrying in clear, heavy type the words skimmed milk. In Lyon the label had to be half the height and width of the container and the type at least a third of the height of the label; in Bordeaux there was added the proviso that any milk will be regarded as skimmed milk if it is less than 5 on the lactometer.58 The Minister of Agriculture, lobbied by producers and tradesmen alike, hesitated to regard these decrees as legal since they seemed to him likely to attack commercial freedom; in his opinion, any measure obliging a dairy merchant to differentiate by label full cream milk from skimmed milk is, in the current state of the legislation, open to dispute. Similar provisions had been widely adopted for wine and butter, where action had been approved by the state, a surprising double standard since the public health was more directly affected by the adulteration of milk than the watering of wine. The minister eventually called on the Comit Consultatif dHygine for an opinion. The answer was actually rather favourable to the mayors: for our part, we believe that the mayo rs can draw upon Article 97 of the Law of 1884; however, this principle conceded, it is necessary to see whether certain aspects of their decrees are not sullied by the abuse of power. They did not think that the bye-laws blocked the freedom of trade, only the freedom to falsify. At the same time, in their opinion the skimming of milk should be regarded as a falsification in the provisions of the Law of 1851 only when it reached a certain proportion: When milk does not contain a given quantity of cream, the mayor has the right and even the duty to prohibit its sale as milk. Thus the decrees of the mayors are legal; but it is their use of the additional provisions which constitute an abuse of power. In particular there was excess in the imposition of the heavy type face on the label insisted upon by the Mayor of Lyon and the white and blue colours by the Mayor of Bordeaux.59 After the Comits decision, the police court of Bordeaux declared the regulations to be legal and obligatory. Yet some of the accused were released when it was found that the selection of milk samples had been unsatisfactory.60 Hygienists such as Ogier and Bordas were infuriated by the Comits intervention. They reminded readers of the Revue dHygine that the values given by a lactometer changed according to the breed of cow, its food, the ambient temperature, and other factors. They criticised the provisions adopted in Bordeaux and Lyon because, while outlawing some forms of adulteration, they gave the appearance of normality to the skimming of milk, which, in their view, constituted a falsification.61 This dispute about skimmed milk in France reproduced in many ways those earlier concerning wine. The hygienists and the administrators agreed that the alteration of these products must be policed in the sense of divulging information that the market by itself would

17 not always be ready to deliver. At the same time, the solution, which consisted of correcting the market without intervening in the production, was enforced mainly in relation to falsifications such as skimming and watering, which primarily affected the honesty of transactions and the consumers diet. It was not until 1905 that a Service de la Rpression de Fraudes was established by the Prfecture de Police in Paris but, in theory at least, this did control milk quality from the farm to the doorstep.62 Further measures came in 1927, with a clean-up of production and the introduction of a seal of approval, lait officellement contrl.63 As we have seen, the debate about falsification was re-established in Britain in the 1850s, following The Lancets publication of a series of revelations by the analyst Hassall. Public opinion was sufficiently moved for the government to appoint the Scholefield Committee into the Adulteration of Food, Drinks and Drugs, which reported in 1856. At last, the 1860 Sale of Food and Drugs Act made it an offence to sell any article of food or drink which was injurious to health, adulterated or not pure. But this was a rather ineffective measure and was soon followed by Acts in 1872, 1875 and 1879, that were altogether more purposive, shifting the burden of proof from the purchaser (caveat emptor) having to show fraudulent intent on the part of the trader to one of strict liability for the nature of the product sold (caveat venditor).64 As a result, analysts were appointed by many local authorities and the large cities began the systematic sampling of milk. These data series are invaluable for understanding the nature and extent of fraud but they are unreliable to a certain extent because of the variation of methods of analysis and of the levels at which samples were declared to be fraudulent. In Britain the falsification debate was similar, with some variations, to that in France. There was friction, principally between the local authorities and the various actors in the milk trade. The Medical Officers of Heath and their staff were legally empowered to take samples but there was a great deal of variation in the enthusiasm with which this duty was performed. Smaller towns and rural districts in particular made less effort. Thus Durham City paid a retaining fee of five guineas per annum to an analyst for twenty years before a single sample was analyzed in the 1890s.65 By contrast, in Manchester from 1879 onwards, falsified milk samples were traced back from the city retailer, to the railway station and, if necessary, to the farm. 66 It is not surprising that farmers and dealers who were caught in this elaborate net should feel aggrieved. Gross frauds were perpetrated in other parts of the country but were going unpunished due to a lack of political will or funds upon which to build an administrative system. The professional milk adulterator seems to have studied, like the professional gambler the

18 doctrine of chances. Calculating his chance of a visit from the Food and Drugs Act Inspector it would run in some districts, judged by the samples taken, to once in a thousand years...67 Among the loudest voices heard, both in the press and in Parliament, were those of a powerful lobby opposing legal sanctions against honest farmers and dealers. As in France, the natural variations of cows milk were noted but opposition to chemical analysis was less virulent. In Britain, by the turn of the century, most seem to have accepted the need for standards and the argument now turned on the need to allow two exceptions. First, a written warranty of compositional quality from a farmer was said to be sufficient under certain circumstances to remove liability from the purchasing wholesaler. Second, there was a call for farmers to be allowed an appeal to the cow where they could prove that any doubtful milk came from an animal that ordinarily produced thin, watery milk. Gradually the weight of legal precedent and expert opinion moved in favour of the commercial interests. In 1911, for instance, E.G. Haygarth-Brown pointed out to his colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture that local authorities had misunderstood the nature of the 1901 regulations. In the administration of the Law as to the sale of milk is exceedingly difficult and varies in different districts. In some districts the mere fact that milk falls below limits referred to in the sale of Milk Regulations is regarded as sufficient to justify the issue of a summons. This view is incorrect. The local authorities overlook the fact that not only is it, generally speaking, no offence against the Food and Drugs Acts to sell milk which is below the limits mentioned in the sale of Milk Regulations provided it is genuine, but also the fact that the proportion of butterfat or solids not fat in a sample of milk falls below him these limits is only prima facie evidence of adulterationIt is doubtful whether it is possible to administer the present law strictly enough to keep down adulteration without incurring great risk of instituting proceedings against sellers of milk which is genuine though poor.68 At the end of our period, the regulations and their enforcement in Britain were in disarray. The legal decisions in Hunt v. Richardson (1916) and Grigg v. Smith (1917) shifted the weight of proof to a question of whether the milk sampled was as it had come from the cow and therefore appeal to the cow became admissible.69 Politicians began to lose faith in their own judgement,

19 the most glaring case coming in 1923 when the Minister of Agriculture issued a circular instructing local authorities to desist from prosecutions on the basis of single samples in order to eliminate unfair prosecutions. He very soon had to withdraw that advice and re-institute the previous practice in the face of a storm of protest from the British Medical Association and the public health press.70 The milk trade may have won a fairer consideration of their complaints but they had by no means carried all before them. VII The dairy companies that grew to prominence in our period were highly significant in the discourse about adulteration. Despite occasional convictions for minor offences with regard to the quality and composition of their product, the large corporations such as the United Dairies and the Cooperative movement gradually gained a reputation with the public for supplying milk of an acceptable quality. This was built through an extraordinary effort on their part to monitor and privately regulate the milk of their suppliers; as a result, sales increased and this tranche of industry was able to maintain its profitability. After the Great War, Ben Davies, the first Director of Laboratories for United Dairies, was a particularly vigorous actor in this regard and a frequent commentator generally about the state of the industry. He criticized the farming community for their lax and at times dishonest attitudes and continually pushed central government to show more commitment to the enforcement of high standards. In the early 1920s, his company alone examined seven times more samples of milk and cream than all of the local authorities in England and Wales put together and inevitably this gave them a strong voice in both commercial and political circles.71 There is no evidence that British dairy companies were trying to undermine the authority of local analysts but the sheer weight of their resources made it difficult for all of the other stakeholders, from farmers to retailers, from local authorities to central government, to compete on grounds of theoretical knowledge, scientific methods, or laboratory results. The rise of large-scale wholesaling in Britain started from the late nineteenth century, in the form of joint stock and some private companies. The development in France was later, through four integrated distributors: La Socit Laitire Maggi, les Laitires Hauser, la Socit Amiot and le Lait Integral.72 In both countries these developments coincided with the early phase of modern mass marketing.73 One might think that liquid milk is an unpromising product for an advertising makeover, but this is exactly what happened in Britain with the foundation of the National Milk Publicity Council in 1920. The NMPC was largely funded by the industry and, despite early teething problems, it laid the early foundations of a public awareness of the positive

20 aspects of milk consumption.74 There were local lectures, window displays, exhibitions and baby weeks, along with the publication of pamphlets and newspaper advertising, but possibly most powerful innovation was a range of visual imagery through the media of posters and film. Developments in France were about ten years behind, again with advertising in the forefront, organized by the larger progressive distributors and the cooperatives rather than by the state. 75 We think it reasonable to argue that the gradually improving reputation of milk on both sides of the channel, partly as a result of reduced falsification, facilitated this mass marketing and worked to the further advantage of all in the trade, from farmer to retailer. This was a time when objections were being raised about the nutritional impact of processed foods, for instance the use of farinaceous patent foods for infants, the substitution of margarine for butter, and the introduction of roller-milled flour for flour produced by less efficient pre-industrial techniques. Yet milk was following a contrary trend, to greater respect. 76 The acceptance after the War of the nutritional richness of milk, largely through work on vitamins, encouraged its use as a medical food with fortifying properties.77 In the 1920s in Britain, the extent of its rehabilitation in the mind of the public was confirmed by a large-scale expansion of school milk. This would only have been possible if it was considered on the whole to be safe and, in general terms, over the worst problems of falsification.78 In France such trust was withheld a little longer because the legislative framework there was not revised until 1935.79 VIII By 1925 the seller of milk in both France and Britain was under pressure as never before. Falsification was still common, in the form of toning and short-measure but legislation, particularly in Britain the Act of 1875, and in France the Law of 1884, coupled with slow improvements in the respective systems of regulation, had meant that by the turn of the century in both countries the grossest of frauds fifty years before were less frequent. Instead of added water or abstracted cream, the public throughout western Europe were becoming more concerned about the connexions between diet and health. Thus, milk warm from the cow had early on been praised as being of high quality, but in the space of a few decades, this milk, a pure and expensive product, became synonymous with toxicity because of the discovery that untreated milk was an ideal medium for the multiplication of germs and very commonly a source of infections. In Britain, far more than in France, the bovine variant of tuberculosis was commonly found in milk supplies and fierce debates began about the best means to counter this.80 Pasteurization was the solution favoured by the large dairy companies

21 and by most doctors but there was a large and vociferous minority against any heat treatment that might have deleterious consequences for the natural properties of milk.81 These developments were not easy for hygienists to live with. Although divided amongst themselves on many topics, they agreed on their condemnation of the lure of gain and of the penetration of chemistry into the agro-food system. Their opposition to preservatives constituted their last stand against the world of marketing. This fight was weakened from the outset by their disagreements over what constituted a natural product. Values had been ascribed to the principal components of the product, and criticisms were levelled at the standardization of foodstuffs, always in the name of a natural product. This is a dilemma that continues down to the present day, for example in France with cheeses made from unpasteurized milk, where consuming the natural does not necessarily equate with the minimization of medical risk. At the turn of the century new forms of falsification were emerging, not only on the endor quasi-finished-product but, right from the start of the production process. It was realised that the food of the cows, for instance, could affect the quality of the milk. The hygienists, at last conceding the need to allow for both science and regulation, were then confronted the need for a new form of traceability. In order to control the whole supply chain from producer to consumer, as had already happened in France with wine, they added the need for compositional analysis. What finally gave a new impetus to the normative ambitions of the scientists was that the definition of standards could not do without the detailed analysis of the products. This affected their view of the relationship between standards and economic activity. In common with several economic societies, the hygienists blamed poor judgement in cases where standards were badly conceived. According to this view, quality was defined less by the market than by means of the standards, which in turn were based on scientific knowledge. This ambition nevertheless was thwarted by conflicts among the scientists themselves about falsifications of foodstuffs. There was disagreement over falsification between hygienists (medics and administrators) and the milk industry because of the impact of regulation on the functioning of the market. Although rarely expressed in this way, the debate was in essence about whether regulations should prioritise public health or fair competition. The two are rarely compatible away from the abstract theoretical world of economists and in our period market imperfections made compromises particularly difficult to achieve. The regulations that emerged were solidified under pressure from the opposing lobbies, although in France no official definition of milk was possible because of disagreements among producers and traders, and also among the diverse group of hygienists. It was at this time that our present-day perceptions of food falsifications were

22 formed and in this light it is not surprising that current scandals and debates on food safety in Europe are far from easy to clarify and resolve. Significant similarities between the situations in Britain and France have emerged from this paper. The drivers of science and technology were important, as were the development of legal and regulatory regimes based upon a common belief that genuine milk could be differentiated from milk modified by the various actors in the food chain. Differences arose over the relative strength of the various interest groups in the two countries, with compositional standards coming forward in Britain but not in France. We suspect that there were also significant differences both within and between the two with regard to the implementation of anti-fraud measures at the local level, and further work on this area would be welcome, as would comparative work on other parts of Europe. More work is also now required on the innovation process. There was a long-standing technical struggle between the milk falsifiers, from farmers to retailers, and the food analysts employed by the state. It would be interesting to know more about the timing and acceptance of new methods by the main actors. We do not wish to reduce the history of food falsification to a history of technology but our knowledge at this point is modest and limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the present paper.

23 TABLE 1. Estimates of liquid milk consumption, litres per head per week 1845-1854 1855-1864 1865-1874 1875-1884 1885-1894 1895-1904 1905-1914 France 1.10 1.42 1.35 1.35 1.32 1.58 1.80 Britain 0.73 1.12 1.55 1.56 1.67

Sources: H. Rew, An inquiry into the statistics of the production and consumption of milk and milk products in Great Britain, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 55 (1892), pp. 244-78; D.J. Oddy, The working class diet, 1886-1914 (PhD, London, 1970); D. Taylor, The development of English dairy farming c. 1860-1930 (D.Phil., Oxford, 1971); J.C. Toutain, La consommation alimentaire en France de 1789 1964, conomies et Socits, Cahiers de lI.S.E.A. 5, 11 (1971), p. 1953. TABLE 2. The minimum milk compositional standards (percentages) acceptable in various jurisdictions at the turn of the century Belgium (1895) Rotterdam, Netherlands (1895) Copenhagen, Denmark Paris, France (1897) Prussia (1899) 21 states of USA Great Britain (1901) Source: BPP 1901 (Cd 491), XXX, 386-87. TABLE 3. Methods of milk fat analysis Method Dry extraction Solvent extraction Wet extraction Technique Wanklyn Adams coil Soxhlet Gottlieb/Rse Werner-Schmidt De Laval Lister/Babcock Gerber Leffmann/Beam Somerset House Butter fat 2.8 2.5 2.5 3.0 2.7 3.0-3.7 3.0 Solids-non-fat 8.7 8.5 8.5 8.5

Maceration

Source: BPP 1901 (Cd 491), XXX, 401; A.W. Blyth and M.W. Blyth, Foods: their composition and analysis 7th edition, revised by H.E. Cox (1927).

24 TABLE 4. Variation in results of six samples analysed in three laboratories (A, B, C) Sample No 1 A B C No 2 A B C No 3 A B C No 4 A B C No 5 A B C No 6 A B C Fat (%) 3.75 4.06 3.90 3.08 3.56 3.40 3.58 4.44 3.90 3.93 3.75 4.15 3.61 3.46 3.90 3.59 3.54 3.75 Solids-non-fat (%) 8.77 8.75 8.64 8.42 8.33 8.44 8.98 8.36 9.03 8.87 8.89 8.74 8.94 8.91 8.90 8.48 8.70 8.68 Total solids (%) 12.52 12.81 12.54 11.50 11.89 11.84 12.56 12.80 12.93 12.80 12.64 12.89 12.55 12.37 12.80 12.07 12.24 12.43

Source: BPP 1901 (Cd 491), XXX, Appendix VII.

25 Footnotes
1

Research for this article was at various times funded by the Wellcome Trust, the University of

Durham and the CNRS. We take full responsibility for the opinions expressed and for any errors or omissions.
2

Falsification as a technical term in France is inclusive of simple watering and cream abstraction A.H. Hassall, Food and its adulterations: comprising reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of `The See http://www.eufoodtrace.org/index.php. By traceability we mean the ability to trace the history, application or location of an entity by Alessandro Stanziani (ed.), La qualit des produits en France (Paris, 2003); Idem., La fraude dans

but also frauds such as short measure, mislabelling, and other forms of sharp practice.
3

Lancet for the years 1851-1854 (1855), p. 320.

4 5

means of recorded information (ISO standard 8402: 1994).

6

l'agro-alimentaire. Gense historique: La falsification du vin en France 1880-1905, Revue dHistoire Moderne et Contemporaine, L 2 (2003), pp. 154-186; P.J. Atkins, White poison: the health consequences of milk consumption, Social History of Medicine 5 (1992), pp. 207-27.
7

The years of highest July-September temperatures were 1857, 1859, 1865, 1868, 1884, 1895, P.J. Atkins, The growth of London's railway milk trade, c. 1845-1914, Journal of Transport History D. Taylor, The English dairy industry, 1860-1930, Economic History Review 2nd series, 29

1898-99, 1906, 1911, and 1914.

8

new series, 4 (1978), pp. 208-26.

9

(1976), pp. 585-601; idem., Growth and structural change in the English dairy industry, c.18601930, Agricultural History Review 35 (1987), pp. 47-64.
10 11

Atkins, op. cit. (1978). X. de Planhol, An historical geography of France (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 353-59; M. Phlipponneau,

Les laitiers-nourrisseurs de la banlieu parisienne, Bulletin de lAssociation de Gographes Franais 198 (1949), pp. 9-18; idem., La vie rural de la banlieu parisienne, Centre dtudes conomiques, tudes et Mmoires 32 (1956).
12

P.J. Atkins, The intra-urban milk supply of London, circa 1790-1914, Transactions of the Institute of

British Geographers new series, 2 (1977), pp. 383-99; A. Gaubeaux, Nouveau rapport sur les vacheries du Dpartement de la Seine (1887), p. 6. The Parisian cowkeepers were subjected to triple monitoring by the inspectors of registered premises, the inspectors of foodstuffs, and the veterinary medical service. This last was present in all Dpartements. In spite of this regulation, in May 1887 there were still 490 cow-keepers and 6,850 milch cows in the city.

26

13

H. Hitier, Approviosionnement en lait de Paris et Lyon, Bulletin de la Socit dEncouragement

pour lindustrie Nationale May/June (1916), pp. 581-595; R. Dubuc, Lapprovisionnement de Paris en lait, Annales de Geographie 47 (1938), pp. 257-266.
14 15

G. Duby and A. Wallon, Histoire de la France rurale (1992) volume 3, pp. 418-9, 422. BPP, Departmental Committee on Distribution and Prices of Agricultural Produce, Interim Report on Milk and Anon., Three months in the London milk trade, The Economic Review 4 (1894), pp. 177-188. M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (2002). Letter from C.F. Green to Waldorf Astor, 7 April 1914. University of Reading Archives, F. Accum, A treatise on adulteration of food and culinary poisons...and the methods of detecting them

Milk Products, 1923 (Cmd 1854), IX, 41.

16 17 18

Astor Papers, MS1066/1/1018.

19

(1820); J. Burnett, History of food adulteration in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, with special reference to bread, tea and beer, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (1958); J. Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day (1966).
20
21

Hassall, op cit.; idem, Adulterations detected (1857). idem., The narrative of a busy life: an autobiography (1893), p. 47. J.B.A. Chevallier, Dictionnaire des altrations et falsifications des substances alimentaires, mdicamenteuses P.J. Atkins, Sophistication detected: or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850-1914, Social By 1914 the proportion of added water had fallen to about ten per cent. The equivalent figure for Britain in 1907 was 10.5 per cent. BPP, Local Government Board A Bonn, Extrait du rapport sur le fonctionnement du laboratoire municipal agre de Lille

22

et commerciales (1850).
23

History 16 (1991), pp. 317-39.

24 25

Annual Report for 1907-1908, 1908 (Cd 4347), XXX.

26

pendant lanne 1910, Bulletin International des Falsifications May (1911), pp. 166-169; F. David, Rapport sur le budget du ministre de lagriculture pour 1912, Bulletin International de la Rpression des Fraudes 38 (December, 1911), pp. 453-462.
27

There were others but they tended to be short-lived. The Dairy Review, for instance, lasted for

only one year (1894), the Dairyman's Record for four issues (1899-1900), and the Retail Dairyman also succumbed quickly (1910).
28 29 30

The best source for all of these publications is the National Newspaper Library at Colindale. E. Ferville, Lindustrie laitire: le lait, le beurre, le fromage (1888), pp. 5-8. L.S. Goodwin, The pure food, drink, and drug crusaders, 1879-1914 (1999).

27

31

BPP, Report from the Select Committee on Food Products Adulteration, 1894 (253), XII, 1; 1895 (363), X,

73; 1896 (288), IX, 483; BPP, Report of Departmental Committee to Inquire into the Desirability of Regulations, under Section 4 of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1899, for Milk and Cream, 1901 (Cd 484, 491), XXX, 371.
32 33 34 35

P. Budin, Commission municipale dtude de lalimentation par le lait, rapport general (1897). Anon., op cit. (1903), pp. 769-907. ibid., p. 793. ibid., and: Socit de mdecine publique, sance du 22 avril 1901, in J. Ogier and F. Bordas,

Dangers que prsente pour la sant publique la vente du lait crm, Recueil des Travaux du Comit Consultatif dHygine 31 (1901), pp. 25-36.
36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., pp. 794-95. ibid. ibid. ibid., pp. 796-97. The 1901 regulations in Britain did define skimmed milk as having total solids of 9.0 per cent Anon, op cit. (1903), pp. 769-907. ibid, 793-95. Deuxime Congrs International pour la Rpression des Fraudes Alimentaires et Pharmaceutiques, Paris, La Laiterie et les Industries de la Ferme 19, 21, pp. 162-63. Comit Consultatif dHygine Publique, Recueil des Travaux du Comit Consultatif dHygine Revue dHygine et de Police Sanitaire (1882), pp. 590-2; The Analyst 7 (1882), p. 186. See in particular Anon., op cit. (1903), pp. 769-907. Cited in M. Robin, La sant des vaches laitires et la production du lait Paris, Revue dHygine Prior to this the police used lactometers for testing and often poured milk into the gutter if it C. Girard, Le commerce de lait Paris, Revue dHygine et de Police Sanitaire (1889), pp. 316-319. One of the best-known writers on adulteration, A.W. Blyth, based his 1876 Dictionary of hygiene Food & Sanitation (10 February, 1894), p. 47.

or over.
41 42 43

1909 (1910).
44 45

Publique de France et des Actes Officiels de lAdministration Sanitaire 20 (1881), pp. 107-8.
46 47 48

et de Police Sanitaire (1891), pp. 587-600.

49

appeared to be adulterated. J.A. Wanklyn, Milk-analysis: a practical treatise (1874), p. 9.

50 51

and public health on Ambroise-Auguste Tardieus three volume Dictionnaire dhygine publique (1852-54).
52

28

53 54

Food & Sanitation (27 January, 1894), p. 25 For more on the battles between Somerset House and professional analysts, see M. French

and J. Phillips, Cheated not poisoned? Food regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875-1938 (2000), pp. 4045.
55 56 57 58

Food & Sanitation (12 May, 1894). Food & Sanitation (26 May, 1894), p. 161. Food & Sanitation (21 July, 1894), p. 226. M. Bouffet and T. Tissier, Vente de laits crms, Recueil des Travaux du Comit Consultatif ibid. Ogier and Bordas, op. cit., pp. 25-36. ibid. Bacon and Cassels, op. cit., p. 629. Dubuc, op. cit., p. 266. For more detail see French and Phillips, op. cit.; J. Phillips and M. French, Adulteration and

dHygine 31 (1901), pp. 19-24.

59 60 61 62 63 64

food law, 1899-1939, Twentieth Century British History 9 (1998), pp. 350-69; idem., State regulation and the hazards of milk, 1900-1939, Social History of Medicine 12 (1999), pp. 371-88.
65 66

Food & Sanitation (17 February, 1894), p. 56. National Archives: MH/80/5. MacFadden to Newsholme, 28 April 1914, Control of milk Food & Sanitation (26 October, 1895), p. 324. National Archives: MAF 52/10, File A/22021/1911. E.G. Haygarth-Brown, 20 November J. Liverseege, Adulteration and analysis of food and drugs (1932), pp. 40, 58, 197. For details of

adulteration. Manchester system.

67 68

1911, Memorandum on the law relating to the sale of milk.

69

Hunt v. Richardson, see: Kings Bench 2 (1916), pp. 446-75, Law Times 115 (1916), pp. 114-24, and Times Law Reports 32 (1916), pp. 560-69; for Grigg v. Smith: Times Law Reports 33 (1917), pp. 54142, and Law Times 117 (1917), pp. 477-79.
70 71

National Archives: MH 56/110. J.H. Maggs, The organization of United Dairies (Ltd), in L.A. Rogers and K.D. Lenoir (eds)

Proceedings of the Worlds Dairy Congress, Washington DC, October 2, 3, Philadelphia PA, October 4, Syracuse NY, October 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 1923 (Washington DC, 1924), Volume I, p. 241; B. Davies, The nations milk supply: its hygienic production and control (1933).

29

72

L.B. Bacon and J.M. Cassals, The milk supply of Paris, Rome and Berlin, Quarterly Journal of W.H. Fraser, The coming of the mass market, 1850-1914 (1981); G. Shaw, The evolution and

Economics 51 (1937), pp. 626-648.

73

impact of large-scale retailing in Britain, in J. Benson and G. Shaw (eds) The evolution of retail systems, c. 1800-1914 (1992), pp. 135-165; J. Benson and G. Shaw (eds) The retailing industry. Volume 2: the coming of the mass market 1800-1945 (1999).
74 75 76

A. Jenkins, Drinka Pinta: the story of milk and the industry that serves it (1970). Bacon and Cassals, op cit., pp. 629-630. For a commentary on nutritionally inadequate processed foods and their consequences for

health, see J.C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishmans food: a history of five centuries of the British diet (1959), Chapter 22; but note the corrective discussion, based on careful scholarship, in D.J. Oddy, From plain fare to fusion food: British diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (2003), Chapters 3 and 6.
77 78 79
80

M. Dupuis, Natures perfect food (2002). P.J. Atkins, Early experiments with school milk in Britain, 1900-34, forthcoming (2005). Bacon and Cassels, op. cit., p. 629. P.J. Atkins, Milk consumption and tuberculosis in Britain, 1850-1950, in A. Fenton (ed.), Order

and disorder: the health implications of eating and drinking in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (2000), pp. 83-95.
81

P.J. Atkins, The pasteurization of England: the science, culture and health implications of

milk processing, 1900-1950, in D. Smith and J. Phillips (eds), Food, science, policy and regulation in the twentieth century: international and comparative perspectives (2000), pp. 37-51.