Swill milk scandal

The Swill milk scandal was a major adulterated food scandal in New York in the 1850s. The New York Times reported an estimate that 8,000 infants died one year from swill milk.

It is named swill milk because cows were fed swill which was residual mash from nearby distilleries. The milk was whitened with plaster of Paris, thickened with starch and eggs, and hued with molasses.

After the extraction of alcohol from the macerated grain, the residual mash still contains nutrients, and therefore it was an economical advantage to keep cows stabled near distilleries and feed them with swill.

The New York Academy of Medicine carried out an examination and established the connection of swill milk with the increased infant mortality in the city. The topic of swill milk was also well exposed in pamphlets and caricatures of the time.

In May 1858, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper did a landmark exposé of the distillery-dairies of Manhattan and Brooklyn that marketed so-called swill milk that came from cows fed on distillery waste and then adulterated with water, eggs, flour, and other ingredients that increased the volume and masked the adulteration. Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once they were tied, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases. These cows were fed on boiling distillery waste, often leaving the cows with rotting teeth and other maladies. The milk drawn from the cows was routinely adulterated with water, rotten eggs, flour, burnt sugar and other adulterants with the finished product then marketed falsely as "pure country milk" or "Orange County Milk".

In an editorial published at the height of the scandal, the New York Times described swill milk as a "bluish, white compound of true milk, pus and dirty water, which, on standing, deposits a yellowish, brown sediment that is manufactured in the stables attached to large distilleries by running the refuse distillery slops through the udders of dying cows and over the unwashed hands of milkers..."

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