When's the last time you had a glass of cow's milk?
Americans are drinking a lot less milk than they used to. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, the average person drinks 18 gallons a year. Back in the 1970s it was more like 30 gallons a year. We once hoisted a glass with dinner, soaked our breakfast cereal or dipped into the occasional milkshake. This habitual milk drinking was no accident.
It started in the 1800s, when Americans moved from farms to cities. "First, you had to have the rise of milk trains that would bring milk from the countryside. That milk was refrigerated with ice," says Melanie DuPuis, a professor at Pace University and author of Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink.
Before that, she says, milk was not a reliable source of nutrition for city dwellers. Nor was it all that safe. In the 1850s there was a major scandal in New York after thousands of babies died from drinking swill milk — the stuff that came from sickly cows, animals fed from the waste of city grain-alcohol distilleries.
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