Episode Details

In 1850s New York City, an estimated 8,000 infants died in a single year, and contaminated milk was blamed. This episode explains how the swill milk scandal happened. The city was growing fast, clean water was scarce, country milk was too expensive for most families, and distilleries were producing huge amounts of leftover grain mash. Distillers kept cows in sheds next door and fed them that hot swill. The cows were confined in filthy stalls and got sick, and the thin bluish milk they produced was doctored with plaster of Paris, flour, eggs and molasses and sold as pure country milk.

We follow reformer Robert M. Hartley's early warnings, the New York Academy of Medicine's findings, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper's graphic 1858 exposé. We show how Tammany Hall alderman Michael Tuomey, later nicknamed Swill Milk Tuomey, ran a sham Board of Health inquiry that cleared the distillers, and how public anger led to the milk regulations of 1862, among America's first food safety laws.

• Why New York's growth and its distilleries created the swill milk trade
• The conditions inside distillery dairies
• How distillers doctored milk to make it look wholesome
• Frank Leslie's exposé and the role of illustrated journalism
• Tammany Hall's cover-up and the 1862 milk regulations