The long genealogy of quality in the British drinking-milk sector

Abstract

Throughout most of the last 150 years milk in Britain has been an example of modernity in food production. It became a mass-produced, industrial product, with high volume, rapid tur nover, but limited choice. To modify Henry Ford’s humorous dictum, you could have any kind of milk you wanted as long as it was white and about 3% fat (Ford, 1923: 72). It is only in the last two or three decades that drinking-milk in Britain has become differentiated into the many different lines we see today: reduced fat, sweetened, flavoured, for tified, and so on. The pur pose of the paper is to look at the evolution of milk quality since the late nineteenth centur y and to suggest that today’s milk is the result of many histor ical developments. These include the breeding of the modern dair y cow, the changing organization of the milk industry, advances in processing technology, the identification of bacteriolog ical risk, and the increased involvement of state-inspired regulation and the law. Until 1993 the British experience was very different from that in other countries but the regulator y framework of the European Union has encouraged convergence. It remains to be seen whether Brexit will open a new chapter in British milk quality.