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Advertisement for
Chevrolet automobiles (above)
From Ladies’Home Journal, September 1956
Trips to the supermarket, usually by homemakers in family
automobiles, replaced home milk delivery.
Newspaper advertisement for
pasteurization, 1930s (above, top)
Published by Oakhurst Dairy Company,
Portland,Maine
Courtesy of Oakhurst Dairy
Milk consumers did not quickly accept pasteurization or
even believe that it was beneficial. Decades after milk pasteurization
became possible, not all localities had it. |
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| PASTEURIZATION,
HEALTHY BABIES,
AND A NEW KIND
OF BUYING |
| Over the course of a century, milk
and the way it traveled from dairy
to doorstep were transformed.
After pasteurization and government
oversight put an end to
deadly milk-borne epidemics,
especially among children, milk
gradually came to be considered
an essential part of the American
diet.Now a capital-intensive, mechanized
dairy industry produced
clean, homogenized, and standardized
milk products in disposable
containers.
Suburban sprawl increasingly
made the daily milk route inefficient
and unprofitable. By the
1960s, the housewife in the family
car had replaced the milkman on
his delivery route. Supermarkets,
refrigerators, and affordable automobiles
made the milkman obsolete,
and home milk delivery as a
reassuring staple of city and village
life receded into memory. |
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A typical supermarket of the 1950s
(above)
From The Hood Story: A Century of Progress in
the New England Dairy Industry, circa 1953
Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities
Supermarkets represented a new kind of buying and
selling that depended on self-service featuring prepackaged,
heavily advertised food products under one large
roof, often miles from where the customers lived. What a
difference from the small, local specialty shops and home
delivery of the past!
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