Homogenization – Manipulated ‘Milk’ and the Loss of the Creamline
November 22nd, 2011 | Our Food, Raw Milk, Anne Mendelson, big ag, consumer, corporation, cream, creamline, culture, Dairy, homogenization, industrial, industry, manipulation, milk, quality, raw milk

Skimming cream image from http://chiotsrun.com. Click image for old-fashioned method of making butter.
The following is from the chapter The Story of Modern Milk. By the way there are lots of great recipes in Anne Mendelson’s book as well.
Brave New Milk
The first breakthrough, in the 1880s, was the mechanical separation of cream by centrifuge, far more thorough than any hand skimming. The next came in 1890, when a University of Wisconsin dairy chemist invented the eponymous Babcock test for measuring the precise fat content of milk — at the time, the chief indicator of quality. These two advances led to intense growth in the butter industry, which became the most lucrative destination for milk. Old-style farmstead buttermaking declined, while dairying regions became dotted with small factories called creameries that bought up shipments of high-Babcock-score milk and produced butter from cream so efficiently centrifuged that, like the cream my parents remembered buying in tiny Creamery, Pennsylvania, it had to be spooned rather than poured.