Life, 1913-08-14 · page 30 of 40
Life — August 14, 1913 — page 30: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains satirical commentary on early 20th-century food safety anxieties, particularly regarding milk production. **The Hippo Cartoon**: A humorous image of a hippopotamus refusing to bathe, claiming it roughens her skin and causes freckles. This is a nonsensical joke playing on vanity—the humor lies in applying human beauty concerns to an animal. **The "Milk" Essay** by Judson M. Hinchthone: This is the page's main satire. It mocks the proliferation of milk classifications and scientific pasteurization processes that had recently emerged. The author ironically celebrates "scientific progress" while criticizing how modern treatments (pasteurization, inspection, certification) had actually made milk *worse*—now it spoils and becomes undrinkable rather than naturally souring into useful buttermilk. The satire targets the tension between scientific modernization and practical results: consumers faced confusing product varieties and arguably inferior outcomes compared to traditional raw milk. The piece ridicules how modern science created problems it then claimed to solve, and how "milk" without a qualifier had become meaningless.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“Do YOU NEVER BATHE, MISS HIPPO?” “No INDEED, IT ROUGHENS MY SKIN SO TERRIBLY AND—I FRECKLE, 700.” Milk O NCE upon a time there was some- thing called Milk. It was gen- erally liked. People went so far as to say that it was not only useful as food, but palatable as well, and was en- joyed by persons of all ages. But that was long ago. Many of us cannot re- i] member how long ago it was. We have never known any Milk like that. Milk to-day is a very awful thing. It is full of very bad bacteria, so full that we often wonder how the good bacteria find room to dwell in their own home. And Milk is of many kinds. There is raw milk, par- boiled or pasteurized milk, inspected milk, certified milk, fermillac, bacillac, and others too numerous to mention. We should hesitate to accept anything labeled just “ Milk.” It might be from a natural cow—a cow that had never been injected with tuberculin, a healthy cow that just fed on grass in the meadow, was milked by hand both night and morning, and had the milk strained from a tin pail into a tin pan, from which it was poured into a bowl and so fed to the children, This presents rather a dreadful picture, so we will not dwell on it. Let us instead turn to the Milk of ‘science, which any intelligent person can recognize very easily. Of course the name Raw Milk exists, but it would be a piece of pure stupidity in this age of scientific living for anybody to think of supplying simple, fresh, cooled raw milk direct from the cow. It is not to be thought of. It is unscientific. Almost everything worth while can be accomplished by scientific progress and enlightenment. But not that. Oh, dear me, no! Then, as good raw milk is not to be thought of, we have Pz) og next that delectable product called pasteurized milk, which is scientifically parboiled. Of course we have nothing ty do with the things that are parboiled in it, things like visiting germs, dirt, and other substances that will not divulge their identity after the parboiling. Inspected milk has a very aristocratic sound, and vies with certified milk in commanding our admiration for the exclusion of most of the germs that milk is really heir to. Consequently, when this modern invention is a day old in ordinary temperatures, where in the right nature of hegie LATA c+ The Militant’s Husband: HOW RESTFUL THE WATER LOOKS things it would ferment and be- come nice sour milk or butter- milk, it putrefies instead, and be- comes offensive, unfit for any purpose whatever. So for the old- fashioned sour milk we are forced to accept the artificially- soured milks of the laboratory. And, oh, my, ain’t they sour? Did you ever try to drink them? Well, don't. And don't go speaking about Milk as if there were any such thing. If you have any education at all, specify what you mean. You can easily see that “ Milk” without an adjective before it means nothing. Judson M. Hinchthone.