Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Skimming milk

I found a few references in The Times archive to problems caused by an overproduction of milk in England in the summer of 1957 – thousands of gallons were reported to have been poured over fields or into excavations in Wales & the West of England or into quarries in Devon.

The problem lay with too much skimmed milk – a by-product of butter manufacture – which had very little value except as pig food at a few pennies per gallon, but even the animals could not make pig enough of themselves to soak it all up that summer.

The response of the Milk Marketing Board was an advertising campaign to encourage more human consumption of whole milk. A campaign fronted by lively, pretty, healthy, athletic-looking, blonde Zoe Newton was judged a success, with evidence that young people in their teens & twenties had begun to drink more milk, & even that “Some of the dance halls now find milk bars a popular & profitable line”

I wonder what went wrong in the years since then?