How NYC save America's children (New York, Roosevelt: neighborhoods, income, living)

[Cida]

The New York Times had a Magazine issue on longevity, and there was a great article by Steven Johnson about health innovations over the years. In some cases, I knew the basics, but there was all sorts of interesting details. For instance, we all know that pasteurized milk dates back to Pasteur, but there was a story about how it was urged on all children. That's where NYC comes in. This is just a small bit, but I hope people read the whole article.


How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life
Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.
The density of industrial cities like New York had made cow’s milk far deadlier than it was in earlier times.
How did milk go from being a “liquid poison” — as Frank Leslie called it — to the icon of health and vitality that it became in the 20th century?
In the United States, it would finally make a difference thanks to a much wider cast of characters, most memorably a department-store impresario named Nathan Straus.
Dairy producers resisted pasteurization not just because it added an additional cost to the production process but also because they were convinced, with good reason, that it would hurt their sales. And so Straus recognized that changing popular attitudes toward pasteurized milk was an essential step. In 1892, he created a milk laboratory where sterilized milk could be produced at scale. The next year, he began opening what he called milk depots in low-income neighborhoods around the city, which sold the milk below cost. Straus also funded a pasteurization plant on Randall’s Island that supplied sterilized milk to an orphanage there where almost half the children had perished in only three years. Nothing else in their diet or living conditions was altered other than drinking pasteurized milk. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped by 14 percent.
Straus’s advocacy attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered an investigation into the health benefits of pasteurization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/m...life-span.html

[Cida]

No one thought this was interesting?

[GGG2020]

That is interesting! I work with historical maps, and there were a LOT of milk depots in Manhattan in the 1920s or so. So this is why there were so many!