"DIRTY MILK."

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8878, 12 November 1907, Page 7

"DIRTY MILK."

Under the above heading a correspondent signing /himself "Australian," writing from Masterton to a Wellington city contemporary says: —-For a long time we have had to put up with milk so dirty in appearance and smell that our appetites for it and everything it is used for is being entirely taken away. Dr. Hosking has lately taken advantage of the Press to voice his experience and opinion of the matter, and his complaints are so exactly what we ourselves have been making that I ask you to permit me space to lift my voice in the same cause. "Milk supplied to us, at 7.30 a.m. is vtrging on sour. On boiling it, a smell bordering 011 a horrible stench is given off from it. ' A thick chalky sediment forms at the bottom, so that even with brisk stirring it is impossible to prevent it burning badly, jiven when scalding by setting the jug in another vessel of boiling water this thick sediment occurs. "We raver drain our milk jug down to its dregs, because of the black gritty secretions we find there. A cup of boiled wholesome new milk has a flavour of nutty sweetness—

but a draught of that daily supplied to us in Masterton has the flavour of l a stench. Dr. A. Hosking says that he has examined, under a microscope, some of the dirt strained from the milk through muslin, and that'it was,' roughly speaking, 'cowhair, dung, dirt and scales from unwashed udders, and in bad cases scabs and pus from sores on bad teats.' "Is it any wonder that members of my household have .at various times exclaimed 'the milk smells like the cow yard,' and again 'it smells like bad mushrooms.' Delicate health makes me almost entirely dependent" on milk and milk foods as a diet, yet the Masterton milk causes me to sicken against it. I confess 1 have sometimes waxed satirical when reading the glowing and boastful accounts of our dairying facilities and abilities; the scientific inspections End the strict laws against supplying bad or impure milk; while during the four years I have been house-keeping in New Zealand I have longed in vain for sweet, rich, yellow, nutty flavoured new milk of my remembrance in other colonies. "Staying at one of the first-class hotels some time ago in Wellington, I had to call attention to the fact that the milk on the breakfast table was just turning sour. The attendant told me with a worried look that that was the milk they had to use, an&that it was frequently sour now. Agfiin, at a very first-class hotel in the Hawke's Bay district the milk having soured we had to be content with condensed milk for our porridge, tea and coffee! Is all we read and hear regarding the careful inspection of milk and dairy only theorising, or is it ever carried into practical effect?"