“Pure Milk Is Better Than Purified Milk”

This article explains how pasteurization—with few outspoken political supporters during this period—first became a primary milk purification strategy in Chicago and why eight years passed between pasteurization’s initial introduction into law and the city’s adoption of full mandatory pasteurization. It expands the current focus on the political agreement to pasteurize to include the organizational processes involved in incorporating pasteurization into both policy and practice. It shows that the decision to pasteurize did not occur at a clearly defined point but instead evolved over time as a consequence of the interplay of political interest groups, state-municipal legal relations, and the merging of different organizational practices. Such an approach considerably complicates and expands existing accounts of how political interests and agreements shaped pasteurization and milk purification policies and practice.