Dirty Milk and the Ontology of ‘Clean'

What about dirt and disease in food history? Their under-emphasis in the standard texts seems curious in view of their crucial role in the development of quality definitions, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when dirt was seen as one of nature’s principal transgressions. ¹ Dirty food, in particular, possessed the most visceral of nature’s qualities and was increasingly associated with affective repulsion.