1 Atkins, P.J. (2010) Liquid Materialities: a History of Milk, Science and the Law Farnham: Ashgate ISBN: 9780754679219 (hbk) and 9780754698197 (e-book), 334pp, http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754679219 Chapter 4 Expertise 4.1 Analytical Expertise: Concentrated or Distributed? The subject of milk analysis was one of which every member thought he knew something more than anyone else … .1 The vast literature on expertise is complex and riven by the assumptions and disciplinary perspectives that have loaded so much meaning on to this one word.2 Recently Harry Collins has argued that attempting to understand expertise is the foundation of a ‘third wave’ of science studies, which seeks answers to the question ‘how do you make decisions based on scientific knowledge before there is an absolute scientific consensus?’3 He asserts that this is ‘the pressing intellectual problem of the age’ because of the recent widespread questioning of scientific authority.4 He is referring here to the alleged undermining of the authoritative voice of ‘experts’ in food scares such as BSE or genetically modified organisms.5 Ulrich Beck goes further; for him it is the challenge to the whole notion of expertise that sets the tone of the latest phase of modernity − the ‘risk society.’6 1 Hehner 1891. 2 For the work of psychologists and others, see Ericsson et al. 2006, Crease and Selinger 2006. 3 Collins and Evans 2002: 236. For critiques and a response, see Gorman 2002, Jasanoff 2002, Rip 2003, Wynne 2003, Collins and Evans 2003. 4 Collins is a realist. To him, expertise is substantive, experts can be identified and their expertise is a matter of a social process of acquisition. This is different from relational interpretations, which are contextual. Collins and Evans 2007. 5 For more on the relationship between science and expertise, see Nowotny et al. 2001. 6 Beck 1992, 1999, Mythen 2004. 2 Collins’s waves and the risk society of Beck and Giddens, while attractive for the bold and far-reaching vision they portray of expertise, both lack historical texture. For a sounder foundation in this regard, I prefer the insights on expertise in two splendid collections edited respectively by MacLeod and by Rabier. On society’s attitudes to trust and risk, I also value the thoughts of several French historians providing interesting interpretations.7 Madeleine Ferrières is one, writing on food scares and the lack of public trust in city retailers before the Second Empire.8 Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is another.9 He shows that Beck-type risks existed as far back as the nineteenth century in France. These were ‘new’ risks with incalculable consequences, mostly resulting from technological change in the industrial revolution, but including also environmental hazards such as the impact of deforestation on climate and the potential contamination of the groundwater around the capital by faecal matter. Expertise was involved, not only through scientists advising Paris’s Conseil de Salubrité or giving evidence in court. There were also popular commentators articulating caution about technical progress that was very similar to today’s ‘precautionary principle.’ Timothy Mitchell’s perspective is also historical but somewhat different in its theoretical context. He argues that experts were brokers of knowledge in the processes of modernization and development, and, as such, performed an important controlling function for the direction of both technoscience and the economy. For him, the quantity and quality of knowledge was not necessarily changed by their intervention; their achievement instead was one of redistribution: a process of removals and transfers to new sites.10 For food, the issues at hand in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in Britain and France, were, first, the indeterminacy of compositional expectations, second, the ferocious arguments that erupted around how standards (agreed or imposed) could be solidified into the form of regulations and then legally enforced, and third, the hazard that milk presented in terms of infectious disease. The present chapter will begin by recounting 7 MacLeod 2003, Rabier 2007. 8 Ferrières 2006: 302. 9 Fressoz 2007. 10 Mitchell 2002. 3 a major controversy about expertise and professional credibility in the eyes of the law. It was a long-running dispute between government scientists and local authority analysts in which expertise was seen as ‘a relational attribution in which you acquire the status of an expert by virtue of your position in a network of social relations.’11 Michel Callon would have us call such debates ‘hybrid forums’, where laboratory expertise mixes with ‘recherche de plein air.’12 He argues that both knowledge and democracy benefit from the controversies that form here like storms at a meteorological front. In today’s extensive debates about the quality of food and drink, which have increasingly taken on the guise of deliberative democracy, the interests of the consumercitizen are at least represented, even if they are frequently overshadowed by the corporate power of the food industry; but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such voices were subdued.13 In fact, more often that not, we must ask in whose real interests food laws and regulations were established: those of the public or those of certain sections of the food producers, processors, manufacturers and retailers?14 Expertise in the regulatory situations under scrutiny in this chapter and the next was a set of constructions of goal-orientated knowledge that was deployed in laboratories, in courts and in the corridors of power, in order to achieve the insertion of rational ordering and standardization into the realm of the food supply. But who were the experts: the government chemists or the public analysts? Or was chemical expertise distributed widely among actors, including those in the trade? There certainly seems to have been a sense in the nineteenth century that scientific authority in this area was fragile and open to challenge. This was true of the anonymous skill and considerable enterprise of the adulterators. The Scholefield Committee heard evidence along these lines in 1856: Hitherto the progress of legislation has not kept pace with the ingenuity of fraud, which has not scrupled to avail itself of every improvement in chemistry or the arts which could subserve its purpose.15 11 Evans 2008: 282. 12 Callon and Rip 1992, Callon et al. 2001. 13 For more on consumer-citizensip, see Chapter 7. 14 Stanziani 2003a. 15 Scholefield Committee 1856: 8. 4 As we noted in Chapter 3, the chemical means of analysis in the mid-nineteenth century were time-consuming, expensive and uncertain. Both scientists and traders therefore employed the measurement of risen cream and the specific gravity of milk for the practical, everyday detection of adulteration. Both they and the adulterators knew very well that, with careful attention to detail, cream could be skimmed and water added to simulate the properties of genuine milk; so detection was not easy. This point about the ease of simulating genuine milk continued to be made for at least a further fifty years, until the coming of corporate laboratories in the early twentieth century led to a redefinition of expertise and of the skills required of an expert. The detection of adulteration is becoming more and more difficult, and is due, in the first place, to the astuteness of the vendors of the adulterated articles, and, in the second, to the more highly scientific means now practised … The addition of separated milk to new milk has become almost a fine art with some milk purveyors, who, although they are known to receive large quantities of separated milk, which they do not sell, yet mix it so skilfully that it is impossible to bring them within the four corners of the law. 16 The struggle for expert status in judging dairy products was not just between professional laboratory-based chemists. There were other actors in the various food trades who thought that their traditional knowledge − what Steven Shapin calls prudential expertise − was superior.17 Organoleptic skills were especially prized among dairymen, with taste and smell being important in detecting signs of the onset of souring. There were similarities here with, say, the wine industry in France, where use of the human senses continued to be at the forefront of expertise, despite the development of an organic chemistry as complex and insightful as that for milk.18 In Britain, product quality was increasingly linked in our period to a series of centrally defined rules that were negotiated between civil servants and representatives of the food industry. These were empowered by a combination of laws and official regulations, which were then tested and enforced by the courts, starting at the local level in the magistrate’s courts and, in a small number of cases, appealed to the High Court. As a 16 Bannington 1915. 17 Shapin 2003: 293. 18 Atkins and Stanziani 2008. 5 result, commercial and administrative rules and legal debate were inevitably bound together; but it is important to repeat and emphasise the contestation that was built into such a system. Because of disagreements between experts of the same background and between the expertises of traders, scientists, administrators and lawyers, our period has a rich literature and series of case law precedents to draw upon for research. Since I have brought up the differences between the French and British experience, this is a convenient point to press further the notion of locally-specific meanings of expertise. We saw in Chapter 2 that scientists were often aware of key literature in foreign languages, and the expert witnesses in the Schrumpf case had even gone to the expense of transatlantic travel in order to broaden their experience. There was also, from the 1880s onwards, a circuit of international congresses at which papers were read and the experiences of laboratory and administrative successes were shared. And yet there remained cultural, intellectual and political barriers that were responsible for divergent paths in the evolution of the science and technology relevant to our story. The purchase of locally marketed laboratory equipment, especially glassware, was one limiting factor, and another was the variation of local legal frameworks. As a result, we need to consider contingency in our histories of commodity expertise. The second part of this chapter will look at how chemical expertise and commercial interests fed into a political debate about milk standards. Although the British regulations formulated in 1901 were long-lasting in their impact, nevertheless deliberation about market milk continued throughout the twentieth century. This was partly philosophical, about the relationship between food and nature, and partly about the degree to which the practical methods used by the food industry to make profit were socially and commercially acceptable. 4.2 Somerset House The Excise laboratory does not enjoy a high repute amongst chemists … I do not think that any good could arise from having official referees in those disputed cases. I have had some experience of the kind myself, and I can promise you that if you were to elect any such body, 6 and give them powers of this description, you would be giving them a license to blunder and to disregard the general views of chemists. 19 The negative view of government science displayed in the quotation above was already established among private analysts as early as the 1850s, as a result of occasional disagreements about the composition of dutiable goods. By the 1870s, when analysts were increasingly being employed under the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, a clash of wills had emerged with the state chemists.20 This was partly institutional in origin and partly the result of a disagreement about the nature of expertise and the consequence of decisions about the ‘natural’ composition of foods. By far the most volatile body of chemists in the 1870s and 1880s were the public analysts, no doubt because they were a newly constituted body that had yet to achieve acceptance and develop a self-confidence in their role. These ‘practising chemists’ felt they were under attack from the outset, and were especially angry about the evidence of Augustus Voelcker to the Read Committee in June 1874, when he said that he doubted there were more than a dozen chemists in the whole country capable of carrying out the duties of public analyst properly. He went on to claim that a good deal of mischief has been done by the so-called analyses, and the food analysts have been the greatest enemies to the Food Act … Many are very incompetent analysts; they have not had sufficient chemical training, nor any experience in analysis, and therefore their statements are sometimes of a very flippant and unwarranted character, which has done a great deal of harm in rendering the Act contemptible in the eyes of practical men. 21 This pointed condemnation was uppermost in the minds of those who shortly afterwards, on 7 August 1874, met to create the Society of Public Analysts and give credibility to a new profession.22 Their agenda was decidedly defensive: ‘the refutation of 19 Read Committee 1874: Q.6523, Wanklyn, referring to plans for a chemical court of appeal at Somerset House. 20 Scholefield Committee 185455: Q.346, Hassall, Q.2212, Wakley. 21 Read Committee 1874: QQ.5589, 5861, 5600. 22 In 1953 it was renamed the Society for Analytical Chemistry and in 1980 it was incorporated into the Royal Society of Chemistry. 7 unjust imputations’ and ‘the repudiation of proposed measures of interference with our professional position and independence.’23 The bitterest controversy to erupt was between the government’s chemists and analysts employed by local authorities. It lasted for 30 years. 24 All aspects of the quality of food and drugs were at stake but the main flash point was milk. In essence, the debate was about the composition of ‘genuine’ milk and who had the moral and legal duty to declare that a deviation from ‘natural’ milk constituted a fraud. It was also a technical argument about methods of analysis and the identification of thresholds of acceptable composition. These are themes that flow naturally from the discussion in the previous chapter and they will now be considered in the sharper light of legal enforcement. The ‘Excise laboratory’ referred to in the opening quotation was the state’s official laboratory, located in Somerset House, London.25 It was founded as the Board of Inland Revenue Chemical Laboratory (1842-1894), and was later renamed the Government Laboratory (1894-1911), and then the Department of the Government Chemist (19091959), before being absorbed by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 26 As the result of a recommendation by the Read Committee, the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act granted it powers as a chemical Court of Appeal, sitting in judgment upon disputed samples referred to it by the magistrates’ courts.27 Although the number of these ‘reference samples’ submitted was small, the proportion of disagreement between the government chemists and the local public analysts was substantial, leading to friction. In the case of milk, 33.1 per cent of those certificates issued by council analysts to indicate adulteration were challenged by Somerset House in the period 187690 (Table 4.1).28 Professional 23 Chirnside and Hamence 1974: 8. 24 For a flavour of the vituperation, see the correspondence of July and August 1884 between Richard Bannister of Somerset House and Alfred Allen, analyst of Sheffield, reproduced in the Analyst 19, 1884: 23140. 25 The laboratory was established here in 1852 and in 1897 moved to Clement’s Inn Passage. Pilcher 1919, Hammond and Egan 1992, Hammond 1992. 26 The Inland Revenue laboratory and the Board of Customs and Excise laboratories merged in 1894. Hammond and Egan 1992. 27 Read Committee 1874: 248. Strictly speaking, the sample was sent to Somerset House by the magistrate and not on appeal by the defendant. 28 Foster Committee 1894: QQ.552, 555, Bannister. 8 opinions were being contradicted on a regular basis and here we have an instance of expertise being undermined. Relations between the two sides were inclined ‘more towards hostility than towards co-operation’, and disputes frequently spilled over into the trade press and sometimes even into the popular prints.29 Enmity developed at a personal level, particularly in the government laboratory, where Civil Service rules prevented the mounting of a public defence against critics.30 This bitterness persisted for a generation until the protagonists from the 1870s to the 1890s had retired. Table 4.1 Analytical Disagreements (Per cent of Reference Samples) Between the Government Laboratory and Local Authority Analysts Years 18761880 18815 188690 18915 18961900 Samples 108 199 212 233 259 % 26.9 41.7 28.3 11.6 29.7 Years 19015 190610 191114 18761914 Samples 498 478 328 2315 % 17.3 15.5 11.0 20.4 Sources: Reports of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Report of the Principal Chemist, Government Laboratory, NA: DSIR 26. One problem was that, until 1901, there was no legislation, nor any official regulation legally defining milk, whether in words or in terms of scientific measurement. As a result, the government chemists were very reluctant to label any sample ‘adulterated’ if there was any chance that it might have achieved its abnormal composition through natural processes or accidentally. As the wide variability of the constituents of honest milk became better known, their early caution seems to have been justified. For a purchaser to be prejudiced within the meaning of this clause, it is necessary that the article sold should contain some admixture of a foreign substance not specified at the time of sale; and therefore that the purchaser is not legally prejudiced when the article sold is of low quality but genuine … It has been urged that samples should be judged by those of average quality, which the purchaser might reasonably expect to get: but this was evidently not the view of our 29 B.D. 1908: 158. 30 Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 16. 9 legislators, for Parliament deliberately abstained from fixing limits of quality for natural products, whether in a raw or prepared state.31 One reason for Somerset House’s confidence it is own position was that they had undertaken empirical research into the natural variations of milk composition (Table 4.2), and this provided the basis for an evidence-based methodology.32 As a result, they rejected the normative approach of the Society of Public Analysts and refused to engage in academic debate about appropriate laboratory methods of analysis. We have felt ourselves unable to adopt the ‘definitions’ and ‘limits’ for genuineness laid down by the Society of Public Analysts, for the simple but all-sufficient reason that they are not borne out by our own analyses of hundreds of samples known to be genuine. In this view we are supported by many eminent analysts, including some of the members of the society in question, although that society still nominally adheres to the ‘limits’ laid down.33 Table 4.2 Somerset House Analyses of Milk Composition, 1876. Specific gravity 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Average 1031.02 1032.95 1030.64 1031.96 1030.61 1031.62 1031.61 1031.30 Cream (%) 9.17 7.50 12.10 6.69 9.89 11.35 9.90 9.33 Solids-non-fat (%) 9.46 9.31 9.51 9.30 9.39 9.63 8.98 9.41 Fat (%) 4.30 2.50 4.96 2.80 4.39 4.11 3.58 3.99 Key: [1] whole milkings of 40 cows in the counties of Derby, Devon, Oxford, Surrey and Kent; [2] first part and [3] middle part of milking respectively of each of 14 cows in the London parishes of Brompton, Chelsea and St Pancras; [4] first part and [5] remainder of milking respectively of each of 19 cows in the counties of Devon, Stafford, Oxford, Surrey and Kent, and the parishes of Lewisham, Chelsea and St Pancras; [6] eight dairies each containing from three to 35 cows in the counties of Stafford and Oxford, and the parishes of Lewisham, Brompton, Chelsea and St Pancras; [7] six instances from churns from different localities immediately on their arrival in London, the sample being drawn in each case from three different depths of the churn. Source: National Archives: DSIR 26/134. 31 Bell 1884: 135. 32 NA: DSIR 26/134. 33 Local Government Board: Twelfth Report, 188283, P.P. 1883 (C.3778), xxviii.602. 10 Another factor in the official laboratory’s perceived arrogance was its solid establishment and long-standing reputation. In addition to dealing with samples referred by local magistrates, the Inland Revenue Laboratory was also responsible for analysing samples from various government departments, such as Customs and the India Office, and under other legislation they undertook the sampling that went with excise duty, for tobacco, beer and spirits. The total throughput of the Government Laboratory in the year 1894, for example, was 48,255 samples, making it one of the busiest enterprises on the Strand. This was with a staff of 57.34 Only 71 of the samples were the so-called ‘reference samples’ sent in by magistrates under the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, so this food adulteration work was a relatively small part of the overall Somerset House mission. Among the public analysts there were many outbursts against their protagonists. In 1874, for instance, while the Read Committee was still sitting, an editorial in the Chemical News declared that When we heard the Inland Revenue Laboratory at Somerset House suggested as the ultimate court of appeal we were disposed to think that the proposal was a joke intended for the columns of one of our comic contemporaries. 35 Later, M. Henry, editor of the journal Food and Sanitation, was highly critical.36 He spoke of ‘the existing wretched, ignorant, and utterly untrustworthy system of food analysis at Somerset House.’ It was a ‘poor, bungling department struggling to perform work for which it has not got the skill or knowledge.’ In his opinion, ‘scientifically the Somerset House chemists are dead, and there exists no shadow of an excuse for their remaining unburied.’37 Pearmain and Moor were more specifically condemnatory of what they regarded as a lax attitude to milk quality: ‘It is not too much to say that the disgraceful state of the milk industry in this country is fostered, if not actually caused by this ridiculously low standard.’38 34 Foster Committee 1894: Q.772. 35 Chemical News 30, 1874: 11. 36 Food and Sanitation 10 February 1894: 47. 37 Food and Sanitation 27 January 1894: 25. 38 Pearmain and Moor 1897: 1718. 11 Among those who preferred more measured language, six types of complaint were aired. First, the analysts working for the government were accused of being under-qualified and their knowledge of food chemistry was said to be limited to testing the strength of liquor.39 Second, while it was recognised that the milk samples they worked with were always sour, nevertheless their unique ‘maceration’ method of analysis was heavily criticized. Third, they were said to be far too generous to the perpetrators of fraud and to err of the side of caution when declaring their results. Fourth, Somerset House officials were said to be somewhat aloof and secretive, being unwilling, for instance, to discuss their methods with other scientists, apparently on Civil Service legal advice.40 Fifth, despite the available staff and resources, the government laboratory was censured for having made ‘but few fundamental contributions towards the rapid and brilliant advancement of food analysis.’41 The unspoken thought here was the widespread suspicion of centralized government services in the mid-nineteenth century; that they were both inefficient and intrusive. Finally, there was some debate about whether the legislation had ever intended the reference laboratory to have the final say. 42 Charles Heisch did not think so and pointed out that: Most magistrates act as if the certificates of the Somerset House officials were not only evidence, but final evidence. Now those of us who followed the stages of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, will all remember that when Sir H. Peek proposed to insert after Somerset House the words, ‘whose decision shall be final’, Mr Sclater-Booth, who had charge of the bill, refused to insert them, and when the matter was pressed to a division they were rejected by a large majority. Not only this, but Mr Booth declared in his place in Parliament, that he did not intend the Somerset House decision to be final, but that the analysts should both be subject to examination on oath in case they differed, and should each have the opportunity of justifying their decisions if they could. 43 It is true that Dr James Bell, Principal of the laboratory, set a low threshold to judge the genuineness of milk. For fat this was 2.5 per cent, well below the 3.0 per cent adopted 39 Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 15, Egan 1976: 110. 40 Dyer and Mitchell 1932.: 16. 41 B.D. 1908: 158. 42 Jago 1909: 231. 43 Heisch 1882: 14. 12 by most other analysts and the 3.6 per cent that was acknowledged by most commentators as being a good average of the actual output of healthy cows. Bell’s concern, he said, was for ‘justice.’ The spirit of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, in his opinion, and presumably that of his legal advisers, was not against milk that was poor in quality but not adulterated. The thin milk produced by malnourished cows could be sold legally, as could the milk of cows fed on watery material such as brewers’ grains, or from breeds that at certain times of year yielded milk that was exceptionally low in fat and other solids. As a result, a debate opened on whose rights were principally protected by the legislation: those of the consumer to purchase rich, whole milk, or those of the farmer not to be unjustly prosecuted. 44 Table 4.1 above shows the level of disagreement between the government and local authority experts. In the case of milk, it was close to half of reference samples in the early 1880s, remaining at between a quarter and a third up until the late 1890s. After that, the number of disputes fell as techniques of analysis converged and the relevant skills became better known and practised. The proportion of disagreements about the degree to which cream had been abstracted was more variable than that about the percentage of added water, partly because the accusation of something having been extracted was in a sense hypothetical. Throughout the period, watering remained the most common charge to press. In 1892 a letter was sent to Bell signed by ‘a very large number of public analysts’ in which they objected to the wording of the certificates issued by his laboratory. These had sometimes stated that the analysts in Somerset House ‘were unable to affirm that water has been added’, thereby giving the benefit of the doubt to the accused. 45 Faced with such a statement, magistrates not unnaturally felt obliged to dismiss the case immediately. This procedural problem went to the heart of the argument between the two sides because it seems that often there was no scientific disagreement about the results of their analyses; only their interpretation differed, as expressed on the certificates. What the public analysts wanted to be made clear to the courts was that Somerset House’s wording was consistent 44 Hill 1876: 46. 45 By 1894 this form of words had been abandoned. Foster Committee 1894: Q.1697, Bannister. 13 with the possibility of adulteration, giving the magistrate a clearer view of the balance of probabilities.46 After twenty years of hostilities, in the 1896 hearings of the Russell Committee, the Society of Public Analysts argued for the abolition of the Inland Revenue Laboratory and its replacement by a Board of Reference.47 This new institution would have been given the wider responsibility of defining food standards by publishing the allowable limits of chemical composition. The suggestion was scrutinized in depth by the Select Committee and it appeared in their final report in 1896 as a firm recommendation to government.48 Evidence on an earlier version of this idea, from Richard Bannister, Deputy Principal of the Revenue laboratory, however, had been somewhat negative at the 1894 hearings of the Foster Committee, emphasising that the proposed voting structure of the Board meant the possibility of the public analysts gaining control.49 The Board was never established but the new Sale of Food and Drugs Act (1899) did give powers to the Board of Agriculture to frame presumptive regulations, and this was a very important step for our history of milk. Bell retired in January 1894 and was replaced by Thomas Thorpe, who was Professor of Chemistry in the Royal College of Science and, like Bell, a Fellow of the Royal Society.50 He was brought in to oversee the amalgamation of the Inland Revenue and Customs laboratories and to introduce modern methods of investigative chemistry. 51 Defusing the dispute with analysts was also an objective. Thorpe immediately proved to be more pragmatic than Bell. In 1894, pre-dating the commencement of the Foster Committee, he raised the milk fat criterion from 2.5 to 2.75 per cent, and then to further to 3.0 per cent in 1899.52 Nevertheless, despite his best efforts, both he and his team continued to be vilified. An example is the statement to the 1896 Russell Committee by Frederick Lloyd, 46 Foster Committee 1894: Q.743. 47 Russell Committee 1896: 5012. 48 Russell Committee 1896: 524. 49 Foster Committee 1894: Q.887. 50 Bell had become Principal in 1875. He was President of the Institute of Chemistry, 1888-91. See Pilcher 1914: 90100. 51 Thorpe was appointed over the head of Richard Bannister, who had been with the laboratory for 31 years. Foster Committee 1894: Q.542. 52 Foster Committee 1894: QQ. 555, 563, 708, 1665, Wenlock Committee 1901: QQ. 10, 54654. 14 consultant chemist to both the British Dairy Farmers’ Association and the Metropolitan Dairymen’s Society, neither of them organizations with any interest in exaggerating the situation: I am sorry to say that in my opinion the action of Somerset House in taking low standards for milk has been the cause of the enormous amount of adulteration at present in the country. 53 Thorpe’s principalship at the Government Laboratory was a period of progress. He established better contacts with the public analysts and they collaborated together in trying to influence the legislation in 1899.54 He also put the laboratory on a firmer footing scientifically with regard to milk adulteration by recognising that it was necessary to measure the products of the decomposition that inevitably took place in the reference samples that they dealt with, and so achieve a more reliable ‘reconstruction of the original solids.’55 This was more accurate than the sliding scale adjustment that had previously been made, based on the length of time since the sample had been collected.56 What can we learn from this long-running dispute and how does it inform this chapter and the next? First, it suggests that we need to reflect on the nature of expertise in the British analytical system. This will require a commentary on the role of the public analyst and the resources available. It will quickly become apparent that analysts were heavily dependent upon the political will of their local authorities, which varied quite markedly according to local circumstances. Second, the steady evolution of the Sale of Food and Drugs legislation was partly a function of technical considerations. An obituary of Dr Bell in the Analyst, the journal published by his adversaries, admitted in 1908, with obvious reluctance, that his position had had a ‘substratum of truth’ and that the real problem had been ‘ineffective drafting’ of the 1875 act.57 We will look at attempts to capture ‘adulteration’ as a concept in the various 53 Russell Committee 1896: Q. 353. 54 Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 17. 55 Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 16. 56 Foster Committee 1894: QQ 166772, 1688, 1692. For a debate on the analysis of decomposed milk, see Estcourt 1887, Bell 1887, Stokes 1887. 57 B.D. 1908. 15 Acts in Chapter 7. In that chapter we will also look at the various Bills and Acts as a political process in which a balance was struck between opposing interests. Third, there will be a long section in Chapter 7 on the various types of adulteration, fraud and bad practice with regard to milk. In addition to watering and the extraction of cream, there was much contemporary discussion of the addition of chemicals, preservatives, to prolong its shelf life and colorants to simulate a rich milk. We will look at their relative significance nationally and also comment on differences between town and country, between the different cities, and change through time. There are some surprises here, for instance ‘toning’, which initially was seen as a crime but eventually became standard practice, throwing into doubt early conceptualizations of both naturalness and honesty. Fourth, the enforcement of food standards required what I shall call ‘the quality police.’ Our discussion of them in Chapter 7 will not be a dry account of regulations but rather a theoretically-informed discussion of court cases, especially those that acquired notoriety in the appeals system though some point of law that bears upon our interest in the definition of quality. Then I will argue in Chapter 8 that such legal disputes have been undervalued by historians and that their study provides a way forward in understanding a key aspect of food quality governance. 4.3 Analysts and the Quality Police The best historiography of the literature on the emergence of experts and expertise in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain has been written by Roy MacCleod in the introduction to his celebrated edited collection. His co-authors complement this with the results of their own empirical work on the history of administration.58 Together they claim that the direction in which modern governance has evolved was at least in part dependent upon the specialist knowledge and judgement associated with expertise, and in this assertion they have some support from the work of Harold Perkin on the professionalization 58 MacLeod 2003. 16 of leadership in administrative governance.59 Our public analysts seem to have approximated the first stages of MacDonagh’s model of Victorian bureaucratic control.60 Their numbers increased during the acceleration in the size and scope of the civil service in the last twenty years of the century and food quality monitoring then evolved in phases: first an ineffective piece of legislation was drafted, followed by the appointment of experts to enforce the law, and a central body (the Local Government Board) then acted as coordinator and had ultimate authority. The analyst profession had a vigorous pre-history as servants of industry and sanitary science,61 as gas examiners, alkali inspectors and as water analysts, and they were part of the wave of public professional men and women of science appointed in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century, along with Medical Officers of Health. Frank Turner sees the 1870s as a hinge-point, with science after that being taken more seriously and the state feeling an increasing need to employ scientists rather than consulting them occasionally, as had been the previous pattern.62 From the 1840s analysts had a proliferation of professional organizations and journals to champion their interests.63 At the outset, few had any experience of food analysis, however, and in 1856 Scholefield rightly predicted the mismatch between supply and demand of the relevant skills that was to occur twenty years later: At first, no doubt, some difficulty would be experienced in finding persons qualified to conduct the required chemical and microscopical examinations; but the want will soon give rise to the needful supply. This want has been already felt by the Board of Inland Revenue, which has been compelled, for the purposes of the analyses requisite in cases of adulterated articles of Excise, to educate persons for this special duty. 64 Analysts could be appointed under the 1860 Sale of Food and Drugs Act, but by 1873 they had been appointed in only 17 counties and nine boroughs. The 1875 Act was a compulsory measure, with a duty to appoint a competent analyst being imposed upon each 59 Perkin 1989. 60 MacDonagh 1958. 61 Donnelly 1994. 62 Turner 1980. 63 Dyer and Mitchell 1932, Moore and Philip 1947, Chirnside and Hamence 1974, Russell et al. 1977, Roberts 1979. 64 Scholefield Committee 1856: 8. 17 county, boroughs with quarter sessions or a police authority, and, in London, the City and all of the Vestries and District Boards.65 For analysts generally, there was frustration at poor funding and weak access to the policy-making process, and the fact that sampling was not compulsory until 1899.66 Some analysts were full-time, others were shared between authorities on a part-time basis, and a few were paid a small retainer against the day when funding and political priorities would enable them to take up their duties. A majority of the first analysts appointed were not chemists at all but local Medical Officers of Health. They were instructed by their authorities, for reasons of economy, to accept this additional portfolio, but generally they had ‘very little education in chemistry …’67 As men of science it was simply assumed that they could perform the extra duties, in most cases without any training or additional resources. The required qualifications were modest. The 1872 Act mentioned medical, microscopical and chemical knowledge, the medical element being a consequence of the concern with poisoning as the main problem of adulteration at that time, not fraud. In 1875 the medical requirement was removed but the monitoring of appointments by the Local Government Board remained lenient. In 1874 it had been observed that the Board had ‘hardly objected to anyone’ put forward.68 Of those in post at that date, it was said that ‘many of them are incompetent chemists.’69 Gradually, better qualified analysts came forward and the Board tightened its procedures, so that applicants by the 1890s had to ‘produce evidence of competent microscopical knowledge, chemical knowledge, and also, to a certain extent, medical knowledge; that is to say, as to the effect of adulteration on health.’70 Testimonials were required but still no formal academic qualification or professional membership.71 This was despite the advice of the Society of Public Analysts that applicants should have a science 65 Return of Number of Analysts appointed under Adulteration of Food Act, 1872, in each County and Borough of United Kingdom, P.P. 1873 (280). In 1893 the powers of the quarter sessions were transferred to county councils. 66 Macleod 1967, 1968, 1976. 67 Read Committee 1874: Q.2448, Barham. 68 Read Committee 1874: Q.4696, Cameron. 69 Read Committee 1874: Q.5665, Voelcker, Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 5. 70 Foster Committee 1894: QQ.6, 194, 381, Preston-Thomas. 71 Foster Committee 1894: QQ.27990, Preston-Thomas. 18 degree, a Fellowship of the Institute of Chemistry, and a year’s experience in the laboratory of a public analyst.72 It was not until 1900 that the Local Government Board required evidence of a pass in the final examination of the Institute for Chemistry’s Branch E: the Analysis of Water, Foods and Drugs.’73 Experts, in order to perform their expertise, need a clientèle and an audience. At first, the local authority public analysts in Britain were not quite sure who had a stake in their results. As we have seen, many local authorities simply went through the motions of appointing an expert analyst and resisted expenditure on the collection of samples or laboratory facilities for processing. But what of private clients? Under the 1860 Act, samples could in theory be submitted by members of the public but the cost was up to half a guinea per item and so few citizens did so.74 Some public analysts refused approaches from the trade on the grounds that only ‘purchasers’ had access to their skills.75 Compare this with the situation in Paris, where, as a result of pressure from the public, in 1882 the municipal laboratory processed almost as many samples of wine submitted by citizens and traders (5,188) as collected by inspectors (5,238).76 For milk, the situation was more like that in London, with fewer complaints from civil society. Although commercial traders were also entitled to submit samples, many analysts did not see their role as a support service for industry. This was almost certainly because many of them had private practices to supplement their meagre state stipend and they did not see why prosperous dairy companies should get their analyses done ‘on the cheap.’ At first some of the dairy men tried to take samples to the analysts, but they said they could not take them unless they came from a purchaser … in point of fact, they shirked the question. 77 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, expertise took on a procedural nature. Many of the analysts working for local authorities were required to process large numbers 72 Dyer and Mitchell 1932: 34. 73 Local Government Board Order, 1900. Chirnside and Hamence 1974: 37. 74 Some local authorities charged less but were not able to elicit further private samples. Foster Committee 1894: Q.249, Preston-Thomas. 75 Read Committee 1874: Q. 2579, Barham. 76 Atkins and Stanziani 2008: 322. 77 Foster Committee 1874: Q.2579. 19 of samples. Efficiency was therefore a concern and time and motion data were collected. At the turn of the century we learn that each adulterated sample took about 100 minutes of an inspector’s time and Table 4.3 also gives a breakdown of the expenses on 2,777 prosecutions in England and Wales, indicating that chemical analysis represented about 75 per cent of the total cost. The ‘rituals of verification’, then, were expensive and, in order to conform with the law, they began to take on an institutional guise. More and more local authorities brought analysts into their civil service establishment and provided facilities in order to guarantee high standards of work.78 Table 4.3 Expenses Associated with Analyses Expenses Cost of samples, including packages Cost of inspectors’ time purchasing samples Incidental expenses of inspectors Cost of analyses Cost of inspectors’ time spent in court Cost of Clerks’ and Medical Officers’ time in court in three-quarters of the adulteration cases Solicitor or barrister for the other quarter of cases Cost of appeal cases, about ten a year Fees and expenses of analyst if called by prosecution, stationery and postage, cost of summonses Total Less amount collected in fines Net total £ 1,333 3,070 830 29,285 359 685 1,457 1,000 1,000 39,019 3,683 35,336 Source: Cribb and Moor 1899: 225. Analysts were required by many local authorities to produce quarterly reports of their activities and the law obliged them to fill in a certificate in any case of suspected adulteration, as the pseudo-legal form of their professional opinion. Most, from time to time, had to attend court to be cross-examined on their evidence. The articulacy skills of the witness are very different from those of a laboratory scientist, so this required a hybrid expertise that was performative. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries disputes about 78 Power 1997. 20 food were dealt with under the British common law, which was based upon local justice and, in criminal cases, upon trial before a jury of lay peers. As Hildebrandt points out, this was not predisposed to participation by experts.79 The adversarial setting and the sometimes hostile questioning by counsel made it an uncomfortable ride for many scientists, who were often unable to encapsulate their complex, specialist knowledge in simple yes or no answers. Hildebrandt calls this épreuve or coordinate justice and traces its historical origin to grassroots, popular justice, with its scepticism about elite knowledge. By comparison, the inquisitorial process – preuve – of continental civil law was more respectful of scientific specialists and less dependent upon the theatre of courtroom procedure. Whatever their level of zeal in detecting fraud, analysts could only analyse what was sent to them, and in many districts few samples were collected in the early decades. There was a plain reluctance by many local authorities to use the permissive powers granted to them in the Act. The Local Government Board issued a circular in 1884 encouraging local authorities to use these powers but the reaction was mixed. The Board’s own annual report for 1891-2 noted that: in many large boroughs … such as Devonport, Sunderland, South Shields, Preston, Ashton under Lyne, Burnley, Great Grimsby, Northampton, Ipswich, and Dudley, no serious attempt was made to enforce the Acts.80 Table 4.4 illustrates the variability of investment by local authorities in collecting samples for analyses. The LGB’s initial target, published in 1880, was for one sample of food generally to be taken for each 1,000 people in an area.81 This was eventually achieved in 1892-3 but the report of the Russell Committee in 1896 decided that even this was not enough. It was not until 1930 that sampling achieved 3.5 items per 1,000 people.82 In 1894 the Foster Committee found that there were 99 public analysts looking after 237 districts in England and Wales. Of these, 49 were responsible for just one district each and 22 had four districts or more. Having a list of several districts did not guarantee a substantial business and only nine analysts in the whole country had a gross income for 79 Hildebrandt 2007. 80 Local Government Board Report: Twenty-first Report, 189192, P.P. 1892 (C.6745), xxxviii.142. 81 Liverseege 1932: 6. 82 Evans 1976: 131. 21 official work of more than £500 per annum. 112 of them, including 29 in London, were paid a flat rate annual salary, varying from the miserly £5 laid out by Sunderland to £250 in Cardiff, and £200 in Liverpool and Swansea. The average salary among the London local authorities was £92. Some localities preferred to pay fees for individual analyses, from which the analyst was meant to cover his raw material costs and laboratory overheads. These ranged widely from 2s, 6d to three guineas a piece, with additional travelling expenses for attending court.83 There is one interesting insight into the cost of overheads. The Foster Committee found that George Embrey of Gloucestershire had been provided by his County Council with a laboratory and the cost of chemicals. On top of that, his salary remunerated his own time, that of any assistants, and also his court expenses. Overall, he worked for a modest 2s, 0d per sample. Table 4.4 Urban Population per Milk Sample, 189397 Town/city Salford Cardiff Manchester Liverpool Croydon London Bristol Oldham Bradford Birmingham Portsmouth Hull Brighton Population per sample 340 400 480 750 800 1,040 1,190 1,230 1,270 1,310 1,410 1,470 1,610 Town/city Sheffield Newcastle Leeds Leicester Birkenhead Preston West Ham Blackburn Nottingham Bolton Norwich Sunderland England and Wales Population per sample 2,040 2,080 2,150 1,210 2,970 3,140 3,170 3,260 3,870 4,000 4,390 6,200 1,730 Source: Liverseege 1899. In 1894 the busiest public analyst in England and Wales by far was Campbell Brown, whose laboratory in Liverpool processed 7,508 food samples for seven boroughs in Lancashire and also for the county council, at an average rate of 7s, 0d per sample. Others 83 Foster Committee 1894: Appendix 9. 22 who were fully-stretched included W. Morgan, the analyst for Swansea, Neath and six Welsh counties (2,762 samples, £1,532 income); Edward Bevan of Middlesex (1,315 samples, £979); and Alfred Hill acting for Birmingham and six other Midland towns and cities (3,005 samples, £628). The average cost per sample for the whole country was 8s, 10¼d, but there were some local authorities that squeezed maximum value out of their analysts. Salford, for instance, was renowned for its active policy of food testing and it achieved this by dealing with 1,010 samples at the very efficient rate of 2s, 6d each. 854 of these were milk samples. As a result of this intensive monitoring, Salford was said to have ‘one of the best milk supplies of the kingdom.’84 Some analysts built up fiefdoms, taking on several local authorities in a region. John Pattinson was an example, with a portfolio comprising the urban districts of Durham City, Newcastle, Gateshead, South Shields, Tynemouth and the county of Northumberland. 85 For him this was not the path to riches, however, because no samples at all were collected in 1894 in Durham, and only 6 in South Shields and 13 in Tynemouth. 86 In fact, the North East was far from being a model of best practice in this regard. 87 Other analysts acted for authorities from around the country and relied upon the postal service for prompt delivery. Alexander Wynter Blyth, for instance, was the analyst for St Marylebone in London, but also for Barnstaple and the whole county of Devon, where he had to travel for time to time for court proceedings.88 Another example was Charles Cassal, who looked after Battersea, Kensington and St George Hanover Square in London, and also Kesteven in Lincolnshire and Chipping Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. All of this was possible due to a clear division of labour between the analysts and the local authority officials who collected the samples, such as the Medical Officers of Health, Inspectors of Nuisances, Inspectors of Weights and Measures, or even the police. 84 Foster Committee 1894: Q.78, evidence of Herbert Preston-Thomas. 85 Tyne and Wear Archives: DT.PT/126, J.and H.S. Pattinson, Analytical Chemists. 86 Durham City was notorious for never having had a sample analysed. Food and Sanitation 17 February 1894: 56. 87 Sunderland insisted that its Medical Officer of Health double up as the borough analyst at a salary of £5. Foster Committee 1894: Q.288. 88 For more on Blyth, see Thornburn Burns 2007. 23 At the quieter end of the market, the Foster Committee found that there were 39 analysts who dealt with 100 samples or less per annum, including five who looked at none at all.89 Their services were retained for a modest fee by local authorities who had no intention of investing in the staff and systems necessary for a thorough food-testing regime. It was either not a priority for them or was actively opposed by local vested interests. The initial reluctance, on the part of local authorities, to pay adequate salaries and fees was later replaced by the realization that investment in equipment and laboratory staff was unavoidable. The larger metropolitan authorities led the way but local political and cultural contingencies meant that there was a great deal of variation, even where financial resources were not a problem. For cities such as Liverpool and Manchester there was civic pride to be nurtured and political capital to be gained. Food quality, and its relation to sanitation and health, was seen to depend upon the skill of the analyst and the willingness of the authorities to prosecute those in the food industry responsible for carelessly dirty milk or milk reduced in quality by deliberate acts of adulteration. 4.4. Cattle Breeding: an Example of Distributed Expertise Our discussion of analysts by no means exhausts the expertise that underpinned the milk supply system. It is labouring the obvious to stress that farmers deploy great skill in their struggle to capture and valorize the resources around them. My school geography text books spoke of specialist dairy farming regions such as Cheshire and the West Country as if the natural premium of climate and soil guaranteed successful pasture-based milk production. Yet such a high degree of specialism was really only true of the years 18501950, and historical geographers have revealed that, even then, it was under constant challenge from factors such as disease, soil exhaustion, and poor facilities.90 As more producers became involved in selling milk to urban wholesalers, they were entrained increasingly into a modern food system that required supplies of daily regularity 89 J.J. Beringer (Penzance), J. Bradburne (Hartlepool), W. Chattaway (Colchester), J. Haworth (Tiverton), and W.T.G. Woodforde (Newbury). 90 Simpson 1957, Barnes 1958, Phillips 2004. 24 and of a certain quality. This required sacrifices but most farmers seem to have found ways to bend the system to their own advantage. We have mentioned adulteration as one, but the most common, and perfectly legal, strategy was to translate the characteristics of nature. In this way their cows’ metabolisms became entrained in the milk food system. It was clear for all to see that their efficiency as machines for producing milk differed according to breed. Some were renowned for the quantity of their milk and others for high butterfat content. The latter had been particularly valued for butter and cheese-making but the midnineteenth century was a time for reassessment. After that farmers were less sentimental about their local breeds and instead sought high-yielding cattle that produced a quality that would satisfy the market. There was an impressive degree of flexibility in the mindset of livestock farmers that enabled relatively rapid adjustment to circumstances. Part of the calculation was the, as yet unquantified, relationship between feed and milk output. This was important because there were regional and seasonal variations of the availability of fodder, from pasture and arable, and each farmer had to calculate an informal cost-benefit ratio that might also include the purchase of concentrates or even of stimulants such as the spent grains from breweries or distilleries. The point we are making here is that from the 1860s and 1870s onwards it would have been obvious to all but the most conservative of dairy farmers that it was in their interests to consider new, high-yielding genes.91 For most farmers this meant the purchase or hire of a proven bull, but there was also a steady turnover in some areas of bought-in cows and heifers, especially close to market where most would be fattened for the butcher but a few kept for breeding purposes. 92 The shorthorn had risen to prominence in the nineteenth century as a result of its milk yield and the butchering potential of its substantial carcase. John Walton has mapped the spatial diffusion of pedigree shorthorns and shown how they spread to every part of the country where milk production was an important part of the agricultural economy.93 The 91 Brassley 2000. 92 Pedigree herd books were established for the following dairy and dual purpose breeds: Shorthorns in 1822, Jerseys 1866, Red Polls 1874, Ayrshires 1877, Guernseys 1881, Dexters 1890, Kerrys 1890, South Devons 1891. 93 Walton 1984, 1986, 1999. 25 Ayrshire was also a well-liked specialist dairy breed and remained the animal of choice in Scotland. ‘Dutch’ or generic ‘black and white’ cows had been popular with London cowkeepers for a long period and their reputation grew gradually with the import of large numbers from the Netherlands. But it was not until the early twentieth century that a breed of stable and reliable quality emerged due to the efforts of the British Holstein Cattle Society, founded in 1909 and soon renamed the British Friesian Cattle Society. 94 By 1947 they composed 20 per cent of the herd, and 76 per cent in 1970, whereas shorthorns fell from 85 per cent in 1908 to 3 per cent in 1970. 95 This affected the compositional quality of market milk, as we will see later. A more statistically-minded culture in the agricultural community was encouraged from the First World War onwards with the spread of milk recording. This was a grassroots movement at first, with farmers recording daily yields in order to help them eliminate cows that were unprofitable, but in 1943 it became an official, national scheme. In 1917 478 farmers were involved with 13,838 cows being recorded, expanding to 4,302 farmers and 161,077 cows in 1938. A Register of Dairy Cows with Authenticated Milk Records was published annually by HMSO from 1917 onwards.96 The first edition listed 572 registered cows, which was a subset of those recorded, and included only those with annual yields of 8,000 lbs or over. Of these, 10.1 per cent were Holstein-Friesians and 69.2 per cent shorthorns. In 1929 15,065 animals were eligible for registration, of which 22.4 per cent were now Holstein-Friesians and 55.1 per cent shorthorns. No other breed exceeded six per cent. In theory these data have potential for an analysis of the spacings and timings of breed changes but there are issues of representativeness in the data set.97 First, milk recording depended very much upon the enthusiasm of a relatively small band of farmers and, second, these elite herds were generally dedicated to breeds producing milk rich in fat.98 94 For more on the breed and the Society, see Hobson 1930, the British Friesian Cattle Society 1930, Burrows 1950, Stanford 1956 and Mingay 1982. 95 British Friesian Cattle Society 1930, Stanford 1956, Federation of United Kingdom Milk Marketing Boards 1972. 96 For more on the significance of herd books and milk recording, see Orland 2003, Nimmo 2008a, 2010. 97 An analysis of the data collected by the National Milk Records Scheme would allow an account of the spacings and timings of the shift to Friesian-Holsteins. Available at: http://www.nmr.co.uk/ [accessed: 29 April 2009]. 98 Mingay 1982: 63. 26 At the turn of the twentieth century scientific knowledge of dairy husbandry was limited. Witnesses to the Wenlock committee spoke of pasture quality, feeding regime, breed of cow, her ‘condition’ (health, nourishment, stage of lactation), and interval between milking (Table 4.5), but there was little feel for the relationship between the variables until the work of Kellner in Germany and Armsby in America on animal nutrition, and on quantity and quality of milk by Crowther at Leeds and a group at Newcastle in the decade or so before the First World War.99 What was not appreciated at this time was that each herd is made up of animals giving milk of different quantities and qualities each day, within surprisingly broad bands of uncertainty, according to many factors: sometimes crosscutting, sometimes reinforcing. Looking at the supply of a city the size of London, it might therefore be made up of 130,000 different milks each day in 1900. There were never any precise repetitions, even from the same animal. Table 4.5 Factors Affecting Milk Composition 1. Breeding and selection  breed and inheritance  selection and culling  age of cow  stage of lactation 2. Feeding. Underfeeding can lower the protein content in particular.  energy, fat, protein, minerals, fibre in diet  quality of roughages  supplementary feeding at grass  seasonal variations in quality  indigestion 3. Management and disease  stockmanship  milking technique and frequency  animal’s health  milking machine efficiency  whether the milk of several cows mixed Source: Hall and Buckett 1969. 99 Wenlock Committee 1901: 38086, Crowther 1939, Mackintosh 1939, Tyler 1956. 27 4.5 Conclusion In one sense, expertise is about bringing the world to life, about making it knowable and known. As we have seen, this process can be fraught, with arguments about the necessary skills, about methods, and about ultimate authority over results. There is nothing unusual about such contestation but the level of vitriol and personal bitterness in our story is interesting because it indicates that food analysis in the second half of the nineteenth century was in the front line of debates about the formulation of professional opinion and where this stood in relation to the official knowledge of the state. An important point to make here is that there was an historical geography of expertise as it gathered momentum from the 1870s. To a degree it was the large cities that were first in the field, providing their citizens with an analytical service that attempted to protect the public interest of an honest food supply. But the hint here of an urban hierarchy model of provision would not be sufficient to explain the local complexity of enthusiasm and inertia. This was more a matter of local political priorities that I do not have time here to discuss in detail. Another point to make concerns the need for a distributed view of expertise. Our analysts were recognised by the law as experts, capable of revealing scientific truth in court, but the less formal skills of the farmer, the milk dealer, and even the consumer deserve recognition. In addition to their practical, day to day knowing of milk, they were all capable in their own way of influencing the direction of the system as a whole. This was possible through decisions about purchasing and also through the lobbying of others in order to achieve a translation of interests. An example is the decision of the New York City authorities in 1910 to lower their standards for total solids in milk from 12 per cent to 11.5 per cent as a direct result of pressure from Holstein breeders, who by that time had become sufficiently influential to be heard.100 Finally, if we are to take material seriously, we should also consider the innate qualities of cattle, milking machines, milk trains, and laboratory equipment in the process 100 Race 1918: 60. 28 of making milk knowable. We normally vest in ‘expertise’ a sense of performed knowledgeability but the degree to which this is possible and successful depends upon the qualities of the objects that are in play, their acquiescence, resistance, or active participation. In as much as the cattle breeds that we discussed above have had a major influence upon our story of milk composition, and will also be central in Chapters 910 in our account of dirty and diseased milk, we may need to revise our human-centred narrative and see the cows themselves as experts.