The 1840's:
A golden age of entrepeneurship as market disrupters deployed emergent technologies with aplomb.
Two premium commodities were milk and booze, both indispensable to the urban-forward lifestyle.
Modern distilleries created an underutilized byproduct: The excess slurry of boiling hot grain mash.
Identifying an inefficiency to be corrected, distillers pivoted this “swill” as feed to the new industrial dairy farms.
Optimized dairies re-located adjacent to distilleries, allowing cows to be fed via trough direct from the stills.
Swill contained residual alcohol, which lessened the cows natural repugnance to consuming the scalding hot liquid.
Early-adopting consumers became accustomed to the cutting-edge feed. Denying access to any competing nutrients accelerated adoption.
Since the resulting milk was blue and puss-y, owners doctored it with white plaster and labeled it as "fresh".
Eventually regulators, looking for causes of infant mortality, found that drinking this milk was maybe not so good and successfully campaigned for the elimination of the practice.
It only took roughly 30 years?
