I've been in Minnesota for 5 days, preparing for my dad's funeral. In that time 3 women have told me they were diagnosed with "stage zero" breast cancer for which they are having the full array of treatments (surgery, chemo, radiation). I hear this nowhere else. Explain.

In 1858 a newspaperman named Frank Leslie found milk left at his New York door. It was bluish. It contained pus. He set out to find where it came from. What he uncovered became one of the great scandals of the century. The distilleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn had a waste problem. Whiskey left behind enormous quantities of hot fermented mash, and dumping it cost money. So someone had an idea. Feed it to cows. Hundreds of them, packed into sheds beside the stills, standing in their own manure, fed boiling spent grain until they sickened, their udders ulcerating, their bodies breaking out in sores. The milk came out thin and blue. They fixed the colour with plaster of Paris and chalk. They thickened it with flour and rotten eggs. They cut it with water from a ditch that ran past the manure pile. Then they painted "Pure Country Milk" on the wagon and sold it from carts across the city as fresh from the meadows of Orange County. The New York Times put the toll as high as eight thousand infants a year. This is the milk that built the case for reform. The entire safety apparatus was designed around it. Sick animals, industrial filth, distillery slop, deliberate adulteration, urban sheds without a blade of grass for ten miles. There were two ways to solve it. You could stop feeding cows whiskey waste in filthy sheds. Let them eat grass on clean land and sell the milk fresh and local, the way every human had drunk it for ten thousand years. Or you could keep the sheds, keep the mash, keep the scale, and heat the result until the bacteria died. When the city finally investigated, the inspectors were tipped off in advance and the committee recommended better ventilation. You know which path they were always going to take. You can taste it. The frightening thing was never raw milk from a healthy cow on good grass. It was a dying animal in a distillery, held upright by a sling while someone ran whiskey slop through its udder. We solved that with a process, kept the process forever, banned the healthy version to be safe, and told you the cow was the danger. Frank Leslie would have had questions.

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Starts with D and we all like it

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