GoKawiilThe story of MIT’s most notorious milk carton begins, as many good stories do, in a college dorm.
The milk in question was purchased in 1994 and rediscovered in 1995 by an undergrad named Justin Cave. By that point, the reportedly lactose-intolerant Cave had even less use for the milk he had abandoned in his fridge ten months earlier. For reasons lost to history, he did not throw the milk away. He threw it a birthday party.
The Milk lived the rest of its life unrefrigerated, stored in a tall, single-walled jar. For twenty-seven years, the residents of Random Hall dorm gathered faithfully to celebrate its birthday. At age 20, the Milk applied to, and was rejected from, MIT. The jar was periodically “burped” to release the gas pressure inside, until the Milk reached its stable final form – a cloudy brown liquid. When asked why the Milk was never thrown away, one resident of Random Hall replied: “Why throw something away when you can tell a story about it?”
The Milk (center, party hat) and friends celebrate its 21 st birthday (credit: MIT ).
“Stuff I learned from things that normally get thrown away” could be the title of many scientists’ memoirs, including Louis Pasteur’s. Winemaking produces, well, wine, but it also produces acidic crystals on the walls of the vats. These byproducts were not discarded – they were studied by Pasteur and his contemporaries. Pasteur’s observations both revolutionized our understanding of chemistry and led him to the phenomenon that would define his career and lay the foundation of modern food safety: fermentation.
The microorganisms responsible for fermentation are visible to our naked senses only through the textures, colors and smells resulting from their collective efforts. From Aristotle through the 1850s, it was assumed that some intrinsic property of a non-living starting substance (like grain or milk) enabled its spontaneous fermentation into something useful (like beer or yogurt) or its eventual spoilage.
It was Pasteur who proved that living organisms were required for the transformations that took place during fermentation. He heated up nutrient-rich broths in custom flasks that let gases, but not microbes, flow in and out of the flasks. Pasteur then broke the neck off of one of the flasks to expose the broth to the air. If the boiled broth could spontaneously transform, it would do so with or without exposure to microbes in the air and environment.
The flask with the neck broken off grew cloudy and fermented as bacteria bloomed, but the sterile one remained clear.
Pasteur’s famous “swan-necked” flask experiment from 1861. (Illustration source: Vedantu )
This finding was great news for Napoleon. The French were losing money, and perhaps more alarmingly, their reputation, exporting wine to the British – the wine would “spontaneously” go bad during shipping. The French government offered a prize for a scientist to solve the case of the spoiled wine. With the knowledge of the microorganism-driven process of fermentation in hand, Pasteur did to the wine what he did to the broth, just more gently – he heated the wine enough to kill microbes without damaging the wine’s flavor. Immortalized as pasteurization, this process was adapted shortly after its invention in 1865 to let us safely drink stored milk.
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