The problem of milk in the nineteenth-century Ontario cheese industry: an envirotechnical approach to business history
本文用环境技术方法分析19世纪安大略省出口导向的奶酪产业，揭示牛奶变质和掺假问题如何促使奶农协会发展准管理角色，并展示乡村奶酪产业作为生态与环境技术过程的本质。
This article analyses Ontario’s export-oriented cheese industry and its challenges in the second half of the nineteenth century using an ‘envirotechnical’ approach. The reorganisation of cheese production from farms to rural factories in the 1860s increased opportunities for spoilage and adulteration of milk at the same time that it made detecting and managing the same more difficult, which compelled the provincial dairymen’s associations to develop quasi-managerial roles to contend with these unanticipated challenges. The ‘problem of milk’ highlights the extent to which the rural cheese industry was an ecological and envirotechnical process rather than an entity separate from the non-human world. Ultimately this case study offers one model for combining environmental and business histories at a scale beyond the individual firm while also highlighting the relevance of the local in the development of the global food system in the late-nineteenth century.