People tend to forget the Food part that the Food and Drug Administration take care of. Here’s milk before 1906:
Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.
Oh, there’s more fun in the article.
“Surprisingly enough,’’ he added, “it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee.”