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- [00:01]
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Dr. Tammy Parr
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- [01:26]
Dr. Tammy Parr
That's why you wreck welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Tammy Parr about her book titled Goats in America, A Cultural History, published by Oregon State University Press in 2025, helping us understand that goats actually have quite a history in the United States. They may not be the animal that we immediately associate with the history of the US but turns out if you go looking for them, they are all over the place. We're going to be talking about the goats themselves. We're going to be talking about goat meat, goat milk, goat's cheese, and covering a pretty broad swath of space and time in the US to do so. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Tammy, thank you so much for joining me.
- [02:21]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Thanks for having me, Miranda. I appreciate it.
- [02:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:29]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah, so as you noted, my name is Tammy Parr. I started doing a little bit of research and writing about cheese in the early 2000s here in the Pacific Northwest United States, where I live. We had sort of an artisan cheese. We called it a renaissance at the time. Numbers of cheese makers grew quite a bit and small farms started making cheese. And I started to write newspaper articles and things like that about the cheese. And it was all very interesting. But over time I started visited a lot of goat dairies and goat cheese makers. And over time I started to think about the goats. People talk about goats differently. The goat cheese is perceived differently here in the US And I just started thinking about that and my academic and research background kind of kicked in and I sort of wanted to understand how we got to this place in cheese history and American history and started poking around a little bit. And I looked at old newspapers and things like that, old magazines. And one of the really surprising things that I found all of a sudden was just this very intensely negative perception of goats that was very common in the 19th century, 18th, 19th century United States. And I thought that was just very strange. What is this about? So I kind of went down a rabbit hole with that. And now here we have this book.
- [03:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I always love hearing the backstory of books. It so often is kind of you come in from one angle and you're like, oh, maybe this will be an 800 word blog post. Oh wait, yeah. And you start sort of investigating and always interesting to hear kind of what that entry point is. However, I do want to make sure that we go in sort of more chronological order here so that we can contextualize those initial newspaper articles that you found. So intrigu. So starting at the beginning, when and why did we get domestic goats first coming to what is now the United States?
- [04:21]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Well, it's very interesting, at least for me, to learn more about how goats and really other domesticated animals, generally cows, sheep, all of those cats and dogs, rats are none of those are native species to the western hemisphere generally. So they all were brought here in the colonial era. So specifically arriving in two waves, Columbus's second voyage brought domesticated animals to the Caribbean. And then the colonization of the east coast of what is now the United States starting in the 1600s brought more goats, sheep, cattle, et cetera, to that part of the continent. And so it was really a specific artifact of the colonial era. And the other thing about goats is goats were really actually a really key role in played a key role in the colonial era. They were really common on ships making these Portuguese and Spanish and English ships making these far flung multi year voyages around the world. Ship supplies, supplying the crew, feeding the crew was really a problem. And so they wouldn't have Enough. They didn't have enough room to put enough food on the ships for these really long voyages. And so they would often put goats on the ships. Goats were small and it was sort of a live milk and meat supply. And often they would even put these goats, sometimes sheep as well, sometimes pigs as well, on random islands as they were traveling throughout the oceans of the world. And so these islands would then become sort of ocean rest stops for ships traveling around the world. And so goats serve that purpose as well, both on ship and, I don't know, on the traveling cycle of supplying colonial ships. So it was a really interesting kind of entry into North America via colonialism.
- [06:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really interesting to think about kind of how central they were for those processes. And in fact, that therefore kind of surprised me to read further on in the book that goats in this early colonial period were considered the sort of quote unquote, poor man's cow, which sounds kind of derogatory given the way you've explained. They're really important. So why do they sort of have that reputation?
- [06:39]
Dr. Tammy Parr
It's a really good question. I mean, important, but not necessarily beloved. I guess there's some interesting threads here. One of them is there's some interesting research that I noted in the book about some English researchers are doing about the kind of the track of goat appreciation in England and how goats were very common in England. But that really changed during sort of the feudal period. And as land became more increasingly enclosed and fenced off or enclosed in various ways, goats tended to become less favored. Primarily, at least this one researcher was talking about how because of goats grazing practices, goats the prefer to browse on leaves and bushes and things rather than grass. And so goats would consume the hedgerows that form boundaries between, you know, estates in the feudal era. And so that was of course not good. But the other thing, I mean, I think cows are bigger, they give more milk. You get more meat from a cow than you would a goat. Their goats are much smaller. So in terms of that there's, you know, quote unquote value to a cow versus a goat at the same time. Goats are very prolific. They. They consume many different kinds of forage. They can survive in really poor conditions, whereas cattle cannot. So I think there were advantages to goats and they were, you colonists use goats to their advantage, but with the eye on eventually getting cattle. Goats were sort of the subsistence animal until they could get cows. And the other threat of. Yeah, the other thread of this was as. As colonists started to establish themselves in the new world, goats reputation began to suffer even more because of their destructive habits. And like I mentioned, goats like to browse on leaves and things. And goats also are. If you've ever. People who have kept goats, know this. They're. They're a little bit more stubborn and persistent than other animals. They've never met a fence or any kind of barrier that they didn't try to get over or around. So goats are always. Were always getting into corn fields in the colonial era. They were always getting loose and bothering people and so on. So that contributed to the negative reputation, I think the fact that they were harder to keep, harder to regulate.
- [09:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Regulation, however, is attempted. In fact, you have some examples where goats are even banned in law. That's intense. Yeah.
- [09:22]
Dr. Tammy Parr
And so in order to try to address some of these problems with goats, all the cities and villages and towns of the era would regulate. Goats can only go in certain parts of the village. Goats can only be set out on certain parts of land if there were two keepers. Just various permutations of ways in which they tried to regulate goats. And that worked to some extent. Didn't work to some extent. And it eventually got to the point where, I mean, one of the biggest sort of sins that goats committed in the. In the eyes of folks of this era was that they. Goats will eat tree bark off of trees if they're. Especially if they're very hungry and not being fed. And that was sort of the biggest sin of all because the colonists were really working hard to establish fruit trees to make cider. And destroying the fruit trees was like, no, that was the final straw. And so in many cases, cities like Boston, early Boston, Cambridge, you know, Massachusetts Bay Colony, generally, a lot of the small colonies up and down the east coast of the time would just ban them entirely. They're just like, okay, forget it. Fruit trees is one, you know, one. One thing too many. So. So yeah, that. That was sort of the fate. Let's just get them out of here. Let's get cattle, let's have our meat and our milk and be done with it. Hmm.
- [10:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. So can see how. Then we're getting to that point where you're investigating newspaper articles going, wow, really not so inkled the goats. But there's in fact some additional factors of negative connotation that's worth throwing into the mix further. So I wonder if you can talk particularly about. In 19th century media, you found examples of goats being particularly tied to negative perceptions of Irish immigrants.
- [11:09]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yes. Yeah. So the negative perception of goats really continues starting in the colonial era and continues on through the 19th century. And what happened in the 19th century in the United States was just a rapid expansion and immigration of folks from a variety of countries in Europe, including Ireland, during the Great Famine or the Potato famine in the mid 19th century, and then later Germans and Italians in through the early 20th century. And the influx of immigration really created a sense of mistrust and panic among the established residents. So you have this growth in nativist sentiments, belief that people are encroaching on our land, our environment, our social world. And a lot of mistrust was created that way. And the Irish immigrants who came over, you know, I mean, many, many European countries had goats, kept goats, and had goat keeping and goat milking traditions. And so goats were much more normal in for them than they maybe were for established Americans. And so immigrants, many immigrants, including the Irish, came over. And American cities, say, like New York City is a good example, just because it was the largest city in the nation at the time, were really unprepared to have these big waves of immigrants. And so there was not enough food, There was no place for people to live. And many immigrants, including the Irish, established just kind of put together communities wherever they could, finding. Finding pieces of wood and cloth to make shelters and so on. And many of these little immigrant communities that popped up, which the residents of New York called shantytowns, derogatorily, many of these settlements kept people in the settlements, kept goats, chickens, occasionally maybe a cow or a pig, just so they could survive. And so goat keeping became associated with these immigrant communities, particularly the Irish. But for established residents, the goats became linked up with these sort of settlements of what they perceived as poverty and decay. And so social decline. And so the very common stereotype popped up during the 19th century and in. Especially in New York and in some of the popular satirical magazines and so on, was the Irishman and his goat, or the Irishman as a goat. So if you called someone a goat, you. You know, you. You probably meant they were Irish. You would often there would be articles in newspapers about goats. And they would give the goats Irish sounding names. They would give the goats stereotypical. What were stereotypical then qualities of Irishmen maybe being drunk or angry or various things like that. And so it became this sort of, you could say the word goat and it meant Irish or in a very negative way. So the nativist sentiments in New York City and the United States during that period really collapsed the idea of negative ideas of goats with immigrants and immigration and the perception that they were contributed to the decline of United States okay.
- [14:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this link is really interesting. And as you've been describing to us, this is not the only time that goats are not looked upon favorably, which makes it honestly, even more interesting to continue reading the book and realize that there were some parts about goats that actually do sort of turn a corner and are really important again. You know, we started off with goats keeping sailors alive, then not so nice things. We then get to a point of goat's milk becoming a really important source of milk in US Diets. So how does that happen if we've got newspapers saying that kind of everything about goats is bad?
- [15:11]
Dr. Tammy Parr
It's really, really remarkable. I mean, it's. It's amazing. And to see this kind of pivot in history and so quickly is. I don't know, it's just kind of strange, but also fascinating at the same time. And it really starts with the widespread consumption of fluid milk as a widespread product. The history of milk and milk consumption is kind of complicated, and there are some really good books about this that people can consult to really get into that. But there was a really widespread rise in milk consumption starting around the mid 19th century, especially for infant feeding. But this sort of predates the widespread scientific knowledge about microorganisms and the fact that milk is a perfect growth medium for bacteria and all sorts of bad things. And so people got sick. No one really knew why. This is how pasteurization started to be developed and so on. But as knowledge grew about microorganisms, as the germ theory of disease started to come into play, at the same time, it started to change people's perception of milk. The perception of milk became negative. And then that really collapsed when it was discovered that tuberculosis could be passed through cow's milk. And that's sort of like there had been this great growth in milk consumption, even though it was some relatively unhealthy. But when discovery came through that tuberculosis could be passed, that was like, oh, boy, this is just. This is just not, you know, so people were really upset by that. And suddenly, you know, little. Somewhere, I. I swear, a little. A little, you know, twinkle came in someone's. Or maybe the general consciousness of ghosts. We could. We could drink goat's milk. And what's interesting about that is the perception was that while cows could pass tuberculosis through their milk and meat, goats could not. Goats were perceived as tuberculosis free. And that is the pivot point. Now, it's important to note that goats can in fact, pass tuberculosis through their milk and meat, and goats are now tested for tuberculosis, as are cows. But at the time it was believed that goats were the healthy alternative milk to drink. And that was that. The industry just exploded. Goat's milk dairies, caves sprouted up everywhere, all across the country, big cities, small towns, everywhere. And of course this had a huge effect on goats social status. Suddenly those, all those newspaper articles I was reading that talked about, you know, goats are the scourge of society and da da da da became goats are saviors of mankind. I mean really, just like so superlative, so many sort of funny superlatives about goats and how amazing suddenly goats are. It's kind of hard for people, it's hard for me to see that and think did people really realize what was happening? Anyway, so in any event, the point being that the association of goat's milk and health and wellness started here and goats became popular, goat's milk became popular and I mean goats finally acquired the economic value that cattle have had all along. And I think that's kind of the key reason that goats became popular.
- [18:44]
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- [19:07]
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- [20:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
H yeah, really made a difference in the industry and in the perceptions as well. Speaking then of the dairy goat industry, can you tell us why this was a part of the economy that women were more able to get involved in than in other areas?
- [20:22]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah, just one more interesting aspect of the whole goat project. Generally, you know, I mean, women's gender roles are sort of Starting to expand a little bit around the turn of the 20th century. There are women starting to go to college. And this is, you know, all very new. Women in the United States are sort of lobbying for women's suffrage, the right to vote, but there's still a very solid expectation that women are supposed to sort of be doing women's work in the home and cook and clean and all of that kind of stuff. The concept of the women's sphere of influence is still very strong, but changing. And one of the ways in which women were beginning to sort of be able to enter more professional, public facing types of roles were, was when the areas intersected health and social improvement, types of. Types of things. So the milk issue in particular was really a natural fit for women, especially because a lot of the controversies around contaminated milk that were happening over the late 19th century and early 20th century surrounded infant health and infant mortality and infant feeding. So obviously that's a mother's issue in the parlance of the day. And so. So that, I think, helped as a segue for women to be involved. Another layer of that also, I think. I mean, in England at least, and of course, you know, we're far from the colonial era, but, you know, in England, the dairy was always traditionally women's work. I think the word dairy even comes from an old English word meaning female servant or something like that. I mean, dairying and cheese making was always a woman's job. And so there's these late. I think there's this latent collector, collective memories, type of association of women and milk that I think is there somehow. And I think that contributed in some manner and added to the perception that goat dairying was somehow fit or more fit for women in a certain way. And there's also, I mean, some of the articles you read about women and goats during this period of time in the early 1920s and so on, there's this kind of a patronizing perception that women can handle goats. Goats are smaller, you know, they're not as, you know, rough as cattle or whatever. They're not as big. They're, you know, so there's kind of a. A little bit I found of that kind of perception too. But I mean, really what happened is a whole new generation of women took up go daring and really professional farming as a independent way of life. And this seemed to work. I mean, people. There were articles written about them in newspapers and it seemed to be like this sort of portrayed as a gallant kind of profession, you know, improving, working toward improving society. And women were doing this really great thing and. And how natural it was that women would be associated with milk. And, you know, I think one of the most prominent figures in goat circles of this time, I like to talk about her and kind of resurrect her name out of the dark recesses of goat history. Her name was Irmagaard Richards. She was a Mills College professor and started a goat dairy in Northern California during the early 20th century. And she was an educator. She wrote the book about goat dairying of the early 20th century called modern Milk Goats and, you know, would go around the country lecturing to goat groups and social organizations and so on about the virtues of goat milk and so on. So, you know, it really was a time, sort of a convergence of events and social movements that allowed women, I think, to really seize upon the goat dairying as a means of having independent, you know, income and profession. So it was really interesting.
- [24:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really interesting to read about and hear you talk about. So thank you for sharing that with us here. This is all sounding very good then, for industries related to goats, but turns.
- [24:33]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Out, not so much.
- [24:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Goat dairy industry, goat milk, very successful, as you've explained. Why wasn't goat meat as successful?
- [24:41]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yes, again, the funny twists and turns of goats and beliefs about goats in America are just so interesting. What happened is a little bit bizarre. In addition to this wave of goat dairying that happened simultaneously and not related, was the business of angora ranching. Angora goats are a goat, but they're primarily raised for their. They're fiber or wool, sometimes called wool. And that fiber is called mohair. And it was an enormous mohair industry in the United states during the 19th and early 20th century. And there were millions and millions of angora goats in the United States well into the 20th century. Three to four million Angora goats, which is an enormous number of goats. I think the total population of all goats in the United States today is a little over 2 million. So there. There are many, many more goats in the United States a hundred years ago than there are now. But anyway, all these ranchers had. They were making money off of their angora goats by selling the. Shaving them and selling the mohair. But they also were like, well, hey, why don't we try to market the meat as well so we can make more money now, presumably you say, okay, yeah, you know, go. Smoke is popular. Why not goat meat as well? Somehow that was a barrier that you were not able to break. Why? And, you know, it's a little bit mysterious, but I think the familiarity with Milk is a really different and really different sort of track and association set of associations than the familiarity with meat. I think the healthfulness of milk, the belief that milk was sort of this healthy elixir that could make you healthy and live a long life, really was really different than association with meat, which didn't carry some of those heightened awarenesses about. And goat meat was something that people were just didn't understand or know about. Even mutton. Sheep's meat was sort of something that was not super popular around the greater United States. So these goat ranchers, these Angora goat ranchers are trying to sell this goat meat. Made a couple really, I would say, really big mistakes. One was to try to market the goat meat as mutton or sheep's meat. Created a whole sense of deception among the general public that really, I think, doomed the whole enterprise. They also tried to create a name for goats meat that did not contain the word goat. So in the. During the 1920s, the Texas goat Ranchers association created the name Chavon, excuse me, for goat meat. And you know that people still use that today. I don't think people really know what it is in large part. But what happened was newspapers got a hold of the idea that goat ranchers were trying to somehow disguise goat meat as sheep meat. Congress got involved in Pennsylvania. There was even like inspectors were raiding butcher shops trying to, you know, see if they were trying to market goats meat as sheep's meat. And it just, it generated this entire drama that really, even if there was an opportunity to market goat's meat, really, they doomed the enterprise with that whole thing. So, but even outside of the whole marketing or lack of marketing efforts or strange marketing efforts, really, goat meat acceptance in the United States just was not there on a broad scale. I think many, many immigrant communities, the Italians, the perhaps the Irish and Germans, who, many of whom had kept goats in the early 20th century, but amongst the broader population, there just was not an acceptance of goat meat. And that the. All of the positive associations with goat's milk just never got over that hump, if you will. It just never translated.
- [28:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to understand, kind of which did get through and which didn't and sort of the comparison there. Moving however, to a community we haven't yet mentioned, but nevertheless has very strong ties with goats. And talking a little bit about these stereotypes we've been discussing, what did this mean for the Dine community in the southwestern United States? How were these stereotypes against goats used for colonial purposes against them?
- [29:26]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah, Another very interesting angle on the Whole goat perceptions. In the United States, the Dine words Dine and Navajo are generally considered interchangeable. I tend to use Navajo just because it's something that I think my readers would know what I meant, so I'll just use Navajo. But the Navajo as a population, the territory in most of the western half of what is now the United States was Spanish territory for many centuries until the mid-1800s. And so the Spanish brought their domesticated livestock, as I talked about earlier. And so sheep and goats in particular, were very suited to the kind of that desert sort of southwestern landscape and did really well there. And the Navajoans, one of the other native populations of that region, took up goat raising and sheep raising as their way of life. And this is how sort of the derivation of Navajo weaving and all of that sort of thing. And you know, just as an aside, it's a. It's also a really an important niche of, I think, American cheese making history that has been overlooked. The Navajo made goat's milk cheeses for. For, you know, probably at least a century, if not more. So that's something that I think deserves more exploration. But so when the U.S. acquired, quote, unquote, acquired Navajo territory during the 19th century, they put all of the administration of all of their Native American populations under the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So they put the administrative apparatus sort of over the top of Navajo land and livelihood. And so of course, what you ended up with was a clash of beliefs about many, many, many things, including livestock practices. Bureau of Indian affairs officials were really negative about Navajo go keeping practices. So they brought many of the negative stereotypes about goats to the administration of these people whose livelihood was sheep and goats. And this all sort of came to a head during the early 20th century. The Southwest is a desert. It's had cycles of severe drought for centuries. A particularly severe period of drought occurred during the 1890s. And causing the Bureau of Indian affairs to try to implement a livestock, what's since been called a livestock reduction program, believing that there were so many animals on the land that, you know, this was contributing to the deterioration of the land. And so the drove Indian affairs essentially said, you know, you've got to get rid of your animals or large, large portions of your animals, because this is just not going to work. And so it was really remarkable. And when I was, I was, I started to investigate some of this and the, the same sort of super negative sentiments that I saw in 19th century beliefs, you know, even about the Irish or, you know, just some of the really negative associations between good goats and Social decay and decline and so on were repeated here vis a vis the Navajo. The Bureau of Indian affairs officials really blame goats for a lot of the landscape deterioration, which was clearly caused by extended drought conditions and lack of rain. The rhetoric is really quite remarkable. So the old stereotypes about goats and the connections to goats and poverty, goats and lack of social organization and so on really came back. And this is a really complicated time. It's hard to sort of talk about and sum up really quickly. But there's a great book by Marcia Weisinger called Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo country, if people are interested in reading in more detail about this period. But the long and short of it is that the Bureau of Indian affairs instituted this livestock reduction program, believing that, you know, again, the sheep and goats were. Were the cause in some sense. But they really went after goats with particular vehemence. Officials rounded up animals, sold them, in many cases, just would herd up goats, shot them, leave piles of carcasses everywhere. And the Navajos say that there are areas in certain canyons and certain areas of the reservation where there are some still the piles of bones on goats that were just sort of decimated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So, you know, it's a really horrible story. I think that the Navajo were aware of the need for. That the environment was deteriorating and of the need potentially to reduce the numbers of livestock. But it was that disconnect between the administrative, you know, kind of paternalizing view of the Bureau of Indian affairs and vis a vis a people whose livelihood, whose spiritual practices revolved around the animals. It just was a disconnect that really made the whole livestock reduction era really devastating.
- [34:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, Incredibly, incredibly devastating. The book you mentioned, especially photographs of it, really bring that home as well. But since then, the Dine have worked to recover. Recover such that they now have one of the largest goat populations in the U.S. is that right?
- [35:08]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yes. Yeah. And so, you know, the period of livestock reduction was really devastating, and there has been some recovery, but there are really. The Bureau of Indian affairs still controls all native populations in the United States. And so there's still a lot of rules around livestock keeping. You have to get a permit to graze in certain areas, and you can only graze so many sheep and goats on this. This particular space of land and so on. And so it's. It's. There's a lot of constraints around it. And what happened, the effect of the reduction, was that newer generations of Navajo don't understand livestock rearing. They didn't grow up with it like their grandparents. May have and so on. And so the. The newer generations, I mean, they're not even familiar with immigration. The foods of that era, the goat's milk, even the goat's milk cheesesthat were produced by, again, their grandparents. Some of these traditions are just disappearing. So people are working really hard to recover some of those practices and make sure the oral traditions are taken down and the history is at least there for the newer generations to look back to. So, yes, like you said, sheep and goat herding is still practiced on the reservation and there is a really large population of goats there, but it's on a smaller scale. And it is. You know, the question of recovery for the Navajo is kind of ongoing. And what the livestock mean to the tribe now is I think it's in a state of transition. And I'm not sure anyone knows where that's going to go eventually. But.
- [36:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, thank you for taking. Sort of updating us on where we're at now so that we can pay attention going forward. And I realise I did kind of break my chronological goal here, because I did ask you to go from sort of mid 20th century to now, but I do have some questions that cover time sort of between those two periods. So, you know, apologies to the chronology, we're going to go a little bit backwards. But if we're thinking about sort of the US as a whole, sort of mid century, so kind of after World War II, we were at this point before then where we're looking at, like, goats are becoming popular, dairy milk, goat's milk, like, this is all great. It doesn't stay that way. You're like, no, no, no, hang on. Then we get to just after World War II when all of this dips again. We've obviously had a lot of rises and falls over our conversation. Why is there this low point after World War II?
- [37:34]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah, really interesting. And partly, I think, because initially, at least, the popularity of goat's milk was really tied directly to tuberculosis and the tuberculosis epidemic. And over the course of the 20th century, the tuberculosis, excuse me, rate, began to decline, partly because of improvements in sanitation and in the 40s, the development of antibiotics. So tuberculosis was not as top of mind as it had been for really centuries before. Before that point. And because goat's milk was tied to tuberculosis, maybe the need for goat's milk kind of began to a little bit disappear in people's minds. There was no apparent need to worry about getting tuberculosis from cow's milk anymore. And that is because cow's milk became safer, because the USDA went on this giant program to eradicate infected cattle. So by mid century, most of the affected cattle had been eliminated from the dairy cow population of the United States. At the same time, another thread, pasteurization, became pretty much the norm across America. And so milk, generally speaking, was much safer than it had been in the 19th century. So all of those fears around tuberculosis and contaminated milk and so on were on the wane. And so for a lot of people, there was no need to have goat's milk anymore. But I think the other part of it is that I think the goat dairy industry was really, if there was ever a moment to seize, kind of a distillation point in history, just take it on. I think the goat dairy industry kind of missed it. I think there were not enough goats and not enough goat's milk generally to really compete, I guess you could say, with cow's milk. While there were many, many goat dairies, they're generally pretty small. There was just not enough goat's milk to really make a, make a run at competing seriously with cow's milk as America's sort of, you know, milk of choice. If goat's milk had, had been able to be more widespread across the country and there was more volume, it'd be interesting to see. I really curious to see what, what might have happened if, if that had been able, if goat dairy people had been able to do that. But as it was, there was just a dip and, and people kind of, you know, not really forgot about it, but it sort of just became less, less interesting.
- [40:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, in some ways we kind of have an answer to that hypothetical of like, what if goat's milk could have competed? Because we do have today both goat's cheese and cow's cheese both running around being popular and successful in the US So why do we get the rise of goat's cheese in sort of the 1970s, 1980s?
- [40:25]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah. So what happened was post World War II, combined with a sense of alienation in the United States from especially the Vietnam War, but also a book like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, awareness, alienation from society, but also an awareness that society is a belief that society is kind of spraying all your food with chemicals and really kind of harming and destroying nature generally. So this, this really big, all these factors went into this really big widespread counterculture movement in the United States, jumpstarting a kind of a back to the land idea. Let's go back, let's start fresh, let's get our own piece of land, grow our own food, you know, milk our own cows. Or goats, everything will be free of all the harmful pesticides and we'll be, you know, able to kind of live on our own terms. And what you saw was a renewed interest in goats. Again, goats were kind of the perfect starter animal for this back to the land population. People who were not experienced with keeping animals at all, but let alone cattle, goats were less threatening. They're smaller. And so, you know, you see a lot of hippie communes in the 60s and 70s with goats, you know, trying this experiment of being on the land and living off the land and so on. And it's kind of funny to read some of the memoirs and stories of this because no one knows how to milk a goat, but they're trying to get back to the land and all this stuff. But the idea was getting back to milk from animals, fresh milk from its source, not from buying it from a store, not treated in any way, and so on and so forth. And that led to, over time, some of these sort of erzatz goat dairy people were able to sort of start businesses selling goat's milk. And at the same time health, the health food store became a thing in the United States and food collapse. And so these were places where they would sell goat's milk and people would go to these stores for goat's milk. And it was sort of a, it contributed to sort of an economic rise of goat's milk. And not just goat's milk, but goat's milk cheese. And goat's milk cheese really kind of got jump started in the United States when Laura Chanel started producing French style goat's milk cheeses in the early 1980s. And I think that association with France, and they were specifically French style cheeses really, I think helped with the public's increasing acceptance of goat's milk cheeses. That and Chanel's association with Alice Waters and the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, which had a national reputation at the time for local locally sourced ingredients and all that kind of stuff. So goat cheese kind of vaulted into much the way that goat's milk vaulted into prominence in the early 20th century. Now, goat's milk cheese really sort of took off in the 1980s and it went crazy.
- [43:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And we now get to have all sorts of good goat's cheese today. So that's exciting. What about the goats themselves? How have they been? I mean, we last, I think we mentioned them, they were being banned from cities. You know, San Francisco, don't you dare have goats. And we're now more recently seeing goats being introduced or reintroduced I suppose, to urban spaces. What's up with that? And how's it going?
- [44:06]
Dr. Tammy Parr
It's. It's so funny. Just the ups and downs of it all. And partly, I mean, I think the truth is, is that goats were really always there. I don't think goats ever disappeared, no matter if they were banned or not. So that's, that's one thing. But. But cities are starting to come back to the idea of small livestock again. And so I think some of this started sort of in the early 2000s. There's a woman named Novella Carpenter in Oakland, California. She went on to write a book called Farm City about her experiences. But she took this vacant lot and started growing, growing vegetables on it and eventually got a couple goats and I think pigs also, and blogged about her experiences. And then that sort of kind of a rise in popularity again, a little, kind of a mini back to the land movement. And people started becoming enthusiastic about growing vegetables, you know, finding plots of land or in their backyards or whatever. And that idea of growing, you know, your own food, of course, never really died from the 60s and 70s. But the goat thing was really interesting. That kind of became popular. People were interested in taking that next step. Vegetables are one thing, but, you know, milk. Well, this is interesting. Why don't I try that? There was a woman in Seattle in the early 2000s, also named Jenny Grant, and she got a goat, couple of goats. And they turned out that Seattle, they were not legal in Seattle. And so she kind of created a legalization campaign in Seattle. It was sort of a tongue in cheek campaign. She called her organization the Goat Justice League. It was really kind of funny, but she was able to legalize goats in Seattle and. And she, you know, milked goats, made fresh cheese and, you know, drank the milk and so on, and her family really enjoyed it. So I think that idea generally of growing your own food, having control of your own, you know, your own sustenance is really, I think, appealing and has ongoing appeal even outside of different fads and so on, I think these days. So that was in the early 2000s, I think at this point I don't see the urban goat movement being quite as at least media prominent as it was. It's not really top of mind for people at this point, although goats are definitely still around. And I know I live in Portland, Oregon, and there are plenty of goats, urban goats in this city, and I think they will always be around to one extent or another. The waxing and waning of the popularity will come and go, but I think the other things people maybe they start to do it and start to realize goats are expensive. It's expensive to feed livestock. These are not just they're much bigger than cats and dogs. They have different needs. Veterinary care is expensive and so on. So that will always be a part of urban go keeping too, is the it's not just that easy, but I think urban go camping will always be a thing, no matter what.
- [47:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, and we'll certainly, I'm sure, notice rise and falls the way that we have been documenting in our conversation in your books. So something to pay attention to. What might you be doing now that this book is done? Any current or upcoming projects, whether or not they're goat related, whether or not they're book related that you want to give us a brief mention of?
- [47:18]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Yeah, I mean every time I this is my third book and every time I've written a book, it sort of suggests another topic for me to think about. I mean, I think just to set me on a path of exploring the background and history of cheese making in the United States. I think goat cheese, the history of goat cheese has really been under underappreciated. And so I think that's a whole track that I could get into in much more detail, especially in like in the colonial era, I think fermented milk products are have been a thing for, you know, centuries and belong millennia. But in the United States, I'd like to know more about that. I think there's work to be done on specific regions of the United States. The specific history of I think would be interesting, the history of goats in the American south, especially post Civil War South. I think there was a large concentration of goats there and I'd love to look into that more or maybe someone can do a dissertation about that at some point. So yeah, there I think one once I just started with goats, I just scratched the surface. So I think there's so much more there. So I'd love to think about it and write about it more.
- [48:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. And while you continue to investigate goats, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Goats in America, A Cultural History, published by Oregon State University Press in 2025. Tammy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [48:35]
Dr. Tammy Parr
Thanks Miranda. I really appreciate it. Sa.