Who first suggested that milk be pasteurized to make it safer
for consumption? No, it wasn’t Louis Pasteur. Back in 1886,
Frans von Soxhlet, a German agricultural chemist, was the first
person to suggest that milk sold to the public be pasteurized.
The term “pasteurization” of course is derived from Louis
Pasteur’s pioneering work on the destruction of microbes through
heat treatment, but Pasteur’s area of interest was wine and
beer, not milk. Actually, Pasteur didn’t even really invent
pasteurization. The fact that heat treatment made foods safer
was known long before Pasteur, but the French chemist was the
first to provide an explanation for the phenomenon. Pasteur
realized that spoilage was due to chemical reactions initiated
by living microbes, and that the reason heat treatment prevented
spoilage was because of its destructive effect on these living
organisms. If wine or beer turned sour, Pasteur maintained, it
was because of contamination by acid-producing rogue yeasts
after the alcohol producing yeast