The swill milk scandal was a major food fraud in New York City in the 1850s, where cows were fed distillery waste ('swill') and their milk was whitened with plaster of Paris and thickened with starch. An estimated 8,000 infants died from swill milk in one year, making it one of the deadliest food adulteration scandals in American history. The scandal was exposed by journalists and the New York Academy of Medicine.

The swill milk scandal was a landmark event in American food safety history, and it was covered extensively in newspapers and pamphlets. It inspired muckraking journalism and social reform literature, including the works of later writers like Upton Sinclair. The scandal also contributed to the growing demand for pure food laws, a theme that would be taken up by American poets and novelists.