I read somewhere that during WWII a lot of children were sent from the city of London to surrounding farms to escape the Blitz (a la The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and that a lot of them were given raw milk by farmers who didn’t believe in pasteurization. A lot of them caught various interesting diseases.
I suspect that if you grew up on raw milk you developed antibodies against a lot of those, and the city kids were just unprotected.
Yet another topic guaranteed to generate debate in GQ.
Having survived the consumption of raw milk myself, I can say that it’s certainly possible. The point of all of the laws against it (and not just in the U.S.) is that commercial production of raw milk is a dangerous proposition. It’s difficult, and expensive, to maintain the handling standards necessary to offset the higher risk of disease from unpasteurized milk. And let’s face it, short of agar in a petrie dish, it’s pretty much the ideal medium for growing bacteria.
Certainly, it’s possible that every producer is going to maintain the requisite level of care and quality. I think though, that lawmakers in the instance are erring on the side of caution.
Certified milk used to be available a long time ago. It was produced and handled under rigidly controlled conditions and was not pasteurized. I’m told that for my first 6 mo. or so I had to have that because for some reason I couldn’t handle pasteurized milk.
I doubt that any such thing is available commercially now. A quart would probably cost $50.
More like $8.00/gallon. That’s what we pay for quasi-legal cowshare raw milk from our farmer neighbors.
I drank a lot of raw milk as a child, and for some reason I liked it warm, freshly milked. It was somehow reassuring to me, I s’pose, that it just came out of a cow.
Pasteurized milk cannot compare in taste to raw milk, but I wouldn’t buy bottled raw milk and drink it. I’ll only drink raw milk if I know the person doing the milking and I’ve met the cows.
(IME): I lived in Germany as a child and my brother, sister and I used to walk to the nearby dairy farm and pick up a pail of raw milk. I liked it at the time.
at one time I had heard the raw milk is actually better for you.
Is it true that you can take raw milk, and add fresh grapefruit juice and get homemade acidophilous (spelling?)?
Also I have eaten raw cheese and the milk is highly available now in the organic section of stores…so can it be that bad?
I’ve heard about beans repeating on you, but “The Enduring Chili” seems like a stretch. Oh, wait.
Is this a woosh that I’m not getting? Maybe it’s just that I live in a dairy county in the Midwest, but every farmer I know owns cows that are milked.
As to the OP - Mr. Stuff gets raw milk from our neighbor, and loves it. I am not a big milk fan myself, and I don’t like the consistency, so I don’t drink it. We wouldn’t drink raw milk from any farm, but we know our neighbor and know his cattle are clean and healthy.
Maybe not today. In day past it depended on the skill of the milk maid, or milk man.
They could put the stream in the mouth of the cat, the dog, or the casual unsuspecting stander by! 
Interesting – I remember dropping by a market within the last decade and finding all kinds of milk from fat free all the way up to unpasteurized and unhomogenized (ie, raw) milk. They all came in good ol’ fashioned glass milk jugs with paper caps.
I wasn’t brave enough to try the raw milk, and reading this thread, it seems I was wise to. :eek: As it was, I went for the pasteurized, unhomogenized milk. Sweetness!
And these days, I buy whole milk. Yay! The fat free milk tastes like white water to me, IMHO. I’ve also been known to have myself a wee shot of heavy cream just 'cause I love the taste. 
I grew up drinking fresh, raw milk. I was never a fan of the warm stuff straight from the cow, but some members of my family were. I preferred it be chilled first. When I was just a wee lad we milked several cows, ran it all through a cream separator, and sold the cream. After I was about 8 or so Dad only milked one cow for our own use, and instead of using the separator the milk would just be strained, and then after the cream rose to the top most would be scooped off, and a bit stirred into the milk. I would be quite surprised if raw milk were inherently more dangerous to consume than, say, spinach. When distributed commercially the issues change, because all the milk is mixed together and the time between milking and consumption is generally much longer.
Alas, language standards are going down, down, down. When I was growing up in Iowa, when cattle that are used for milking were advertised for sale it was always “FOR SALE - 2 Holstein milch cows.” or some such thing.
I have no problem eating raw spinach.
Holsteins? Fuck that shit! Jerseys!
/Frank Booth
I think you’ve been misled - lots of suggestions of possible hazards, but no evidence that milk from a single healthy cow is a problem.
Just like the McCoys and Martins, the fight goes on.
Should I throw in Guernseys?
Anaamika’s posting reminds me of what a friend told me about his childhood in India. Instead of a van full of bottles, the milk man just brought the cow around every morning. Several neighboring families owned a share in a cow. The keeper of the cow would come around to each house and dispense that family’s share straight from the udder.
The first time I ever had warm milk was on a visit to my great uncle’s Nebraska farm. I went out to watch the milking and he squirted some out into a stainless steel cup. Can’t say I liked it much.
Our herd (in North Texas) was mostly Holstein with a smattering of Jerseys, Guernseys and Brown Swiss thrown in. They don’t give as much as the Holsteins, but it is higher in butterfat and AMPI paid a premium for that.
FWIW, we always called them “milch cows”, but I thought we were kidding. 
I grew up drinking raw milk as did all of my family and many of my neighbors. Since we sold our milk, it was stringently tested and we had monthly (unannounced) visits from the local health department. The bacteria count of our raw, unpasteurized milk was roughly 1/10th that of standard tap water (according to the inspector from AMPI).
So to the OP, raw milk per se is not particularly hazardous when it is collected, handled and stored in a safe manner. Verifying that that standard is met in commercially available products may be problematic.