I think you guys are conflating homogenization with pasteurization.
No one is getting sick from un-homgenized milk. It’s the unpasteurized/raw milk that has the potential to make you sick and has legal restrictions regarding it’s sales.
So far as I know there’s no restrictions regarding homogenized milk. People just don’t want it. I do see it for sale (on a few websites I looked at to confirm at least someone produces it for retail sale), but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it in a store.
Also, a quick check tells me raw milk is also unhomogenized, but I’ve always been under the impression it’s the unpasteurized part people are after if they’re buying raw milk.
What did I miss in my post that’s four up from yours? I thought I was at least semi-clear about the difference between the two?
Oh gosh, there are so many rules and restrictions regarding milk that it is hard to keep them all straight. I will just say that there are many restrictions regarding homogenized milk and drop the subject.
I do believe you are correct here. I honestly doubt that many folks know what raw milk is except for the part that it is natural and organic so is healthier or some such shit.
HOWEVER, there are a ton of rules and regulations as to selling raw milk. Many of them involve labeling but storage, filtering and climate control are all addressed.
If you have time, go to the FDA webpage and look at organic and natural foods. It will really make you think.
You quoted Dr Strangelove saying that ordinary outlets don’t carry unhomogenized milk and countered with a statement that you’ve never been in a chain grocery store that doesn’t have raw milk.
It’s entirely possible misinterpreted that, but I read it to mean that you were referring to unhomogenized milk as raw milk.
I’m sure I’ve read it at one point or another. I’m in the food business and have picked through the USDA food code more times than I care to think about.*
One thing I do remember being surprised about is that it’s not just YOUR crops that have to be organic. What I mean by that is you can’t grow your crops with certain chemicals. But there also needs to be a buffer zone around your organic crop that is also free of those chemicals. Years and years ago, I asked a farmer I know if his stuff was organic. He said it’s free of all those chemicals, but it’s not certified organic because it wasn’t worth it to him to make sure those chemicals weren’t being used around his farm either.
*In fact, whenever I’m chit chatting with our local health inspector and he’s informs me about some change to the code, he’ll often preface it with ‘you probably already know this but…’ and more often than not I can show him actual evidence that I was aware of and already implemented the changes (ie updated employee paperwork regarding illness reporting or changes to food labels etc).
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I covered both things by the next sentence which said:
I have never been as clear as I would like in my online communications, I will try to do better in the future.
Very cool. I’m just a small cottage creamery so I only pay attention to the things that affect me. I don’t care about carrots, I care about milk so that’s what I focus on.
Thank you for letting me know that I’ve been unclear, do you have any suggestions as to how I could have better written that paragraph? I am NOT being snarky, I honestly do want to know how to communicate with my clients better.
My father hated cornbread, and I asked him why. He grew up on a farm, and a common, cheap evening meal was a bowl of milk with a hunk of cornbread in it.
To a growing boy, it wasn’t a very filling or satisfying meal. He also said it was either cornbread and “sweet” milk, or cornbread and buttermilk.
Buttermilk was probably served more often than sweet milk, because the cream was skimmed off and churned into butter, which could be sold for “cash money.” The whey that was left in the churn was buttermilk. The stuff that is sold in the dairy case at the grocery store is cultured buttermilk, a more substantial product than the stuff in the churn.
I also found you unclear, and i was really confused that you seemed to be conflating homogenization with pasteurization, as i knew you played with milk and cheese and had to understand the difference. Also, I’ve never lived anywhere where you could buy raw milk in most supermarkets, so that was confusing, too. (It’s illegal to sell in many states, and complicated to sell in others.) But almost every grocery store I’ve been to recently does have at least one brand of un-homogenized milk. I prefer homogenized, but have bought the un-homogenized by mistake.
I think it would have been more direct to say it in the other order, “every store you’ve shopped at has un-homogenized milk, often it’s also raw, and in the ‘all natural’ section.” So, responding directly to the question and then adding the other details.
I’ll have to look more closely next time I’m at the stores, but from the products I see available online from local providers, the only non-homogenized stuff available is raw. And all available raw milk is non-homogenized. So while I think we’re all clear at this point that raw means unpasteurized, it may in effect also be synonymous with non-homogenized based on what is typically available.
I suspect that depends on where you are - it’s only in the last 10-15 years that I could assume that a restaurant would have unsweetened tea. Before that, it was more likely to be Lipton or Nestea sweetened* iced tea with lemon, and dispensed by the soda dispenser rather than freshly brewed. Even now, the default is sweetened and if you simply order “iced tea” , you will be told if they only have unsweetened. The same went for bottled iced tea in stores - there might be multiple brands and flavors , but I couldn’t assume any of them were unsweetened.
I didn’t know JaneDoe42 was involved in the dairy industry. I approached the post with the POV that she(?) was simply unaware of the exact meaning of, what is essentially, industry jargon. I assume most of us do that when talking about something related to our job with someone that (we assume) isn’t nearly as familiar with it as we are.
Maybe so. Around here (Texas), unsweetened tea was the norm growing up in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Sweet tea/sweetened tea only became a thing at fast food places in the last 10-15 years. It’s still not a thing at sit-down restaurants- if you order iced tea, you get unsweetened, and you doctor it up with the sweeteners in the little caddy on the table.
This says that raw milk cannot be sold across state lines within the US. And it lists the state by state rules as of a few years ago
This is more up-to-date on state laws, and it looks like you can buy raw milk in about half the states (more or less depending on whether you count “buying a share of a cow” as a way to “buy milk”.)
Thank you for being so clear and specific. I really am working on my online communication skills, I do know they are sadly lacking.
Safeway, Fry’s and Basha’s (but thinking on it, Basha’s is an Arizona chain so it also doesn’t count). The Safeway floor plan I’m used to has the raw milk next to the goat milk. Fry’s has the neato bottles and their raw milk tends to be stocked closer to the cream. This is in Arizona, YMMV.
I have a small cottage creamery. I spend a lot of time playing around with milk and honestly do inspect every single milk case I come across because you never know where you can find something wonderful.
Mostly I just find boring ol’ white milk but I still have to look.
I just went to Amazon to see if they shipped raw cow milk and found this instead.
Thanks to the OP for starting this thread, I found something new that I never knew was available and now can’t live without. At a buck and a quarter an ounce, it better make some REALLY good cheese!
I think doreen was asking for an example of a chain store, not a chain store that also carries raw milk.
I, like doreen, would consider Trader Joe’s a chain store in every sense (including legally) of the word. So when you said that you don’t consider it to be one, she(?) was asking what you do consider to be a chain store. Or at least I was curious about that.
Yes - that’s what I was asking. I can’t think of a definition of “chain grocery store” that Trader Joe’s doesn’t meet. Although if Basha’s doesn’t count, I suppose what might have been meant is “national grocery chain” but I’m not sure there actually are any of those * - I’ve never even seen either a Safeway or Fry’s
* I wouldn’t call either Target or Walmart a grocery store/supermarket although both sell groceries and I wouldn’t consider stores with different names to be a single chain due to common ownership - just because the same parent company owns Giant Food and Stop and Shop doesn’t make them part of a single chain.
One distinction (which @JaneDoe42 might have had in mind) is that Trader Joe’s largely carries their own private label items, or items which are exclusively made for them, rather than a range of national and regional brands.
This makes them not unlike how Aldi operates in the U.S., and with some good reason: there are two separate (but related) German-based companies called Aldi: Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. The U.S. Aldi grocery store chain is operated by Aldi Nord, while Trader Joe’s is operated by Aldi Süd.
There are a couple of grocery operators which operate in much of the U.S., such as Albertsons, Kroger, and Ahold Delhaize; however, in all of those cases, they operate a bunch of regional chains, many of which don’t share the name of their corporate parent. For example: Albertsons owns regional chains like Safeway, Acme, and Jewel; Kroger owns chains like Ralph’s, Fry’s, and Mariano’s.
