I’m hearing that raw milk has all sorts of good bacteria, and that we should be allowed to buy and drink it.
Then I hear that raw milk is teeming with death and should not be sold to people.
Which side of the raw milk divide has the better case?
My guess is that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, by that’s just a WAG. I drank raw milk from the dairy a half-mile up the road from my grandparent’s farm in the summer - no ill effects that I can discern, but I wasn’t a regular year-round consumer. From what I can remember, it was much “richer” and had a totally different taste from pasteurized 2%. Didn’t take much to fill you up either, but it was certainly tasty.
I will say that as with most everything else, if you want to know what’s really going on in any particular debate, follow the money.
I don’t know about the health effects, but as a kid I drank some fresh milk on a farm once, and it tasted absolutely horrible. It was warm and tasted like a cross between milk, piss, and feces. I’m not kidding. Blech!
OTOH, in matters like this, possibly concerning the conflicts between corporate profits vs. public health (that is the question here, right? Right? :dubious: ), maybe you don’t want to know.
It may well be that raw milk is teeming with good healthful bacteria AND death. In which case, I’d say that death tends to override and nullify the good healthful benefits. But maybe that’s just what they want us to believe.
ETA: P.S. to Leaffan: Uh, did you happen to notice if they washed that cow’s private milky parts before extracting the lacteal fluid from the female of the bovine species?
Everyone is accustomed to a certain taste in milk, brought on by how the milk is heated before consumption. For example, its typical to boil milk in some parts of Africa, and people from that area will still boil pasteurized milk to get the right taste.
You can probably check on Wikipedia for the common diseases that pasteurization has practically eliminated – tuberculosis can be spread by contaminated milk, also milk fever – mastitis. And I suppose carefully controlled, carefully harvested milk will also make those not a problem. Its really up to you if its worth the risk.
But really, there’s this meme out there that food has to be “vital” and “alive” to give you superior nutrition. I like my health information to be more peer-reviewed and quantitative – what exactly do “live enzymes” and “raw, unprocessed, natural” foods actually do? Can that be answered, without, for lack of a simpler term, hippy propaganda? I mean to say, can my question be answered without an emotional appeal to how much more “real” the nutrition experience can be?
How much work are people willing to do to get the most organic, raw, untouched natural foods? Don’t they have jobs? Favorite TV shows? Important Cafe Society threads to comment in? Or is driving around to find the raw milk producer, seeing how they treat their cattle, checking that they’re sanitary enough, a really good way to spend their time?
Raw milk from a small, organic, grass-fed dairy with a limited number of cows who receive fanatically consistent care is probably healthier for you than regular milk. It is also not available in the quantities required for most stores to carry it.
Raw milk from a humongous feedlot dairy farm with cows tended by robots would probably be not so healthy to drink, or even stand close to.
Someone milked it from the teat into a paper cup. It was fucking horrible.
Well ok, let me adjust slightly - we got the milk from a big stainless steel vat that may well have been processed in some fashion, it wasn’t from the cow’s teat. The cows were milked with mechanical suction devices, and you could watch the milk move through overhead pipes and into the … well, processing room? Not sure. It DID have a foamy yellow layer on top which I assume was fat of some type, and it was dispensed from the bottom of the vat into jugs, so… not sure if that counts as “raw” milk or not but I do know it wasn’t what you get in the stores, then or now.
Perhaps it tasted richer because it had more fat in it than two-percent skim milk?
I believe the technical term for that layer on top is “cream.” Presumably the raw milk isn’t homogenized, so the cream separates.
Derp on both counts, of course. It was still much richer than even “whole” Vitamin D milk like you’d get at the store, but probably as you say because it hadn’t been fully homogenized yet.
I do remember it made cereal taste fantastic, if that helps.
There’s a VERY pronounced difference between the taste of the milk from pasture-fed cows and from silage/feed fed cows.
So much so in fact, that my university put signs up every spring and fall to notify all the dining hall patrons that no, the milk was not spoiled and that they had changed the dairy herd from pasture to feed or vice-versa. (Texas A&M has a big enough dairy science herd to supply the on-campus dining halls with milk, butter and some cheese)
I think that raw milk is probably safe enough these days with refrigeration, but I’m not convinced there are a lot of beneficial bacteria either. I’ll take mine pasteurized.
Seriously, fresh milk should be sterile unless the animal has an infection of some sort that is able to cross into the milk production, or the mammaries/udders are themselves infected. Was your mother’s milk a slurry of bacteria infested goodness/badness? (Indeed, just about every argument about milk, good and bad, should ask the question about human milk to get a bit of sanity.)
The really big problem was tuberculosis. It was not that long ago that a significant vector for tuberculosis infection was milk from infected cows. Regular testing of herds and, later, immunisation of herds managed to control herd infection, and pasteurisation managed the milk. In country areas were unpasteurised milk was the norm, TB from milk remained a significant problem until TB came under control with antibiotics. With the current simmering issues with resistant TBs, I worry that we could eventually see a return to problems here too.
Pasteurisation does change the milk, and is the subject of an ongoing battle in the EU. Some chesses can’t be made if the milk is pasteurised. (Others require it.) The Eurocrats in Belgium don’t like the ides of traditional cheeses made without pasteurisation, and the French get very very upset.
You get the pro-biotic arguments - beneficial gut bacteria have preferences. Unpasteurised milk may have more of what they like. But the bacteria are those already inside you, not in the milk.
This is the best answer you’re going to get.
Raw milk has a long history in this country. Another of the many things we have totally forgotten about today is that there was huge resistance to pasteurized milk at the beginning of the 20th century. All agreed that pasteurization - a somewhat more brutal process than used today - changed the taste of the milk and, some argued, the heating did other awful things. All agreed that reform was necessary. Cholera epidemics stemming from milk was a huge killer. (When’s the last time you heard about one of those in this country?) So some of the reformers advocated for model farms: strictly run, extremely clean, watchful of the cows. But they never were able to get the production up high enough and too many diseased cows kept slipping through the cracks. (Now there’s an image that will keep you up nights.) Eventually, the pasteurization forces won but that came remarkably late, probably not nationally until WWII.
Lots of people remembered fresh milk straight from the cow, and of course every one of those people hadn’t died from milk-borne disease. Anti-government, anti-science forces met up with natural, organic, anti-corporate types and built up the raw milk movement again. Both sides have money. Weston A. Price, an all-purpose quack, has a foundation that proselytizes and lobbies for raw milk, and pays for suits filed by farmers.
In most states today, you can make arrangements - though often inconvenient and expensive - to buy raw milk from farms. In some you can find raw milk in stores.
My judgement from a lot of reading, but no direct knowledge, is that if you like the taste or the idea of raw milk, find a local supplier with a good track record and be one of the few. I do not believe for a second that raw milk has special health benefits or that commercial farm milk is unhealthy, including that containing hormones. Both types of milk can and do have problems. It’s very difficult to know how the percentage of problems compare. Every raw milk incident gets attention, but only large-scale commercial milk issues do. OTOH, the commercial milk industry is, I don’t know, a million times larger and we don’t have evidence that its problems affect a million times as many people. There will never be a large-scale raw milk industry without a big breakthrough in eliminating diseased cows, though.
This is at least wildly excessive. Anything resembling modern dairy techniques will place a lot of emphasis on cleanliness and the quality of the product (failure to do so can seriously affect a farm’s income).
I keep a few dairy goats, and my milk is mainly consumed raw, because I am too lazy to pasteurize it without an expensive machine to do it for me (without a pasteurizer, you just heat the milk on the stove to a specific temperature for a specific time and then chill it very rapidly). What it would do for me is improve the keeping qualities by reducing the bacterial contamination unavoidable in moving the milk from the goat to my kitchen. It wouldn’t make it healthier because it is already just fine the way it is.
My goats’ milk butterfat content is probably around 6-8% (again, this requires an expensive machine to ascertain), but it’s far creamier than even 4% cow’s milk. This is because of the breed of goat; the same applies to breeds of cows; some were developed for low production of high fat milk, others for high production of low fat milk – you can only have one or the other. The cream of cows on grass is yellow because of the chlorophyll; winter milk of cows fed on hay has white cream. Goats do not pass chlorophyll into their milk so their cream is always white.
My home produced milk does not taste “goaty”, because it is clean. Pasteurization does not affect the taste either. It does taste a little different than commercial cow’s milk, rather like the difference between a fresh-caught trout and frozen fish sticks. Some people prefer the safe predictable taste of industrially processed foods, and as a nervous eater myself, I don’t judge anyone for that.
TB isn’t what makes people sick from raw milk these days. It would be more likely to be salmonella or e.coli, or listeria, or brucellosis. A friend of mine with a horrible form of celiac disease recently asked me if I thought raw goat milk would be good for her. I told her she was insane to think so, and refused to give her any of mine. Even quite clean raw milk is going to have more bacteria than pasteurized milk. I would never recommend it to anyone with a compromised immune system.
Sanitation and proper handling at every stage of the process is extremely important. This is true whether you pasteurize your milk or not. My worry about any backyard raw milk producer is that they may well have neither the equipment or education to handle milk safely enough to sell. For example, milk should be chilled to refrigerator temperature as quickly as possible – minutes, in fact. A gallon jar of goat-warm milk takes a couple of hours to chill if you just stick it in the fridge – dangerously long.
Overall, I think there would be nothing unsafe about a Grade A certified raw milk dairy. Grade A is a very high standard. But I doubt the nutritional rewards would be significant just because of the rawness. Those rewards come from what the dairy animals eat and how they are cared for. Forcing high production through artificial means and then heavily medicating the animals in order for their bodies to stand up to such forcing is going to produce different qualities in the milk, which I personally am extremely dubious about consuming.
Warm milk yuck. That is why it tasted bad.
Milk from grassfed cows tends to have a much, much lower bacterial load than from grainfed cows. As well, those bacteria from grassfed animals are much less able to survive your stomach acid.
"A study in the March 28th, 2000 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that as many as one out of every three cattle may play host to the deadliest strain of E. coli bacteria ( 0157:H) This is ten times higher than earlier estimates.
As explained in more detail in Why Grassfed Is Best!, feeding cattle their natural diet of grass instead of grain greatly reduces the risk of disease transmission. Why? First, it keeps the overall bacteria count low. Second, it prevents the bacteria from becoming acid resistant. Acid-resistant bacteria are far more likely to survive the acidity of our normal digestive juices and cause disease. The first graph below illustrates the absolute numbers of E. coli bacteria found in grassfed versus grainfed animals. The second graph shows how many of the bacteria are likely to withstand our gastric juices. (Note: Grassfed animals have so few acid-resistant bacteria that the number fails to register on the scale of the graph.)
One of the lead researchers on the project, USDA microbiologist James Russell, told a reporter for Science Magazine, “We were absolutely shocked by the difference. WE never found an animal that didn’t agree with the trend.”"
I wouldn’t trust research peer reviewed by cattle.
Personally, I’ve been drinking raw milk for over 10 years, that sits at room temp in the dark for days at a time. I ferment it in glass jars in the dark at room temp, until it becomes cheese/yogurtish/whatever. I have eaten probably 500+ gallons this way, over the last 11 years or so. I’ve let it ferment to the point of having maggots, and still eaten it. In Italy, you can even find maggoty cheese as a delicacy in one or two places. It’s traditional. I’ve never gotten sick, not even once.
So yeah, fears about raw milk are kind of overblown, given healthy grassfed cows. FTM, most of that milk that I’ve used has been partially grainfed, although my current milk supplier only feeds grass and silage.
What would you rather have?
Every person in the United States has to drink milk that isn’t quite as tasty and it doesn’t have the helpful bacteria that it would have without pasteurization
OR
1 in a million people or so die every year from contaminated milk.
Pasteurization is needed. All kind of contaminants sometimes sneak in when you’re trying to milk cows on an industrial scale. Even if you tried to have a micro-dairy where you keep everything meticulously clean, mistakes can be made.
Also, pasteurization increases the shelf life of the milk.