Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
And this is where the similarity ends.
The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk to pasteurize it. Once boiled, it is allowed to cool down till a layer of fat forms on top. That is removed to make butter and ghee out of. Milk is then used and refrigerated.
No one ever drank (or drinks) raw milk - not the farmers, not their workers, not the buyers. It boggles my mind that people are willing to take the risk by drinking raw milk.
Without any evidence of course.
It defies logic.
> Vomit, diarrhea, coughing, sneezing, sweating, are all ways that the body expels toxins.
Cooking kills these things.
People eat raw eggs in North America, but that's safe because of antibiotics in chicken feed. Salmonella can kill.
Beef is safer, which is why you only need char the outside to be safe.
July 26, 2018 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/braenderup-04-18/index.html
November 9, 2016 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/oranienburg-10-16/index.html
December 2, 2010 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2010/shell-eggs-12-2-10.html
Regarding ground beef https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/ehsnet/plain_language/restauran...
Grilling various meats https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/bbq-iq.html
Both of these go far beyond just char the outside to be safe.
* people getting samonella from eggs, when those eggs are cooked, has no bearing on my statements about antibiotics in feed, and the safety of raw eggs vs cooked.
If you follow the first link, including going to the FDA, you will see the company responsible for the outbreak was sent a letter, and finally forced closed, as they were not folllowing safe egg handling guidelines.
Samonella can appear in the yolk, which is why antibiotics in chicken feed in North America.
However salmonella can be anywhere, such as in the nest where the hen lays, or 100 other contact surfaces, which is why you should always wash your eggs with soap and water before cracking.
Bets are, the company with the recall and forced close, was not doing so.
So again, to reiterate, cooking or not is not relevant to your link / data.
* You show ground beef in one link, and cooking guidance in another.
Ground beef invalidates "charring the outside", for one has ground up the meat, thus mixing all the bacteria on the outside of a cut of beef, throughout the meat. Always cook ground beef throughout.
If you hunt around, you will find safe guidelines for a cut of beef, which does not require cooking to 75C or what not, all through, to be safe.
One cavaet here...
Some cuts of beef are not as tender, so grocery stores will tenderize them with a mincing tool.
This is basically a tool which creates small slices in the cut, and again, is pushing the bacteria into the interior of te beef. For this reason, one must then cook to safe temps inside.
Lamb and beef do not have parasites we known of, in their flesh, as pork and chicken do. This is why chicken and pork require more stringent cooking instructions....
But obviously only eating raw meat doesn't sound very appetizing or nutritionally healthy.
The response was along the lines of "No, no, no! The fact that you're no longer menstruating is proof that you are now rid of toxins! Menses are simply the body eliminating toxins. Just keep trying to conceive, and try some <herbal tea> if you're still having trouble".
To be clear, this is coming from a 30 year old woman with two children of her own...
These naturalistic fallacies are certainly a strange, ilogical thing, but one at the core belief of _many_ people. I wonder if it's a western thing though and if we don't find it in other cultures as well.
Centuries ago sugar was extremely expensive in Korea. Kings would use it as a medicine when they were sick.
Most processed food in western diets are unhealthy for you. Usually because the processing basically means very high in sugar, and relatively low nutritionally. It doesn't take much to go from that data point to a rule of thumb "natural = good".
Especially if you combine it with a mistrust of large corporations that you believe prioritize profits over ethics (not exactly a huge leap) - where you think that the stuff they make is bad, but "natural" things they didn't have a hand in cant be corrupted by them.
Real life is much more complex than that, but i can see the chain of logic people use.
It's ok to want something in its most natural form, but you have to make sure that the body is designed to deal with it. Like, don't eat raw potatoes or drink raw milk.
I.e. you get better food for an indirect reason.
Like if you make your own müsli you might not add sugar, which the companies add to increase sales, and have more of the expensive nuts, that they cut down in share to increase margins since noone notices the difference between 2.3% expensive nuts and 2.2% until there is almost no left ...
This extends to other related topics as well. For example I had a colleague who went vegan and this meant she actually started to cook and care about the meals. This opened up a whole new dimension to life. I guess much depends also on where you happen the live and/or be brought up, and how strong the food culture is.
Pasteurization involves heating but doesn't require boiling. You can pasteurize by heating to 73 degrees C for 25 seconds.
Boiling, in the case of milk, is heating it to its boiling point which is around 100.17 degrees C.
Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization.
- Calories: 152 -> 146
- Protein: 8.14 g -> 8 g
- Carbs: 12 g -> 11.4 g
- Calcium: 28% DV -> 23% DV
- Vitamin D: 24% DV -> 13% DV
- Vitamin B12: 18% DV -> 13% DV
- Phosphorus: 22% DV -> 20% DV
In principle boiling could induce a lot of evaporation, so the milk would be more concentrated, and so it would have more calories per cup. But people don’t boil the milk so much as to materially reduce the amount of water in it.
Today, calorie counts are usually obtained by checking the protein, fat, sugar and fiber contents, and using known values for calorie/g of each. Those well-known values are ideally obtained either through human calorimetric studies, or through burning protein, fat, sugar directly.
Unless you remove the skim, it's difficult to imagine that some parts just disappear.
> - Calories: 152 -> 146
Dubious: But it's easier to discuss proteins and carbs separately.
> - Protein: 8.14 g -> 8 g
Possible?: Some proteins may denaturalize (like the white of the egg), but they are sill there. Proteins are weird, so I can't say it's impossible.
> - Carbs: 12 g -> 11.4 g
Dubious: Unless you are overheating the milk to make caramel, this is very strange, almost impossible. Carbs are composed of smaller sugar units and with heat they may split or for new bound, but they don't disappear unless it's very hot.
> - Calcium: 28% DV -> 23% DV
Impossible: I don't expect calcium to react with the container or to evaporate, so it's impossible that it goes away. The biological availability may change, but it's difficult to measure.
> - Vitamin D: 24% DV -> 13% DV
Possible: Some vitamins are sensible to heating, and heating them changes the molecular structure to make then unusable, so this is totally possible. I don't remember about vitamin D in particular. Anyway, many commercial milk has additional vitamin A and D.
> - Vitamin B12: 18% DV -> 13% DV
Possible: Idem. Anyway, I but I never heard of milk with additional B12, and other foods are better sources of B12.
- Phosphorus: 22% DV -> 20% DV
Dubious: I don't expect potassium to evaporate. It may react with the container, but I doubt it. The biological availability may change a lot, because phosphorus is used to bind some molecules and they may split and the isolated phosphate may not be as useful.
What does that mean?
Same here, in rural Romania (at least that's what my grandma was doing when me and my brother were kids). To be honest though, we (meaning me and my brother) did use to eat the foam-y thing that was present on top of the milk immediately after our grandma or grandpa had finished milking the cows. It was still worm, as it had just came out of the cows, so to speak. We never had any health-related issue about it.
Not that I'm suggesting that raw milk is a good idea. I've drunk milk from the vat, and it is the cream content that gives it the different taste. But we invented civilisation for a reason.
And if someone is milking into a bucket, stay the fuck away from that stone age shit.
This is a big assumption w/o any sort of evidence. However, this only applies if farmer are drinking milk themselves. Kinda reminds me of agricultural practice where farmer don't put pesticides on the food they eat, but they add a lot of pesticides that goes into sales for high income.
Farms are businesses and the dairy industry is an industry. Food safety is taken seriously, at least where I live.
There are animals in the Amazon that can eat poison dart frogs... I doubt you want to try that.
1) Drinking raw milk from the same cow every day
2) Drinking raw milk from a different cow every day (e.g. from a small market)
3) Drinking raw milk from hundreds of random farms mixed together (e.g. as might be processed)
If a cow has a 1% chance of carrying a disease, #1 means you have a 1% chance of getting sick. #3 means you have approximately a 100% chance of getting sick. #2 means you have an estimated time of 3-6 months to get sick, depending on the size of the pool of cows.
Personally, I believe these are the sorts of risks people ought to be able to accept, but only with full knowledge and transparency both about where the milk came from, and of associated risks.
That doesn't necessarily mean drinking from another species is safe.
The milk has to be stored in clean containers. If you're going to pasteurise the milk anyway, then milking into a tank will do, and you can clean the tank every few days. But if the milk is to be used raw, then you have to milk into a clean container each time.
Lot of them tout it's heals, rather than causes heaps of issues (including type 1 diabetes)
But at least in NZ they are tested daily or weekly, so the risk at least somewhat being minimised.
I'm still perplexed that seemingly neutral national media prints articles glorifying it without listing risks.
p.s. googling "homogenised milk" in NZ first result lands you to seemingly authoritative but completely fake website filled with claims of it being hazardous and causing cancer https://homogenisation.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-h...
We also never boiled the milk, it was fine to just store it in the refrigerator for a couple of days. TBH the boiled milk tasted unpleasant comparing to the raw one.
Raw milk is nearly perfectly sterile when it comes out of a freshly cleaned teat. After that, virtually every microorganism wants to grow in it. The equipment must be handled and cleaned with precision and diligence. Any contamination provides a seed that will grow uncontrollably.
I test every batch of milk that I will consume, using both coliform and aerobic plates. This required a non-trivial investment in minor lab equipment, but it is the only way that I feel safe. The tests have caught mistakes that we did not even know we made, but they also give a high degree of confidence that the milk is pure.
In contrast, commercially pasteurized milk assumes that the milk is contaminated. As such, the regulations actually allow the tests that I run to show unsafe levels of pathogenic organisms. Sure, the heat kills them, but it does not remove them from the milk. All of their proteins are still there and will be consumed.
I used to get sick from drinking store bought milk, and I believe it was due to the literal shit that they allow to enter into the process.
How does pasteurisation make the milk less pure?
> Sure, the heat kills them, but it does not remove them from the milk. All of their proteins are still there and will be consumed.
So?
> I used to get sick from drinking store bought milk, and I believe it was due to the literal shit that they allow to enter into the process.
Loads of people also believe that MSG gives them headaches. I find your theory equally implausible.
This sort of perception of superiority is very common among people who make a fuss about natural, organic or raw foods. Considering that rest of population does just fine, maybe adjust your priors a bit.
If you have enough encounters with the medical system, you quickly learn that human bodies are actually insanely high variance and ridiculously poorly understood. The knowledge frontier is wide but super shallow. Gut bacteria. Epigenetics. Rare mutations. Differences in tolerances and sensitivities. WEIRD. Interactions of multiple conditions.
OP is sharing work that obviously requires a baseline of high intelligence, plus his empirical observations. Writing this off as all just being in his head seems insulting in context.
I also want to point out that of course dead bacteria can harm you! Would you eat pasteurized feces, or month old raw meat? Bacteria excrete waste products which are known to be toxic to humans, e.g. cereulide. Plus heat resistant endospores, e.g. botulism. And FYI there are a ton of known bioactive plus heat sensitive organic compounds in food.
Please adjust your own priors a bit towards open-mindedness and intellectual humility - people here are as smart as you are. Shutting others down like this discourages them from sharing frontier knowledge with us.
This is a community that benefits from the discussion of unique experiences, rather than dismisal of them.
I've grown up with cows, sheeps, goats and my family lived on farming
Pasteurized milk is not in any way less pure or tasty than raw milk.
Actually the opposite is true: pasteurized milk flavour can be taken for granted, raw milk? not at all.
> Raw milk is nearly perfectly sterile when it comes out of a freshly cleaned teat
But the environment is not.
Unless you farm your animals in a sterile environment, which is highly unlikely and probably undesirable too.
When we brought the milk home, we'd pour a cup and let it sit a few minutes, to let the cream to get to the top. You could see the line between milk and cream with your eye an scoop the cream with a spoon. We drank the cream, it could have been 20% by volume, we made cocoa with the milk and no one got sick that I remember. I believe it was because we were usted to it, an "untrained" person would get sick too.
Then one year they put up a sign, saying the milk should only be used as animal feed and a few years back the laws changed again and there was no more selling and drinkig grey market raw milk, because someone decided for all the people that it's dangerous.
I thing my distaste of regulations and prohibitions can be traced back to that time.
Funny thing, I think I would get violenty sick if I tried raw milk again... The law is a self fulfilling prophecy.
People die from drinking raw milk. It is genuinely a risky thing to do. Not everyone will die but enough that society should work hard to limit it as much as possible.
It is of course possible to say “I was fine but probably was lucky”, which is at least acknowledging that food science is a thing and probably closer to the truth than your singular personal experience.
GP is pointing out that people take personal stories and turn them into some science-sounding conclusion.
If the internet existed in the 18th century people would talk about how London didn’t have sanitation systems but loads of people survived so all this nonsense about sewage management is silly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809207 Making some argument that our bodies could handle it if we had more bacteria
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809218 Literal “I was fine so it’s fine”
Lots of “is this just factory farming being an issue” comments which are at least in good faith and usually questions, though! So people are trying to get more details
It’s not every comment but lots of it.
There's plenty of things that are dangerous and can kill you, but we don't and shouldn't prohibit it all. Instead, society should aim to educate, and also put in warning labels etc.
That’s private benefit and socialized risk.
If you’re going to be taking communal resources then you should need to uphold some community standards.
Public healthcare is not a justification for slavery.
I don’t mean this in a negative way. HN is what it is and I love it. But don’t confuse it with a scientific journal.
Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most.
Also pasteurization was invented in the mid 1800s, while mass market electric refrigeration was invented in in the early 1900s. Before that it was a bunch of awkward ice boxes, and not used much.
Fresh milk from a dirty udder, or from an infected cow, or sitting in a bucket that has traces of yesterday's milk, is not safe to drink. Pasteurization (or boiling or fermentation and other preservation methods before that) are all ways to make pretty sure that the milk is safe to drink, regardless of freshness.
So maybe let's not be so quick to jeer at the people here who report they have been doing it with no ill effects. Especially since most of them don't appear to be proselytizing, just relaying their personal experience. I agree there's no need for anyone to drink milk raw in the 21st century, and that it is always going to have some inherent risk compared with drinking pasteurized milk. The same can be said for many uncooked foodstuffs that we consume, and other enjoyable but non-risk-free activities we undertake.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
OP did not said pasteurizarion is folly. You do it to preserve milk for longer term. Which something entirely different then drinking milk right after it was taken out of cow.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
EDIT: This is exactly the problem that I am trying to point out. You (likely an otherwise very educated person) assume that pasteurization is intended to preserve milk because that is the (unscientific) tone of these comments, when in fact that is very far from the reason (you can preserve unpasteurized milk as yogurt/cheese, we've known how to do that for centuries, but it will still potentially give you TB).
Also, some commenters ignore the relevant distinction between pasteurization and homogenization and fat separation.
Bacteria like TB do not need a significant time out of the udder to infect a human with TB.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
I’ll also contend that you probably did get sick but did not put 2 and 2 together at the time (just like how loads of people run around with a cough and a fever and are like “yeah but it’s not COVID”).
The whole “I drink this all the time so it’s fine” is basically the whole point of food sanitation things in general.
High risk stuff is still not going to be a 100% thing, so it’s harder to figure out the correlation without large scale efforts.
No, there is no reason to boil it. But put sugary chocholate powder in it and mix.
> I’ll also contend that you probably did get sick but did not put 2 and 2 together at the time
No, the practice of drinking raw milk was super common in villages in that region. If you drink it fresh, the bakterias has no time to develop yet. If sickness was so sure, people would be sick constantly.
Your idyllic view of the past may have other challenges in terms of perspective. Firstly we tend to remember the good things and forget the bad especially since food poisoning can have an incubation of 1-2 days we may blame one sort of food stuff instead of another or forget that we were incautious with raw foods in the kitchen the night before and blame a restaurateur without good cause. We also may not differentiate between an illness brought on by food and one from a bug. This rose colored view is especially easy to adopt if we remember pleasant consumption and the costs were borne by another. Even with education and standards we have 48 million cases of food borne illness in the US and 3000 deaths annually.
This brings is to scale. Pasteurization can be trivially adopted at scale and has been shown to be effective. Maybe your dairy was highly sanitary had excellent practices that enabled a very much above average performance. Replicating it all over creation may not be tenable but universal pasteurization is.
If you want to see an interesting account of the real "good old days" before either of us were born you may peruse this.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-f...
To maximize profits milk was thinned with water then recolored with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust with formaldehyde added to preserve freshness. Pureed cow brains stood in for rich cream and in addition to all the current maladies like listeria and salmonella consumers had to worry about bovine tuberculosis, undulant fever, scarlet fever, typhoid, and diphtheria.
> Those were the days my friend We thought they'd never end We'd sing and dance forever and a day We'd live the life we choose We'd fight and never lose For we were young and sure to have our way
There is a risk to everything but I've noticed online that Americans tend to focus on food safety a lot, keep their eggs in the coolers, freeze, pasteurize, and homogenize everything while eating a diet of reheated garbage and breaking new grounds in obesity. The systemic risk from being overweight, type 2 diabetes, and eating quarter of your calories in HFCS is much higher than acute risk of eating untreated food. And it's usually hard to miss that the milk tastes off anyway.
[1] https://www.tuwroclaw.com/pliki/duze_zdjecia/wiadomosci/mlek...
This is down to a very specific thing that happens in the USA and doesn't tend to happen here. If you wash an egg (because it has feathers or looks a little "dirty") you remove a sort of protective membrane[0] on the shell's surface which leaves it open to infection. To prevent this you need to refridgerate the eggs.
That said, we do refridgerate eggs in the EU. Every supermarket I've seen in UK and Czech Republic does this, and everyone I know puts their eggs in the fridge when they take them home. It may not be necessary, but we do it nonetheless.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...
edit: I am now remembering some shops that do have them outside of the refridgerator :D
Reminder that chicks take 21 days to hatch, so a (healthy unfertilized) egg is still safe to eat after 3 weeks in the cupboard.
What? Eggs are not refrigerated in the UK. The tend to sit in the dry goods aisle near the flour and baking products.
https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+egg+supermarket+shelf+-ea...
I do put my eggs into the fridge but mostly because I don't have much space for them and there is egg store thing int the fridge.
The same issues come up in meat production. See antibiotics employed to keep large herds healthy - where healthy is a low bar meaning 'not sick'.
Yes, milk breeds bacteria like crazy. It’s exponential growth too so it’s bound to go bad and when it does, it happens quickly. But if you had to drink fresh milk that was still warm, you’d be fine. Mostly.
On a related note, have you noticed how every cuisine is based on a) what is available locally and b) the best way to preserve it?
It's ok as a hobby thing when you go visit a farm, it's most likely not ok at industrial production scales.
Reading the comments here is wild to me. I drank raw, cold milk for well over a decade in my childhood as my father had cows. Although this was in Finland, I would probably not dare drink raw milk elsewhere.
The cows were milked with machines that would immediately transport the milk to a tank that would keep it cold and constantly stir it. Even without constant stirring the milk would last for a day or two in the fridge. You would know from the smell if it had gone bad.
Checks out: my father grew up on salted pork, pickled onions, fruit preserves, cheese, milk, dried oats, dried peas, jarred/canned food or whatever was in season (potatoes, cabbage, turnip, carrot).
Irish cuisine is the most boring in the world, but it's not our fault. We were colonized and forced to farm the land for absentee landlords, and we're given a tiny scrap of land to keep pigs and grow what we could. Potatoes mostly, because they provided the high calories per area of ground. Until blight wiped them all out in the 1840s. We were forced to continue exporting grain while starving / emigrating / getting evicted from land. This history doesn't do much for our national cuisine! "Want some heavily salted pork with overcooked cabbage and potatoes?" I didn't think so.
What changes that is that usually the big dairies want to sell the cream separately, so first they skim it off, and then they homogenise the milk by vigorously shaking it until the internal structures all break down and it stays perfectly mixed.
Personally, I'm very happy to drink pasteurised milk. But I'd love it if normal supermarket milk wasn't homogenised. Getting a bit of cream at the beginning of every bottle of milk is such a treat.
Woah it was illegal to drink! Even if you produced it from your own cow/goat etc?
Personally I have no desired to drink raw milk, but I do hope raw milk cheese becomes more common/legal in the US.
And unrefrigerated?
I assume raw milk does not instantly spoil at room temperature, otherwise human history would look very different, but it can't last long in direct sunlight.
*please consult our book of rules. You may be charged, caged or neutralized at any time by one of the Peace Enforcers if found to be uncompliant.
Yet... Tobacco and alcohol is no problem... Kind of contradicting, but ok.
For cheese fermentation, you inoculate non-pathogenic (and even beneficial) bacterial strains in the milk that overgrow and outcompete pathogenic bacteria. That's actually the reason why cheese (and yogurt for that matter) exists at all, it's an invention that allowed longer storage of milk.
Same for other types of fermentation, such as sausages, kimchi, beer...
I don’t really understand the concept of illegal raw milk though. Why can’t people consume raw milk if they want? If anything, make it illegal to feed to children (except of course, raw breast milk!!)
Edit: thanks for the answers everyone. My mum’s a dairy farmer and so was I during my high school weekends. My family’s been drinking raw milk for the past 20 or so years.
So it’s interesting to know what scary stuff is out there lurking and that a debate has formed around something I had grown to normalize. Tb is obviously a big one and my family being near a native forest increased that risk.
Honestly though, the only thing about drinking raw milk for me was you needed to shake it to mix the 2 inches of cream on top. So now I live somewhere I can’t even buy fresh milk, every time I get the milk out of the fridge it gets a habitual shake :s
Raw milk itself isn’t bad, it’s just very very easy to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.
Proponents of raw milk claim it has health benefits due to the lack of cooking, both on a chemical level and a bacterial level.
"It's not bad for you, it just makes it incredibly likely to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria"
Raw milk itself is fine, it’s in fact incredibly nutritious- which is why it’s so difficult to keep it from being contaminated. It’s a great breeding ground for pathogens.
In my mind, anti pasteurization types are like anti vaxx light, they didn’t have to live through times where food borne illnesses ran rampant, and therefore don’t appreciate what our scientific ancestors have blessed us with.
>“Raw milk is not pasteurized, or heated up to a temperature of 140 degrees F for 20 minutes, a process that kills off bacteria that can cause foodborne illness, including Salmonella, listeria, and E. coli.
TL;DR: food poisoning
> Prior to industrialization, dairy cows were kept in urban areas to limit the time between milk production and consumption, hence the risk of disease transmission via raw milk was reduced. As urban densities increased and supply chains lengthened to the distance from country to city, raw milk (often days old) became recognized as a source of disease. For example, between 1912 and 1937, some 65,000 people died of tuberculosis contracted from consuming milk in England and Wales alone. Because tuberculosis has a long incubation period in humans, it was difficult to link unpasteurized milk consumption with the disease.
There are also liability implications if it is served in a commercial setting, which many jurisdictions just don’t want to have to deal with.
Counterarguments? Is there a big need for dairy milk if, say, oat milk or something else can provide the calcium and other vital nutrients Americans usually get from milk?
The obvious alternative is not oat milk but pasturized milk.
My dad can tell the difference between oat and lactose free dairy milks in tea, so he has both in a day.
Some of the comments in this thread really left my head scratching. Food borne pathogens were a major burden on humankind for millennia, advances in microbiology and hygiene have massively improved the life span. All of that gets belittled in the comments as some minor stomache ache.
Btw the rules were not made “a long time ago”, the law restricting the sale of raw milk was passed in 1987 in the US.
I just find it weird that we start applying germ theory to combating tubercolosis outbreaks, find out raw milk is a problem, FDA makes recommendations to limit the sale of raw milk and sell only pasteurized milk back in the 1920's.
Now there's this whole rejection of past experience and known dangers because of a belief in the naturalistic fallacy. Not everything "natural" is good for you. Drinking milk as an adult isn't even natural. It's nice sure, but it's not natural.
43 states allow the sale of raw milk in some form or another, but this sale is largely restricted from grocery stores. Of course the FDA recommends limiting the sale of raw milk, why wouldnt they? On a commercial scale allowing the sale of raw milk in grocery stores could be disastrous. But it’s not consumed on that scale and that’s outside of the context of this discussion - which is about it being legal to drink (not sell) raw milk.
These are false equivalencies to the question of restricting raw milk consumption. E.g., it’s illegal to not wear a seat belt because i don’t want a stranger splattered on my windshield - that affects me yet i would have had no choice in the matter.
Think about the question of limiting lead content in food stuff; the equivalency would be bacterial testing requirements in raw milk, not the restriction of consumption of raw milk. You can support advances in microbiology and hygiene without legally restricting raw milk consumption. The consumption of tuna isn’t illegal yet undoubtedly if you ate tuna every day for a few months you would likely contract lead poisoning!
Others can get contagious diseases from milk. That affects you. You didn't make the choice to drink that raw milk.
> Think about the question of limiting lead content in food stuff; the equivalency would be bacterial testing requirements in raw milk, not the restriction of consumption of raw milk. You can support advances in microbiology and hygiene without legally restricting raw milk consumption. The consumption of tuna isn’t illegal yet undoubtedly if you ate tuna every day for a few months you would likely contract lead poisoning!
The gigantic difference there is that it only takes one bad bottle of milk to kill you or make you seriously ill whereas eating something with slightly elevated lead content won't do much and only becomes a problem with long term exposure. I'm also pretty sure you don't check the lead content of every batch, but instead do sampling. You can't do that with milk because as noted it only takes one.
I’m still not convinced that the answer to local farmers selling raw milk to their friends should be outright jail time - rather than enforcement of testing standards. I’m not familiar enough with the upfront costs of that to know whether it’s economical. You mention it “only takes one” but the reality is contamination in raw milk is rare enough that it is also essentially a long-term risk as well, particularly when consuming from 2-3 cattle.
Again, I dont drink the stuff but i certainly sympathize with rural communities that believe it’s in their rights to do so.
Put up next to those, a ban on buying raw milk seems kinda odd. If we're gonna ban selling raw milk why not ban serving raw fish too? "But it's safe if it's fresh and prepared properly". So is raw milk.
I'm not saying this is good. I won't personally eat raw hamburger or raw seafood. I have no urge to drink raw milk. I think you're playing Russian Roulette with your intestines if you do.
It just reminds me of weed being illegal (still is in a lot of the US) but tobacco and alcohol being legal despite the massive amount of lungs and livers they have ruined (not to mention stuff like drunk driving). Winners don't do drugs of course but it just doesn't make sense to ban this drug but allow that one which is arguably worse in every way.
You can't do raw milk at scale - so no one will be allowed to. Raw milk yogurt and cottage cheese is out of this world my mom(Russian) and friends in Lithuania with a farm make this as well at the farm and the difference is night and day. you really should try full fat raw milk cottage cheese with honey and walnuts.
In North America, many of these laws were passed in the early part of the 1900s [1]. I don't think that were very many mega producers at the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
Also in my experience it's really hard to avoid contamination. My family farm works hard to keep their cows healthy, happy, and clean, and still has occasional issues with high somatic cell counts in their milk. It doesn't help that cows will (rarely) decide to release their bowels while you're milking them...
[1] https://www.marlerblog.com/lawyer-oped/a-legal-history-of-ra...
I also only sell to customers willing to sign a waiver, and every jar/bottle of raw milk I sell includes a link to the CDC’s raw milk web page and instructions on how to pasteurize.
I even own a 3-gallon pasteurization and I pasteurize my own milk before I drink it, make cheese/yogurt, or use it other for non-cooking purposes because safety is health. Of course I skip pasteurization when using it for cooking (e.g. biscuits and gravy) because it’ll reach kill pathogen temps as part of that process anyways.
People aren't dumb: the Inuit knew to leave polar bear liver well alone and the Mesoamericans knew corn had to be nixtamalized. Another example would be how cassava has to be washed and soaked in a particular process. There are many examples I can think of. Even if the actual mechanism behind these things wasn't understood until modern times people across the world still figured out "you must not eat this part" and "you must do X, Y, and Z before you can eat this" for a lot of toxic or potentially toxic foods.
I'm no expert on foodborne pathogens but it just doesn't make sense to me that people would drink something that would almost certainly make them sick. It seems to me it would be more like, say, eating eggs over easy: it's a risk to be sure but you'll probably be fine if they're fresh and the chicken was healthy.
Prior to introducing raw milk (and the downstream products) into my diet, I was eating a lot of avocados. But, I wanted to move toward eating more seasonal, local, and ancestral foods. My ancestry is Polish/German. I think this may partly explain why it works well for my system.
When I told a buddy of mine about this change, he asked me why all milk isn't raw. I said "Well, according to the CDC, drinking it will kill you."
If anyone knows why, I would be curious to hear.
Yes, calves get neonatal salmonella infections.
Cows also have a ruminant digestive system, which handles things a little differently than a human's.
One thing that was eye-opening to me about unhomogenized milk is that you can skim the fat and make butter. I’m sure everyone knows that, but what might be less well known is how much butter you can get. A gallon of milk makes one, maybe two tablespoons. That’s it! I’m sure industrial butter making is more efficient, but I always think about how much milk goes into a stick of butter now.
In my singular, ancedotal experience, nothing happened.
Onviously that means everything is fine, and we should all be drinking it, all day every day.
The "all natural" crowd supported them.
It works by colonizing the milk with harmless bacteria/moulds which oucompete the harmful ones.
I believe most, if not all, dairy farmers selling raw milk are very careful.
It is simply astounding how often bad decisions by legislators aren't a reflection of their poor judgement but simply poor data. Lobbyists can often times lie without being called out on it. If legislators or their staffs can easily look something up in the browser it would be earth shattering.
Sadly a majority of the legislators do not understand the value it would bring. It's the source of much frustration for us.
"If data were portable, you wouldn't have been manipulated into that embarassing mess last year."
They need to meet various common sense hygiene standards and conduct regular testing of their herd to continue doing so, along with an explicit health warning on each bottle.
It’s delicious.
A good rule of thumb is, if you’re going to drink raw milk at all regularly, ‘know the cow’ it’s coming from.
Mad cow disease more or less wiped out the selling of raw milk for decades. But it is slowly gaining traction in this past 10 years or so, albeit in a very niche way.
You can get raw milk directly from a farmer sometimes but they are obliged to put up a note to cook the milk before consumption.
On the other hand I remember as a kid how we got fresh milk daily in a country village:
Some of the tastiest soft cheeses are made from raw milk, but they also kill a number of people each year. It's the French answer to Fugu, if you will.
Well, technically true. Making operating within the law illegal would certainly be problematic.
This paragraph is worthy of an ambiguity contest.
1. "not pasteurized" might mean "heated up to a ..."
2. the process can cause foodborne illness
I used to get not full on sick, but pretty sick after eating raw or partially raw meat. You may think it's crazy, but I just continued doing it and eventually stopped getting diarrhea and cramps.
David Blaine (I think) talked about a similar effect from when he practiced swallowing live frogs. He got sick initially (not gag reflex but something akin to food poisoning) but quickly built up a tolerance.
Maybe these guys did get sick in some way that is beyond a reasonable risk tolerance. I don't know. I just think Americans in particular are weird about their food and simultaneously germophobic so they end up eating a certain kind of diet. Getting sick when eating food that isn't totally cooked may not necessarily mean danger but that the body isn't acclimated to the particular food.
https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/updates/letter-to-medical-p...
In chicken, beef, and pork, the concern is typically bacteria (like salmonella, and e. coli) or parasite cysts (like trichinosis), which are not killed by freezing.
But in my defense, I got sidetracked googling pictures of Mettigel.
But American food practices are so awful that it is impossible to eat raw meat here, mostly: some places are careful. That's why cows are pumped full of antibacterials: because they are given growth hormones until their udders rip, and are constantly infected.
This doesn't happen in parts of the world where animals are raised and slaughtered in non-high-density, full-speed-ahead industrial production.
The main reason America needs so many food laws is because they try to scale everything up so that people can eat steaks every day for pennies. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Americans gotta have it all, and you can raise animals ethically, safely, and without drugs with that kind of entitlement. That's why food tastes so much better in provincial parts of Europe, it's not a myth.
While American food standards are definitely worse, it’s a mistake to say that in Europe raw meat is safe. Even in the most rustic of environments there are loads of ways for your raw meat to get messed up. So you’re needing to trust a lot of stuff and are rolling the dice a bit each time.
Of course everything is a dice roll, but turns out cooking meat solves a lot of problems.
Factory farming did not create food poisoning!
No one said it did.
But it exacerbates it by orders of magnitude.
Also odd to hear someone defending factory farming.
Steaks are OK because there’s not usually bacteria within a cut of meat (at least not a rotten one). Ground beef is all surface area.
How risky? Compare it to other risks we are commonly undertake, like driving. If you can't quantify risk, you're not providing a useful comment.
So let's go back to: If you don't quantify risk, you're not providing a useful comment. That applies to the CDC too.
If you mean you can tolerate more risk than others, that would be a higher risk tolerance.
In Germany, eating Mettbrötchen is rather popular in certain regions, and somewhat popular in the rest. As far as I know, that also applies to some neighboring nations.
A Mettbrötchen is basically minced raw pork with some salt, pepper and other spices, with onions on top or worked inside the meat. You put that on a baked roll (or sometimes other bread). There is also Mettwurst (sausage), although that's often at least smoked. Rarely the mett you'd eat raw is a mix of raw pork and raw beef. Mett may only be sold on the same day it was prepared, but it's rather popular so you will find it in basically every supermarket (especially the ones with in-house butchers), or you can buy ready to eat Mettbrötchen/Mettbrote (rolls/bread) in basically every full service bakery and some self-service ones.
I am not really fond of that to the point I would prepare that for myself, but have occasionally indulged when offered.
Bonus picture: Mettigel (mett hedgehog), which is for various popculture reasons a popular way to decorate the mett (before you put some of it on a roll/bread)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Mettigel...
On the other hand, some of the pathogens you can get from raw milk (or insufficiently treated water) can be extremely unpleasant/dangerous and there’s no sure guarantee you’ll get used to them.
> I used to get not full on sick, but pretty sick after eating raw or partially raw meat. You may think it's crazy, but I just continued doing it and eventually stopped getting diarrhea and cramps.
This kills some people.
Health advice isn't about you, it's about everyone. See also: wearing a mask during a pandemic.
Auto-immune diseases and allergies are killing people and ruining lives. A little bit of bacteria doesn't hurt.
It's true that other aspects of improved care have also reduced the risk from food borne illnesses - antibiotics, clean water, IV rehydration and others.
That's not even remotely comparable.
If someone else could die from drinking raw milk, what business is it of theirs that I choose to drink gallons of it and live to tell the tale?
The whole point of the legalization is to legalize the consumption. Did you read the article?
It’s because we don’t know who will die from it
It’s like seat belts or motorcycle helmets - millions of people will never have a need for them, but they save lives
Regarding the policy aspects: when a substance is potentially harmful then we already have frameworks to regulate sale and possession, as used for things like radioactives and poisons. If an activity is harmful but only to the individual, then education and normalization of behaviour offers the best possible public health outcome, such as the wearing of bicycle helmets (everyone should wear a helmet, but criminalising noncompliance is the worst possible means to achieve it). Only when an activity is harmful to others (such as smoking, or not wearing a facemask during a pandemic) should criminalisation be considered, in my view. In general, exposing younger citizens to hazardous substances (like people feeding their kids raw milk) shouldn't need specific treatment since it's already covered by child endangerment laws and duty of care towards minors, although I suppose carve-outs can be considered when some echobubble loses their collective minds.
By such a policy position, the legislature in the original story did half the job, in my opinion; the sale and possession of raw milk should be regulated like a poison, and the consumption of it strongly deterred through education of the risks. The stunt of drinking it was the height of idiocy, but stupidity is hardly in short supply amongst legislators.
I can't believe you're giving away this advice for free