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Comment by guntars | Hacker News Reader

Reading these comments, if the world ended and the people here were left with a cow, half would starve to death and the other half would get sick. It’s just crazy to me that what was common knowledge a few generations ago is just gone.

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?

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

The issue is how trivial it is to make it safe; and how people will avoid this trivial step for the sake of some essentially religious notion about human action upon nature violating its "sacred" condition. The underlying view is very much "the world was made Good, and we are Bad". The world is as much poisonous, grow up.

I agree with your sentiment for the most part. However, I've heard plenty of times from people that lived on dairy farms that that milk straight from the cow tastes noticeably better. As someone who has never had that experience, I don't think it's that out there for me to want to try it, especially if the chances of getting sick are low enough.

Yes, it tastes better. No, it's not worth the risk.

It's ok as a hobby thing when you go visit a farm, it's most likely not ok at industrial production scales.

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