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Comment by pingou | Hacker News Reader

"The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits."

Well, perhaps it has taste benefits?

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There is no taste difference between raw and pasteurized milk. The taste comes from the container. If you have both in glass, there is no discernible difference. My father is a dairy farmer and bet his professor (many years ago) that he could taste the difference. The professor setup a blind taste test where he gave my father pasteurized and raw milk in glass cups. There was no difference.

"Nutritional value" is a very ambiguous. It's only in what you measured. Raw milk advocates are going to value things like bacteria and if proteins were changed. Pasteurization by definition is going to kill the bacteria and change the protein structure. The main benefit for pasteurization is that it makes milk a commodity. You can have unsanitary farms with high bacteria counts that don't make people sick. This is both good and bad. Good because it means more milk available with less disease. Bad because our bodies are complex and some bacteria is healthy.

My recommendation is that if someone wants to consume raw milk, they should have a personal relationship with the dairy.

I find this hard to believe because there is a massive difference in tastes just between two dairies. You can also get low-pasteurization milk from the same dairy and the taste difference is also remarkable.

If neither sample is your usual brand you can get two different flavors, but still not be able to tell which was pasteurized. You could try to guess that the one you liked best was raw and be wrong.

Yes, different feed, cow breeds, etc are all going to influence taste. You also need to identify the path that the low-pasteurization milk goes through to see if it has anything that will adjust the taste. My father's professor was able to control the variables such that it was the same milk, no contaminates, etc.

I used to dabble in raw milk and I can confirm the taste is the same, surprisingly.

Depends on the pasteurization method. UHT will change the taste 100%, normal pasteurization might not. My grandmother used to pasterize her milk at a slightly higher than needed temperature, to separate the cream, and eat it on the side. Raw milk/pasterized milk with cream have the same taste, when you remove the cream though, it changes.

Honestly that's the best way to consume milk, pasterize it yourself, that will allow you to control the taste and the fat % you tolerate in your milk.

It may depend on the milk quality and the dairy. There's definitely a taste difference between our raw milk and our pasteurized milk, and neither one is bottled.

You can even sniff the pasteurizer and smell if it's the raw milk or if it's been pasteurized.

Also when making cheese, the naturally occurring bacteria and enzymes in raw milk make quite a large flavor difference (from a cheesemaker's perspective anyways).

the difference in taste comes from the amount of fat. raw milk tends to have more fat

A local small grocery chain started stocking raw milk (with many warnings) and I decided to risk consuming it to see for myself. I couldn't tell the difference between it and ordinary full fat milk. I wondered if it was a fraud (commercial milk falsely advertised as Local Forbidden Delicacy Milk), but maybe there's not much difference. Or maybe I am not a subtle taster. I also can't taste the superiority of an $80 bottle of wine when it's pitted against an $18 bottle.

You're supposed to feel the superiority, not taste it.

I’ve had a few different specialty brands of milk and there can be a difference, but I think that has more to do with the cows (and their diet) than the process. Jersey cow milk is probably more different than raw milk than pasteurized is from raw milk.

I can taste the difference between a $100 wine and $400 wine, but it's maybe 20% better, if it's possible to flatten extra layers of flavour into a linear scale. It's easier to appreciate for different levels of quality from the same producer. My example is drawn from Casanova di Neri Tenuta Nuova vs Cerretalto. They're basically the same style, the Cerretalto just has extra.

Across different grapes and regions and it's like apples and oranges. Sometimes I want a savory Burgundy, sometimes I want a Coke. If you don't know what wine from a terroir tastes like, and hankering after that, don't spend extra on it.

I'd generalize that to cheese. Can't beat a good aged Comte (a raw milk cheese), but it's not everyday cheese.

(I mean, not every day, but every 2-3 days... I'm more of a St nectaire guy myself)

Most of what people like about "Raw milk" is that it is not homogenized. The cream has not been emulsified thoroughly, so the mouth feel can be different.

You can sometimes find pasteurized milk that hasn't been homogenized in order to get the good mouth feel without drinking absurdly unsafe bacteria culture.

There's almost no discernible difference between unhomogenized pasteurized milk and raw milk, both tasted directly and in the final cheese. As a working chef* I had to be taught to detect the difference, and now that I'm not doing it regularly I doubt I even could.

* at the time at a michelin star restaurant, not to brag but because the finesse of my palate is directly relevant and likely to be called into question.

we have a small dairy farm. We sell milk to a company which pausterizes milk soon. BUT

we have in the past made cheese for illegal exporters of cheese, and they require it be made of unpausterized milk. Apparently, they can't get enough unpausterized cheese in their country, so they habe to smuggle it. They can't disclose neither the cheese origin nor its nature; the consumers do taste tje difference.

Similarly, my father prefers the taste of unpausterized milk cuajada (non compact cheese) He says pausterized milk loses most of its flavor.

For the record. I prefer pausterized milk; I also notice the difference.

It makes a little more sense for cheese as a cultured product.

Isn't most good cheese unpasteurised? Comte, Roquefort, Gruyere, Epoisses, Parmesan, even many (most?) small-producer Cheddars.

Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.

For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.

Oh, yeah, agreed. That dairy sounds like a death-trap!

I'm a big fan of cheese and have researched this a bit. The consensus seems to be if two cheeses were made with the exact same process except for using past/unpast then you might be able to tell a difference (especially for younger cheeses) but one isn't necessarily better than the other. Over the years cheese makers have learned how to get the best flavor out of the base milk. So a pasteurized brie will be just as good as an unpasteurized brie but made slightly different.

I've tried doing taste comparisons between past/unpast but there's so much variation for even the exact same cheese that I've never been able to detect a meaningful difference.

I remember growing up, my dad’s family had cows and we would drink the milk raw. The main feature for me was how thick it was. Even the whole milk I buy at stores here is very thin.

That's mostly due to homogenization, a process that spreads the fat evenly through the milk and keeps it from resettling.

It's also my understanding that whole milk isn't necessarily just "pasteurize and pass along"; it really means "3.25% fat".

All the milk has its fat separated out and re-added at specific percents, and the 3.25% for whole milk is just what whoever standardized this thought about typical for whole milk. An individual cow might have a mix that's a little more or less.

If you look around you can occasionally find higher fat milks; I've seen as high as 5% (without getting into half-and-half or heavy cream). You could probably just splash a little heavy cream in yourself if you aren't satisfied with the thickness of whole milk.

Raw milk advocates claim is does shit like fix allergies and cure diseases.

That would get in the way of Arstechnica's hyper liberal bias. I eat raw cheese because it tastes good. It's common in France, like in reblochon and Brie de meaux. There aren't mass deaths in France because of this.

But is it better, or just more traditional? France is a country that cares a lot about food tradition.

It is better. We have a decently strong cheese tradition in Sweden too, but French cheese is tastier.

I don't even like the French, their culture is obnoxious, I'd take every chance to shit on the French. But you just can't argue with their cheese, it's that good. Some of their wines are ok too, but I mostly prefer Italian on that front.

Italian cheeses similar to French types from the alp regions are very good as well. Beppe and his cheeses in Rome.

There is no taste difference, it’s just cheaper to produce since you can skip heating it for a few minutes.

There aren’t mass deaths in the US either (no deaths reported per the article). But there are definitely cases of listeriosis due to raw cheese in France. A recent outbreak was in 2025 and led to 2 deaths.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250813-deadly-listeria-outbre...

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