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Comment by mitkebes | Hacker News Reader

"Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years, according to Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer specializing in food poisoning outbreaks who has kept a record of the company’s outbreaks. Those outbreaks have been caused by a range of pathogenic bacteria known to be risks in unpasteurized dairy products, including E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria. A 2024 Salmonella outbreak connected to Raw Farm’s raw milk was linked to at least 171 illnesses."

If true, it sounds like this is just par for the course.

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The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe. Although of course contamination does happen if a significant proportion of your cheese production nationwide is unpasteurized, that's just a numbers game. So yes, it is par for the course, but probably not at this level where the same producer shows up over and over again.

I guess this producer must be extremely confident to be refusing a recall in such a litigious jurisdiction as the USA. Or maybe they've just made the right campaign donations and feel safe enough...

> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.

"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.

The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.

Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.

And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.

I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.

Nope. Don't believe you.

And the reason I don't believe you is because my family two generations back milked cows just like you claim. And everybody in the family boiled their milk religiously.

Folk wisdom was "boil the milk" and they didn't worry much about what it did to vitamins or taste.

Even worse, they would freeze the milk afterward. I still remember the horrible taste of that stuff. Yuck.

One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".

Companies will never pay to do anything unless not doing it will open them up to a law suit. So, raw milk does have some risks just based upon the the fact it costs to pasteurize milk.

Presumably, you’re American? In many parts of the world we regularly consume cheese made with raw milk. For many cheeses, raw milk is preferable.

European cheese producers have their own costly methods of managing raw milk cheese safety. They have much more surveillance of the entire process, like rapid testing of milk for STEC (the microbe involved in this outbreak) and adding bioprotective cultures during milk production. In France there is an extensive monitoring/alert system. They aren't just YOLO-ing it.

Well if you harm someone by your contaminated product I believe that coming lawsuit could potentially be more expensive than warming the milk to 70 degrees for a minute. Especially in US.

> One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".

I expect this strongly depends on the dairy product in question. For cheese made at the farm, sure. But for plain milk sold in a supermarket, I expect the improvement in logistics far more than makes up for the cost in pasteurization. People don’t UHT-pasteurize their milk for fun — UHT milk is easier to transport and can be shipped and stored in larger lots and rarely spoils on the shelves.

Where I live, you can buy raw milk but only at a substantial premium.

Pasteurized != UHT

Pasteurization is heating to 70C and cooling it down quickly to kill pathogens. The milk needs to be refrigerated afterwards and used within 2 weeks.

UHT is heating it to 140C for 2s a cooling it to kill pathogens and their spores. It significantly changes flavor, destroys 90% of vitamins and changes some of the proteins structure. Lasts a year afterwards

> destroys 90% of vitamins

Gonna make you cough up a reliable citation on that one.

The kombucha folks don't seem to have a problem with vitamins of aseptic purees after processing and generally seem to have converged to aseptic as being superior in terms of nutritional content than any other mechanism including freezing and preservatives. And Vitamin C is notoriously fragile to heat. Generally, Vitamin C is far more fragile than anything in milk (standard pasteurization knocks down Vitamin C by about 50%!).

Would this do? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8844253/

This is probably a stronger reference: https://juniperpublishers.com/jdvs/JDVS.MS.ID.555822.php

Overall, though, the nutritional content is "mostly" unaffected by UHT. B1 and B12 drop roughly 10-20% for both types of pasteurization.

The primary issues with UHT are Lysine and folate. Lysine gets clobbered by the Maillard reactions. The folate you cited is definitely a concern given that folate and Vitamin D are factors in preventing birth defects.

And, you are correct that the taste does change since UHT kicks off Maillard reactions in UHT milk. TIL.

However, we come back to the fact that "standard" HTST pasteurization changes are so minimal that the risks of raw milk FAR outweigh any possible gains therefrom.

And if you don't have a reliable cold chain, UHT pasteurization is pretty good with caveats.

You're also right that apart from the folate the losses are not so dramatic.

Taste is significant though. My kids (spoiled brats) refuse to drink UHT and they recognize it immediately

I hate UHT - and one thing I've learnt from cheap hotels is a teaspoon of natural yoghurt makes the milk taste fresh enough to me to have with cereal. Not sure why.

Currently the law requires substantially more testing (and lost product) for raw milk sales. It is hard for be to believe that pasteurization is a significant cost such that the choice is based on cost rather than a product goal.

At what point do they just get shut down?

Given that RFK is deep in the raw milk psychosis… maybe never.

We can hope they get shut down as soon as a sane government is installed.

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