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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the raw milk warning in there. Raw milk kills people ever year. It gets lost in the flood of dairy marketing.

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I was at the off-grid farm of one of our area's premiere hippie mamas and she took me to her cow barn/milking parlor which had chickens running around and plenty of chicken crap. She told me she'd offer me some milk if her cows weren't dry which saved me the need to refuse the offer.

There's a raw milk lobby. [1][2]

But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.

Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...

[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...

[3] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...

If you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child. And pasteurization removes/diminishes nutrients in milk. It’s much more nuanced than ‘raw milk is bad’.

> If you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child

If people were drinking raw milk directly out of the udder, in a clean environment and blessed with a baby cow's immune system and microbiome, that would be pertinent, but they aren't. Even human breast milk extracted in a clean environment with sanitized tools gets risky very quickly when stored.

At that age you've mostly got your mother's immune system, so it's a little different.

I expect the average human mother maintains a higher level of sanitation than the average cow.

I'm pretty sure people who drink raw milk are aware of the risks.

They very much are not.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...

That will vary by person. My father-in-law bred and milked pedigreed Holsteins. They had a 1 gallon pasteurizer and would just dip a gallon out of the bulk tank for household use when needed. So, most of the time they had pasteurized, non-homogenized. On occasion, the pasteurizer would break, so for a while they would drink raw milk. But of course understood the risk, and also knew darn well where the milk had come from and how clean the milking facility was.

You'd be surprised. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/u-penn-s...

At the very least, the bottle I saw on sale at Erewhon was clearly labeled as "not safe for human consumption".

I'm not sure. Judging by my own family, I think a lot of them have been info-silo'ed to think pasteurization is harmful and that "They" want to keep raw milk from you.

I'd liken it to claiming an anti-measles-vax person is aware of the risks of measles. They might not believe in the risk at all.

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