19
votes
Raw milk easy to obtain despite bird flu warning, FDA interstate ban
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- My rendezvous with the raw milk black market: quick, easy, and unchecked by the FDA
- Authors
- Nicholas Florko
- Published
- May 15 2024
- Word count
- 1559 words
Footnote: RAW FARM, mentioned in the article, has been responsible [archive link] for a recent toxigenic E. coli outbreak in raw milk cheddar produced in accordance with legal standards for aging.
Friends don't let friends consume raw milk or its products.
And yes, I know other things besides raw milk cause listeriosis outbreaks, but it's a particularly dangerous disease. Worth avoiding unpasteurized milk and milk products even before considering the H5N1 risks.
The raw milk movement is basically analogous to the anti-vax movement in my mind - another case of a quality of live improment being so obviously successful that people can forget why it matter in the first place.
Pasteurization and food safety have had an immense impact on the quality of human life, but because it's SO prevalent contrarians and/or the ignorant have been able to ignore it and still reap most of the benefits, right up until the wrong situation hits or a critical mass of people follow along and then things start falling apart.
Note that for cheese making, using raw milk vs pasteurized milk can significantly affect the flavor. With heat, you're killing the very bacteria that gives cheese its taste (cheese is supposed to be alive ! you can mature them just like you can do with a fruit; can't do that with a sterilized cheese). Indeed, a lot of DOP protected cheese mandates starting from raw milk. Double-note: most of them includes a heating step in the cheesemaking process, it's not a bacteria fiesta either.
I'll admit I'm not deeply involved in the nuance of the raw milk debate, but I at least was under the impression that it's more that the end product that gets eaten isn't pasteurized/properly made safe as opposed to raw milk being used anywhere along the way. Fair point call out though, I don't think there's any reasonable objection to that case and I don't think it'd be a safety/FDA issue anyway.
Raw milk is supposed to be about better health, yet its fans are ignoring basic safety/health issues. Given that I would say it is about "religion" or orthorexia, not healthier nutrition.
Today I learned a new word, thanks!
I recall about a decade ago that there was some bro science about how raw milk cures lactose intolerance , which was widely refuted by actual scientists..
I get the love of milk, like I'm a huge fan of dairy products but man alive, raw milk is just not a risk I'm willing to take.
If I or a member of my household is milking the cow or goat, I can see it. Otherwise, distribution allows time for bacteria to grow and I wouldn't risk it.
Yea, for personal use in a creamery you own, sure personal freedom and what not. Hell if I ran my own creamery that ensures good animal welfare and proper sanitation, I'd probably be less concerned. But my microbiology and public health background still makes me weary and concerned about the salmonella, listeria, and staph risk associated with the raw milk. Certainly wouldn't sell the stuff but people can go home and chug bleach if they wanted to.
At the same time, I'm not a fan of woo woo practices and the alternative medicine out there and enjoy milk for the taste so pasteurizing is still the way to go. FYI, for those who also enjoy milk, some of the best milk I ever had was in Tokyo inside the Akihabara station. Highly recommended for anyone who really loves milk.
I don’t know how widespread it is/was among farmers, but according to my father, my great-grandmother who kept dairy cows was extremely strict when it came to sanitization, at least to the extent that was practical to sustenance farmers in the early 1900s until some point in the 1970s. If so much as a single hair was found in a batch of milk for example, it was declared unsuitable for human consumption and fed to the hogs. The cows themselves were also very well cared for, occasionally even to the detriment of the humans caring for them, which also reduced danger of consuming their milk.
I would imagine that more of that was “common sense” back at that point in time, though, since a much larger portion of the population’s lives depended on these practices and had been for generations. These days raw milk is liable to come from a farm owned by someone who decided they wanted to try their hand at farming with zero prior experience from themselves, their parents, or grandparents to back it up.
It may have been one thing to drink raw milk from your own personal family cow, when you could control all aspects of care and sanitation. Modern milk farms (including RAW FARMS mentioned above) pool the output from hundreds to thousands of cows. A single contamination event can affect far more people.
By itself, the introduction of milk pasteurization between 1875 and 1920 halved infant mortality in the U.S. It really makes me boil when I hear claims that "hardly anyone gets sick from raw milk".
Yeah none of the food safety practices and regulations developed in the past century or so should be taken lightly. They were put in place for a reason.
Yea I think industrial farming practices did good by giving so many access to cheap protein, but it has really come at the cost of animal welfare and arguably human welfare. I think about the the near annual culling of diseased chicken, pig farms contaminating water, zoonosis (COVID anyone?) , etc.
Sad thing is I remember watching this Reading Rainbow episode when I was a kid where Levar Burton went to a dairy farm, showed the feed they gave the cows (looked delicious) and then even milked a cow. I distinctly remember them dipping the udders into a iodine solution to sanitize it and as a kid, I was like "man, these cows have a good life". Clearly wasn't how most farms at the time were doing it but it took me a long time to learn that.
people being cool with h drinking raw milk is just. bonkers to me.
as a kid I was super into this series of books that covered American history from like puritan days to....idk industrial era-ish? in a historical fiction format, following this interconnected series of families.
Anyway, in one of the books this girl's family's cow gets sick, then her whole family gets sick from the milk, her mom and little sibling(siblings??) die, and she spends the rest of the book getting parentified by her dad and engaging in Noble Suffering or whatever. But yeah, my key takeaway from this book that has lived in my head rent free for 20 years is that "raw milk is dangerous and sick cows can kill you" so like. Absolutely wild to me that people are just out here casually drinking unpasteurized dairy products in the year 2024 of the common era.
Ok I tried really hard but got more info on that series?
This one I don't remember what book it was though.
what I neglected to mention about the series is that it's xtian fundamentalist propaganda for kids so like. I don't exactly recommend them. they're not good books, or well written imo, and the propaganda is unfortunately a fundamental aspect of the stories.
Thanks, I'd read a lot of kids historical fiction: Little House, American Girl, the Dear America diaries, and the Royal Diaries so I was trying to figure out if I'd read these or not. Pretty sure not. Praise to my Catholic parents that didn't do fundie stuff!
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.ph/CbHzb