Letters to the Editor
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Cravings
I find it very interesting that the woman at the beginning of the article craves milk. It's a very well known and popular theory in naturopathic circles that we crave the foods that make us sick.
Oh? My mom craves leafy greens every day of her life. So I guess I should tell her to knock it off and go have some Twinkies instead? She doesn't care for Twinkies, so I guess they must be good for her. Nu?
As for the raw-milk lovers: Enjoy it while you can. All forms of cow-based agriculture and food production probably won't be around all that much longer, since it's not particularly sustainable.
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Think
Is there a thinking person that can possibly take anything the FDA says seriously? Please.
PS, I don't drink milk, pasturized or not but the FDA arguments are absurd and its track record on food generally gives it ZERO credibility.
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Trust me. Would I lie to you?
We have a lot of people to feed in the U.S. and all over the globe. This talk of relying on small local farmers is fine and dandy -- but we don't have and will never have enough small local farmers to supply the majority of the population with raw milk. We cannot distribute the vast quantities of milk needed by consumers unless it is done in such a way as to minimize the risk of disease.
It also seems that a major factor in purchasing and consuming raw milk is that one must trust the supplier to maintain very high standards of cleanliness in their dairy. If you think you can always trust someone selling you a product just because they are a small business, then let me show you these Rolex watches I am running a special on today.
I prefer my milk to be free of hormones and would like it to be from grass-fed cows. But I also don't want it to contain harmful bacteria. If we are losing some of the benefits of milk due to pasteurization then I hope we can find a new process for treating milk. But I am not going to raise Bessy the cow in my back yard and I am not going to trust someone I don't really know to provide me with milk that isn't pasteurized. So no raw milk for me.
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Raw milk is not medicine
I've just read through the responses on this subject and have found it interesting with the anti-pasteurization crowd hitting the panic button. I much prefer milk straight from the animal -- I have goats, but I have nothing against cows -- to the stuff I can buy in cartons. In fact, I don't drink commercial milk. Adult humans don't need it, and it doesn't taste all that good if you've had the fresh product. Why bother?
I grew up on a farm, and my parents always had a milk cow of the Brown Swiss variety. The first time I had store-bought milk, at my city grandmother's, I thought something was wrong with it. I suppose if you look at it from a certain point of view, there was.
Eventually, I had my own commercial dairy and sold the milk to a small cheese-making plant. If you've ever had cheese from a small cheesemaker you'll wonder why you wasted the calories on supermarket cheese. You can't sell dirty milk to cheesemakers because it makes the cheese explode, or at least smell really, really bad.
Now I have a small herd of goats from which I get fluid milk (which I could drink by the quart, though in the interest of not weighing 300 lbs, I don't). I also make cheese from the milk. Trust me, there is nothing like making cheese from milk to convince a person of the need for sanitation. It doesn't take very many E. coli to literally blow a cheese. It also isn't terribly hard to keep milk clean, especially if you're milking goats who, thoughtfully, have manure that is dry and doesn't tend to drop in the milk bucket. Despite all that, I would have a hard time trusting someone else to produce milk that I'd consider safe enough to make cheese from -- yes, you can drink it fresh with no problem if you drink it fresh, but making cheese is a whole other thing. A number of dairies have produced safe unpasteurized milk for many years, and I am impressed, but it's not an ability that is likely to lend itself to the mass market.
Recently the state where I live has banned the sale of unpasteurized milk from the farm (it used to allow milk sales so long as the seller didn't advertise), a step that I find heinous. The ban wasn't put in place because of widespread or, so far as I know, any problems. As a public health problem, uncooked milk wasn't even on the list. My state has been brucellosis free for decades (my parents tested their cows and Dad once returned a bull that came from a farm that had once had had brucellosis) and TB hasn't been detected in maybe a century (and when it infected milk the germs came from dairy employees, not cows). Other bacteria, particularly E.coli and listeria, are serious threats, but so far they haven't killed or even sickened state residents though on-farm sales.
So, I love my goats and enjoy their output. If you want to share their bounty with me, you'll have to be a guest on my farm.
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More Antidotal Evidence
I grew up on a small dairy farm, and only drank raw milk (and lots of it) as a child.
Today at the age of 42 I have ZERO cavities, plus an immune system that ensures I very rarely get sick. I haven't drank raw milk in about 20 years, but I have always been convinced that the exposure to the bacteria in raw milk helped build the immune system I have today.
Is it safe to drink? There is no doubt it goes bad a lot faster than pasteurized milk, I remember throwing up over bad milk a couple times a child, but as long as it is produced in a clean environment and is refridgerated, you should have no problem.
Go and Enjoy!