Raw Milk and the Collapse of Consensus Reality | how the "debate" over killing bacteria in milk is emblematic of the end of common ground
Raw Milk and the Collapse of Consensus Reality | how the "debate" over killing bacteria in milk is emblematic of the end of common ground
Louis Pasteur didn’t set out to make milk safer. A scientific jack-of-all trades, born in 1822 in eastern France, Pasteur pioneered fields from...
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I don't drink it any more (having kids changes everything), but holy shit raw milk is delicious.
Unprocessed milk is much healthier and tastier than processed milk... but only if the cows graze on grass. The problem with unprocessed milk isn't the milk itself; people have been drinking it for thousands of years. The problem with unprocessed milk is risk of contamination. When bottling it, It needs a clean environment, clean cows, attention to the health of the cows, and as a failsafe, pathogen testing. Mass production of milk in the US's current environment of aged, sick, corn-fed, hormone-dosed cows standing in cages in their own excrement is not conducive to unprocessed milk. It's so filthy that pasteurisation is a must. Creating and maintaining a clean environment, healthy appropriately fed herd, and testing, for the production of unprocessed milk is not economically viable at mass scale. If you want to produce millions of gallons of milk per annum, you unfortunately need dense cages. You need to keep your expenses low so you feed them cheap corn feed which they're not designed to eat. This lowers their immunity so that they often get sick, and have mastitis. So you have to load them up with antibiotics. They remain unhappy and unexcercised cows with poor quality milk which often contains a percentage of pus.
Smaller farmers and operations can often invest the time and money to do what's necessary to produce clean unprocessed milk from healthy cows in a clean environment. In my country we have vending machines on farms for unprocessed milk. And each batch has a testing and pathogen report posted to verify it's good and healthy.
In the US, the mass milk producers would rather everyone think that unprocessed milk is inherently dangerous, rather than a solveable issue surrounding process and scale.
Smaller farmers and operations can often invest the time and money to do what's necessary to produce clean unprocessed milk from healthy cows in a clean environment.
Or you can do what a lot of small farmers do: go slowly broke over the course of decades while the government provides for the megacorps and the nature of the economy changes such that all of their kids can't wait to get the hell away from the old family farm as fast as possible.
You'd think that, if nothing else, we'd have a shared cultural interest in preserving that way of life. Hell, put traditional agriculture under the purview of the National Endowment for the Arts, even.
I think in the future we'll wean ourselves off milk like proverbial calves, and transition to ethical and environmentally friendly alternatives like oat. Don't need to worry about exceeding acceptable faeces and pus limits with oat milk.
Smaller farmers and operations can often invest the time and money to do what’s necessary to produce clean unprocessed milk from healthy cows in a clean environment.
At least in my case, the local small farm I was buying my raw milk from ended up having extremely unsanitary conditions inside. They would open an entire vat of milk inside the barn where the cows were kept (and where flies were buzzing around) to ladle out the milk into a jar. It suddenly made sense why a family member had e-coli poisoning not long before.
I stopped buying raw milk after that, though I can see how, if done in a sanitary way, it wouldn't be quite as dangerous as my local farm ended up being, but I think state inspectors might've had the work cut out for them, or maybe it wasn't strict enough?
You left out the pus bacteria from milking machines.