The war over raw milk

The problem is the mixing of milk from multiple farms, all it takes it one bad batch of milk from one farm to contaminate the rest. Buying from individual farms with no cross-mixing of milk should be fine and would limit disease outbreaks to the locals.

I tend to view people who are passionate about things like raw milk as cultish. They remind me of health food stores where all the food looks and tastes like dirt.

Who knows, though, they may have a point. All processing changes food, and we're only beginning to understand things like micronutrients and useful microorganisms.

The main thing is, the Nanny State should butt out. At the most, require a warning label. Treat the citizenry like grown-ups, and maybe some day they'll grow up.

If we let people volunteer for suicide with the help of doctors (at least in Oregon), let them drink raw milk. Let them smoke, for that matter.

Just found this article entitled "15 Fall Ill After Drinking Raw Milk" about a bunch of people in California who got sick. From two days ago:

http://cbs13.com/local/raw.milk.sickness.2.798221.html

I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill".

If you've read it, you'll get the connection.

I've had raw milk a number of times -- several members of my family (including my late grandparents) have small farms. It's tasty, and if I could get it locally, I probably would. I do occasionally get raw milk cheese.

I wouldn't bother getting raw milk if it was a blend from several farms, and no way would I get it from an industrialized dairy.

Just yesterday, I sent this very article to a friend who was asking me about what I meant in using the term "traditionalist" to describe my views (I started tracking Schwenkler's work after his cover story on food for TAC). I had earlier lamented Monsanto's litigious abuse of farmers in the heartland of America, and he had poked fun at me saying I was sounding like a firebrand liberal (funny that some people on this blog think the opposite of me because of my recent castigation of Junie B. Bones).

Anyway, I sent him a grab bag of links to recent articles that tracked some of the issues I care about, including this one which involves the a traditionalist approach to food and agriculture contrasted against our society's heavy reliance on the industrial food chain.

In that same e-mail to my friend, I sent him links to an article in the latest issue of National Geographic about the loss of topsoil across the globe, a recent Michael Gerson column critiquing the so-called "prosperity gospel," and a couple of recent positive City Journal articles on Leon Krier and the New Urbanism.

This friend has been a loyal member of the GOP, and I had told him how I felt alienated from the GOP because it was becoming crowded with materialists and humanists, people who don't even understand how rooted they are in a materialist viewpoint stripped of any sacramentality or desire for holiness.

I agree with at least one commenter that we can tend to over-romanticize a more bucolic life of yesteryear, and I am aware of how we can also inadvertently discount the good reasons for why things like pasteurization came about in the first place.

But as much as many establishment conservatives criticized Rod's book when it first hit the shelves, I know how it resonated with my wife and I, as well as my younger sister and her husband. I think he was on the leading edge of a growing trend of thought among disaffected conservatives.

Rod, raw milk is pretty darn good though very strong. Once you get past the shock of it, raw milk makes the industrial stuff taste like a distant memory of what milk should be.

There are a couple of problems that need to be dealt with, by anyone who advocates the total libertarian solution of letting people buy and sell milk any way they want it. First, it is an unapproved, regrettable, and yet undeniable fact that there are lots and lots of people who simply lack the discretion to make the kind of choices that would be required to ensure that they'd be choosing carefully processed raw milk, instead of dirty stuff. I'm not sure that when it came down to it, we'd really be up for the sick and dead kids that would result from their parents' and the milk producers' ignorance, laziness, stupidity, greed, or whatever might enter into the mix. Sure, the responsible raw dairies sell a clean and healthy product, but as is so often pointed out, not every producer is responsible, and not every consumer has the wherewithal to sort them out. And it's no myth that poorly processed raw milk can be lethal -- I'm lacking an aunt who never got out of infancy because of it.

The only way to get around this would be to set up standards for how raw milk could be sold -- which would be more restrictive, more bureaucratic, and more expensive to regulate and enforce than simply disallowing the general sale of raw milk.

FWIW, I don't have a problem with the arrangements that let people buy into a cooperative from which they can purchase raw milk, or arrangements that allow producers to be certified to sell it more widely, perhaps with some limits (e.g., selling it directly rather than mass distribution.) In this day and age, that may really be the only workable solution. It would be good if states relaxed regulation at least to that extent.

You only have to read the books by James Herriot to see that even cows grazed on grass in windswept country fields can carry diseases deadly to humans. That's why rural vets had to do so much testing.

Now if you tested your cows monthly, or vaccinated them, and collected the milk in scrupulously hygienic conditions, raw milk would probably be fine.

I'm not real old, but during my lifetime, we often used raw milk from farmers, who sold it directly to their neighbors. We learned real fast who was less sanitary than others. The faster it spoiled, the less careful they had been.

But the real issue is, that there are infuriatingly mindless nannies that can't actually believe that someone besides themselves is wise enough to make risk decisions for themselves and so choose the mantra of all good tyrants everywhere to "protect the people from themselves".

I say... let the people decide. Simple rules to inform people and leave it at that...

1. milk can't be mixed between producers or even days.
2. date (to the hour) required.
3. producer must be named - unique brand, if you wish.

There are already standards for milk production and should be some reasonable ones for manually handled milk, if there aren't.

Beyond that, let people make their own informed choices.

Pasteurizing milk does not result in a zero-bacteria count product. The allowable bacteria count after the process is somewhere around 20,000 critters per some unit of fluid milk (haven't read the regs lately).

The raw milk from our local grassfed-only dairy farms contains only 4,000-5,000 bacteria per unit, so why heating it up is considered necessary is anyone's guess. All of the farm families, including children, consume raw milk and have for decades with no ill effect.

The Minnesota State Constitution guarantees the right of a farmer to sell product directly to any consumer. Raw milk enthusiasts here have set up a co-op to direct order from an organic dairy farm. As long as there is no middle-man, it is completely legal.

That said, the "enzyme" argument is false. Our stomach acids break up food enzymes like any other protein. If enzymes from food got through undigested, our childhood fears about swallowing watermelon seeds would be more realistic.

A bigger concern with pasteurized milk is that it heats the proteins in the milk up to a point where they form bonds that are hard to digest. Better to drink it raw or boiled (the bonds break apart again at boiling) for ease of digestion. Either that or ferment it into yogurt, kefir or similar traditional fermented dairy products.

Raw milk cheese is legal in the US, as long as it is aged at least 60 days. The food science department at the U of MN worked quite a long time to demonstrate that properly aged raw milk cheese is as safe or safer than pasteurized product. Listeria outbreaks in the US have been largely (or exclusively) in pasteurized-milk cheeses.

Many of the processing rules that cover dairy and meat handling are for the benefit of large processors, not farmers or consumers.

Good article, and the FDA really needs to get on the ball with ALLOWING farmers to offer raw milk. The taste is fantastic, and with the beneficial enzymes in the content, it makes a ton more sense to drink raw milk instead of the over-pasteurized sugar-water sold at food stores.

It's so goofy to me that raw milk so villified, but people can zip around on motorcycles without helmets. I don't get it.

So if David J White is right, the historical sequence was

1) Most of history - few people drink raw milk, because there is not the transportion or refridgeration.

2) Late 18th/ 19th century - more and more people drink raw milk, because the rapid transportation & refridgeration appear

But, more and more people also die of raw-milk related diseases

3) Pasteur invents pasteurization, so all that milk being transported everywhere doesn't kill people.

4) Most people forget all this, and demand the right to go back to nature and drink raw milk. They would actually only be going back to the 19th century.

I'm wishy-washy on legalization. Half of me is libertarian, and foody, and I'd certainly like to try it, given the chance. Half of me knows that many people are stupid, and the law has a responsibility to them. I don't see why it shouldn't be sold with health warnings, like cigarettes.

Raw milk is un-Pasteurized, un-homogenized milk. The cream rises to the top. Pasteurizing kills milk's healthful bacteria and enzymes. (Many people who are "lactose intolerant" are actually RAW-milk lactose TOLERANT and PASTEURIZED-milk lactose INTOLERANT.) Homogenization makes the dead bacteria and dead enzymes consistent throughout. Raw vs. industrial: take your pick.

In Britain, until perhaps fifteen years ago, all milk was pasteurized, but it wasn't always homogenized. That was a feature of American milk, that it was all homogenized. We had three types of bottled milk - gold top (with a gold foil top), which had a lot of cream, blue top, which had some, and red top, which was horrible. Then the cartons started coming in, and the milk floats disappeared, and if you got a bottle, there was no way of returning it, and the cartons (which to us had seemed 'American', and were homogenized) took over from the bottles. There were cartons alongside unhomogenized bottles for a long time, then the bottles just disappeared.

The only way of buying 'gold top' now is as very expensive Guensey milk, in cartons. Gold top in one's tea was a delicacy, and the Guensey milk is very pleasant, if you can afford it.

To me, pasteurized but unhomogenized is or was a perfect balance.

Totally irrelevant aside:

"4) Most people forget all this, and demand the right to go back to nature and drink raw milk. They would actually only be going back to the 19th century."

Francesca, exactly the same can be said of some of the "return to the traditional family" arguments frequently made on this blog!

Excellent post, Rod, and great comments. I've learned a bit today about a subject as to which I was previously udderly ignorant.

ScurvyOaks,

That last comment was the cream of the crop, but I think we've milked this thread for all it's worth.

There have been some good comments and some bad comments -- about half and half -- but now the whole thing is getting cheesy.

I know, I know, time to lait off the puns. Okay, okay, don't have a cow, man!

Well Simpson Snail Dr Weston Price's theory has it that crooked teeth are due to underdeveloped jaws due to poor nutrition- especially lacking in calcium. He has excellent pictures of what people with poor nutrition look like (especially their jaws) and how people on traditional diets which included raw milk have much wider jaws and therefore enough room for the teeth to grow straight. He was a dentist after all. Its kinda sad, as I work with lots of children and rarely ever see the broad jaws and facial development.

Bible talks about the promised land flowing with "Milk and HOney" don't tell me they were making it all into cheese! and don't tell me it was pasteurized, homogenized and industrialized!

Enjoy some real milk!

Paul Shiras asked,

They sell milk that does not need refrigeration, we can't seem to be able to do that yet here in America. Why is that by the way?

Paul, the milk that doesn't need refrigeration is zapped with enough gamma rays to kill all the bacteria, not just most of it as Pasteurization does. Think of irradiation as Pasteurization-plus.