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After illegal drugs, raw milk -- milk that’s unpasteurized and unhomogenized, just as it comes out of the cow -- may be the most briskly traded underground commodity in America.
I grew up on a dairy farm. We drank unpasteurized milk all the time.
On the other hand, it does make sense that there are stringent safety regulations regarding milk that is to be sold to the public.
Do people realize how rapidly bacteria grows in raw milk? Years ago, there were a lot of people who died because they drank raw milk that had the TB bacteria in it.
I don't know what the answer are, regarding raw milk. But let one person get sick and die, and let the authorities trace it back to whoever is supplying this raw milk, and there will be hell to pay. I also know that I'm sure as heck NOT going to be buying and drinking raw, untested milk from somebody I really don't know!
do any of you raw milk supporters ask for a bacteria test on that milk you buy?
My milk plant takes one every time they pick up milk from my farm.
Years back there was a guy selling raw milk door to door. His customers bragged about how "wholesome" and how "healthy" that raw milk was.
The law shut him down and then discovered that the reason he was selling raw milk was he got his state permit pulled for high bacteria counts and no processor would / could buy his milk anymore.
He only had one last option to try---------the gullible raw milk buyers.
You can not tell the quality of milk by just visiting a farm.
(This story appeared in the St Cloud Times a few years back )
Before we all go throwing the black market term around, one must check the state status on raw milk in the state they are from...selling raw milk in Maine is perfectly legal. That being said, there is NO WAY I would drink raw milk, nor sell raw milk to others. I am not going to risk my entire farm just so someone can get a few bucks off a gallon of milk, or my health for that matter.
I knew a guy that had his daughter go to a hippie type farm in Virgina and she got a bacteria infection from unpasturized goats milk. It put a baseball sized lump on the side of her face for 9 months. No matter how spotless the farm, there is no way they can prevent a milker from falling off and sucking up bacteria in a nano-second amount of time.
This is one of those deals that sound oh so great as people tout up a flawless milk safety record, only to have raw milk sales go up, a few people get killed and then pasteurized milk becomes a safety issue again. I say buyer beware and stop the insane rise and fall of raw milk sales before people start dying...
I am really interested to read this thread. I've recently been learning the difference between pastuerized, ultra-pastuerized, homogenized and raw. Do you all have opinions on homogenized vs "non"?
Have you guys actually read the published studies on bacteria in milk??? Pasteruization kills off all the good stuff that's in milk. There's very little reason to bother drinking milk if it's been pasteurized. And before you say "but we need the calcium" you can check into the studies that also show that although Americans have the highest calcium consumption we also have the highest osteoporosis levels. Why? Because it's not all about the calcium, it's about our diet being too acidic.
Back to raw milk. It was necessary to ban raw milk when they did, b/c many cows were not vaccinated against TB. Unfortunately, when past. to ensure no one got TB, the milk lost its nutritional value. However, these are not those times. Cows are vaccinated against TB. Of course you'd want to be sure you were buying from a reputable farm, and you could ask to see the actual vaccination records if you wanted, but raw milk is SO much healthier than pasteurized. And don't take my word, or the word of farmers or others on this forum--look it up yourself and then decide.
Your chance of dying from e.coli from tainted vegetables is much higher than from anything raw milk related. And of course the risk of dying from e.coli is not exactly high either. All the high fructose corn syrup Americans consume is a much bigger health risk (as are a million other things) than drinking raw milk and the benefits from drinking raw milk are huge.
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