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Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

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Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#251

Post by elhudy »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #247
elhudy wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an odd conclusion I’m struggling to wrap my head around the mental gymnastics necessary to make it there. Please see my other response addressing the false equivalencies presented in the previous post. Btw the rules were not made “a long time ago”, the law restricting the sale of raw milk was passed in 1987 in the US.

That's the federal ban. Individual states restricted sales of raw milk prior to that. I just find it weird that we start applying germ theory to combating tubercolosis outbreaks, find out raw milk is a problem, FDA makes recommendations to limit the sale of raw milk and sell only pasteurized milk back in the 1920's. Now there's this whole rejection of past experience and known dangers because of a belief in the natur…

The discussion isn’t about what’s good for you or what’s natural, it’s about whether the government should be able to impose extreme restrictions on what we consume and how those restrictions are implemented.

43 states allow the sale of raw milk in some form or another, but this sale is largely restricted from grocery stores. Of course the FDA recommends limiting the sale of raw milk, why wouldnt they? On a commercial scale allowing the sale of raw milk in grocery stores could be disastrous. But it’s not consumed on that scale and that’s outside of the context of this discussion - which is about it being legal to drink (not sell) raw milk.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#252

Post by mbar84 »

rupi wrote: post #83

Growing up in a village in India, we only ever bought raw milk because there was no packaged milk available. Everyone had a deal with a local farmer. Every morning or evening, we would walk over to the farmer's house, pick up our milk and bring it home. My family in India (and the whole village) still does that. And this is where the similarity ends. The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk…

Considering the climate in India, I imagine the situation is a bit different there than in western countries. I think raw milk can be safe to drink if it is cooled down immediately during the milking process and kept refrigerated all throughout until it is drunk only a few hours later. Personally though, I think it's natural only for calves and babies to drink milk (in particular of their own mother) and I wouldn't mind a bit if the practice went away.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#253

Post by cassianoleal »

verve_rat wrote: post #215
dmurray wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogs drink from dirty puddles all the time, and they are mostly fine.

I think we are agreeing here. I was pointing out that baby cows don't immediately die after drinking from their mothers teat, so the same would probably hold for humans.

It does hold for humans. I believe something close to 100% of baby humans drink from their mothers's teats.

That doesn't necessarily mean drinking from another species is safe.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#254

Post by Arnt »

SpaceInvader wrote: post #177
lrem wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drank quite a bit of raw milk in my childhood. But it had to be fresh. I could walk up, glass in hand, to an uncle carrying today's yield to the storage room. I would get the most delicious milk ever. But if I was a couple minutes late, he'd tell me to go get some in the kitchen instead.

I did the same thing several times, no issues as well. At first I was surprised that milk was warm, because I was used to refrigerated one.

AOL, except more than "several". Much more than "several".

The milk has to be stored in clean containers. If you're going to pasteurise the milk anyway, then milking into a tank will do, and you can clean the tank every few days. But if the milk is to be used raw, then you have to milk into a clean container each time.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#255

Post by gotaquestion »

rtpg wrote: post #77
gotaquestion wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steak tartare and carpaccio are two raw beef dishes that I love that are common in France and Italy, respectively. There are many others. But American food practices are so awful that it is impossible to eat raw meat here, mostly: some places are careful. That's why cows are pumped full of antibacterials: because they are given growth hormones until their udders rip, and are constantly infected. This doesn't happen i…

(Disclaimer: I roll the dice on steak tartar every once in a while) While American food standards are definitely worse, it’s a mistake to say that in Europe raw meat is safe. Even in the most rustic of environments there are loads of ways for your raw meat to get messed up. So you’re needing to trust a lot of stuff and are rolling the dice a bit each time. Of course everything is a dice roll, but turns out cooking me…

> Factory farming did not create food poisoning!

No one said it did.

But it exacerbates it by orders of magnitude.

Also odd to hear someone defending factory farming.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#256

Post by alasdair_ »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #225
alasdair_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Calories” measures the amount of energy a human can extract from the food. Interestingly, if you cook.a steak (for examples le) it can gain calories, not lose them.

Citation for the stake numbers? I can see it being possible, if cooking increases bioavailability

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/why-cooking-c... Is one.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#257

Post by PolygonSheep »

I wonder if it's something your body has to get used to? Raw milk has been rare in America for quite a while and I doubt these lawmakers grew up on it. Certainly people drank it for thousands of years and if it was something that had a very high chance of making you sick every time then the practice of drinking fresh milk would have been abandoned pretty quickly and drinking milk would be about as common as eating raw chicken.

People aren't dumb: the Inuit knew to leave polar bear liver well alone and the Mesoamericans knew corn had to be nixtamalized. Another example would be how cassava has to be washed and soaked in a particular process. There are many examples I can think of. Even if the actual mechanism behind these things wasn't understood until modern times people across the world still figured out "you must not eat this part" and "you must do X, Y, and Z before you can eat this" for a lot of toxic or potentially toxic foods.

I'm no expert on foodborne pathogens but it just doesn't make sense to me that people would drink something that would almost certainly make them sick. It seems to me it would be more like, say, eating eggs over easy: it's a risk to be sure but you'll probably be fine if they're fresh and the chicken was healthy.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#258

Post by earleybird »

lupire wrote: post #236
earleybird wrote: post #153

A common pattern in the "I get my raw milk from and I'm fine" appears to be that it is a nearby source, it is perhaps only a few hours old (no shelf life requirement) and the source is not at scale (a few cows perhaps). My dad grew up on a homestead where they had a few milk cows and raw milk was just how it was. Their health depended on the quality of care the gave their animals. Pasteurization is a basic requiremen…

Why are small forms less error prone, on a per unit basis?

The biological activities (health of the animals and the diseases they are exposed to) are no different from small to large. It is easier to monitor and manage the health of the family cow than a large herd. Mind you, automation these days goes a long ways to mitigating that complexity. Still, having a large herd in close quarters (twice a day they're all coming in to be milked) means exposure risks go up exponentially.

The same issues come up in meat production. See antibiotics employed to keep large herds healthy - where healthy is a low bar meaning 'not sick'.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#259

Post by PolygonSheep »

folli wrote: post #79
elhudy wrote: post #21

I put raw cream in my coffee daily, but don’t have the balls to drink raw milk. That said, it makes fantastic yogurt. I don’t really understand the concept of illegal raw milk though. Why can’t people consume raw milk if they want? If anything, make it illegal to feed to children (except of course, raw breast milk!!)

Why is it illegal to not wear a seat belt in most societies? Why are there limits on lead content in food stuff? Why are there any regulations at all? Some of the comments in this thread really left my head scratching. Food borne pathogens were a major burden on humankind for millennia, advances in microbiology and hygiene have massively improved the life span. All of that gets belittled in the comments as some minor…

I think it's the inconsistency that gets me. I can quite legally order at local restaurants: eggs sunny side up, a rare hamburger, raw hamburger with a raw egg on top (steak tartare), a rare steak, raw steak (carpaccio) raw fish (sushi, ceviche), and raw oysters. This is all very legal.

Put up next to those, a ban on buying raw milk seems kinda odd. If we're gonna ban selling raw milk why not ban serving raw fish too? "But it's safe if it's fresh and prepared properly". So is raw milk.

I'm not saying this is good. I won't personally eat raw hamburger or raw seafood. I have no urge to drink raw milk. I think you're playing Russian Roulette with your intestines if you do.

It just reminds me of weed being illegal (still is in a lot of the US) but tobacco and alcohol being legal despite the massive amount of lungs and livers they have ruined (not to mention stuff like drunk driving). Winners don't do drugs of course but it just doesn't make sense to ban this drug but allow that one which is arguably worse in every way.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#260

Post by michaelmrose »

mngnt wrote: post #59

When I was a kid, we lived in a village in northeastern Slovakia. On the hill above the village there was a farm with a big herd of cows. And every morning at around 5, a tractor would bring a few dozen litres of milk down to a small shack just by our house. People were usually waiting in line already, in a room that stank of rancid milk, to get a liter or two. When we brought the milk home, we'd pour a cup and let i…

You for practical purposes can't easily immunize yourself to bad milk by exposure. The problem is two fold. In the first place there are over 2500 types of salmonella identified and surely more extant and as a product of metabolism they produce toxins that are deleterious to your health Salmonella being only one culprit as well. You are probably as safe as you ever were.

Your idyllic view of the past may have other challenges in terms of perspective. Firstly we tend to remember the good things and forget the bad especially since food poisoning can have an incubation of 1-2 days we may blame one sort of food stuff instead of another or forget that we were incautious with raw foods in the kitchen the night before and blame a restaurateur without good cause. We also may not differentiate between an illness brought on by food and one from a bug. This rose colored view is especially easy to adopt if we remember pleasant consumption and the costs were borne by another. Even with education and standards we have 48 million cases of food borne illness in the US and 3000 deaths annually.

This brings is to scale. Pasteurization can be trivially adopted at scale and has been shown to be effective. Maybe your dairy was highly sanitary had excellent practices that enabled a very much above average performance. Replicating it all over creation may not be tenable but universal pasteurization is.

If you want to see an interesting account of the real "good old days" before either of us were born you may peruse this.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-f...

To maximize profits milk was thinned with water then recolored with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust with formaldehyde added to preserve freshness. Pureed cow brains stood in for rich cream and in addition to all the current maladies like listeria and salmonella consumers had to worry about bovine tuberculosis, undulant fever, scarlet fever, typhoid, and diphtheria.

> Those were the days my friend We thought they'd never end We'd sing and dance forever and a day We'd live the life we choose We'd fight and never lose For we were young and sure to have our way

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