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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)

#161

Post by Kerrick »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #107
aunty_helen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just catching up on this, can someone explain to me what happens if you drink raw milk? Edit: thanks for the answers everyone. My mum’s a dairy farmer and so was I during my high school weekends. My family’s been drinking raw milk for the past 20 or so years. So it’s interesting to know what scary stuff is out there lurking and that a debate has formed around something I had grown to normalize. Tb is obviously a…

The wiki on Pasteurization is a real page turner! > Prior to industrialization, dairy cows were kept in urban areas to limit the time between milk production and consumption, hence the risk of disease transmission via raw milk was reduced. As urban densities increased and supply chains lengthened to the distance from country to city, raw milk (often days old) became recognized as a source of disease. For example, bet…

Interestingly, that seems to predate reliable cold chains.

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

#162

Post by Kerrick »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #53
aunty_helen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just catching up on this, can someone explain to me what happens if you drink raw milk? Edit: thanks for the answers everyone. My mum’s a dairy farmer and so was I during my high school weekends. My family’s been drinking raw milk for the past 20 or so years. So it’s interesting to know what scary stuff is out there lurking and that a debate has formed around something I had grown to normalize. Tb is obviously a…

Your question isn’t very clear. Raw milk itself isn’t bad, it’s just very very easy to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria. Proponents of raw milk claim it has health benefits due to the lack of cooking, both on a chemical level and a bacterial level.

Raw milk and pasteurized milk should be equally easy to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria if you do the same things with them. But the pasteurization process does a “reset” after some of the riskiest behavior that happens pre-sale, after which repeating said risky behavior is specifically avoided.

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

#163

Post by tarsinge »

folli wrote: post #88
seiferteric wrote: post #6

> a bill that makes it legal to drink (but not sell) Woah it was illegal to drink! Even if you produced it from your own cow/goat etc? Personally I have no desired to drink raw milk, but I do hope raw milk cheese becomes more common/legal in the US.

You can't compare raw milk to (properly produced) raw milk cheese. For cheese fermentation, you inoculate non-pathogenic (and even beneficial) bacterial strains in the milk that overgrow and outcompete pathogenic bacteria. That's actually the reason why cheese (and yogurt for that matter) exists at all, it's an invention that allowed longer storage of milk. Same for other types of fermentation, such as sausages, kimc…

Yup, also raw milk cheese keep these properties afterwards, it's a living product, whereas pasteurized milk cheese is more fragile because pathogenic bacteria have no competition in case of later contamination. In France we joke raw milk cheese is good to eat until it starts moving by itself (and even then it's gross but would probably be safe). But I would never drink raw milk.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

guntars wrote: post #157

Reading these comments, if the world ended and the people here were left with a cow, half would starve to death and the other half would get sick. It’s just crazy to me that what was common knowledge a few generations ago is just gone. Yes, milk breeds bacteria like crazy. It’s exponential growth too so it’s bound to go bad and when it does, it happens quickly. But if you had to drink fresh milk that was still warm,…

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by butler14 »

In the UK, we have vending machine at a local farm that sells raw, unpasteurised milk.

They need to meet various common sense hygiene standards and conduct regular testing of their herd to continue doing so, along with an explicit health warning on each bottle.

It’s delicious.

A good rule of thumb is, if you’re going to drink raw milk at all regularly, ‘know the cow’ it’s coming from.

Mad cow disease more or less wiped out the selling of raw milk for decades. But it is slowly gaining traction in this past 10 years or so, albeit in a very niche way.

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

#167

Post by Kerrick »

I sell raw milk directly to consumers from my small farm. Selling pasteurized milk is heavily regulated in Missouri, but selling raw milk is both legal and much easier.

I also only sell to customers willing to sign a waiver, and every jar/bottle of raw milk I sell includes a link to the CDC’s raw milk web page and instructions on how to pasteurize.

I even own a 3-gallon pasteurization and I pasteurize my own milk before I drink it, make cheese/yogurt, or use it other for non-cooking purposes because safety is health. Of course I skip pasteurization when using it for cooking (e.g. biscuits and gravy) because it’ll reach kill pathogen temps as part of that process anyways.

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

#168

Post by TacticalMalice »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #111
jmole wrote: post #95

Are baby calves coming down with Salmonella or E Coli poisoning all the time? It seems reasonable that the risk is not in consumption, but letting the raw milk sit around for any length of time. If anyone knows why, I would be curious to hear.

Milk is an ideal growth medium, every bacteria floating in the air loves to breed in the stuff, not least of which tuberculosis. A few hours old, maybe the concentrations are low. After a few days it becomes deadly.

Milk is not necessarily sterile upon lactation only to be contaminated later. Pathogens such as Brucella and TB are shed in the milk itself.

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

#169

Post by mjburgess »

guntars wrote: post #157

Reading these comments, if the world ended and the people here were left with a cow, half would starve to death and the other half would get sick. It’s just crazy to me that what was common knowledge a few generations ago is just gone. Yes, milk breeds bacteria like crazy. It’s exponential growth too so it’s bound to go bad and when it does, it happens quickly. But if you had to drink fresh milk that was still warm,…

The issue is how trivial it is to make it safe; and how people will avoid this trivial step for the sake of some essentially religious notion about human action upon nature violating its "sacred" condition. The underlying view is very much "the world was made Good, and we are Bad". The world is as much poisonous, grow up.

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

#170

Post by verve_rat »

paganel wrote: post #137
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…

> The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk to pasteurize it. Same here, in rural Romania (at least that's what my grandma was doing when me and my brother were kids). To be honest though, we (meaning me and my brother) did use to eat the foam-y thing that was present on top of the milk immediately after our grandma or grandpa had finished milking the cows. It was still worm, as it had just c…

Which seems logical on the face of it. Calves drink fresh milk all the time, and they are mostly fine.
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