Beyond the Raw/Pasteurised Divide

The microbiology of milk and milk products in certainly complex and 'raw vs. pasteurized' is an oversimplification, but practically, most people look at milk and cheese with "is this safe and healthy to consume" in mind. So when the author says this, it avoids that question.

> "There are many factors influencing this ecology which I will refrain from getting into further in this piece (teat treatment, animal bedding, milking equipment, climate, herd size and health, farming practices)."

If all milk was produced by a herd of cows living off the grass in some bucolic Swiss canton, with a careful farmer ensuring no udder infections etc., well, it wouldn't be a concern.

However, what if the cow was injected with growth hormones to double milk output per cow, and then treated with prophylactic antibiotics to prevent the resulting udder infections, and locked in a stall and fed with alfalfa laced with three different kinds of herbicides and pesticides? What happens to milk with trace antibiotics when you try to make cheese out of it using microbes?

See this:

"Whole-Genome Sequencing of Drug-Resistant Salmonella enterica Isolates from Dairy Cattle and Humans in New York and Washington States Reveals Source and Geographic Associations. (2017)"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28389536/

If you're going to ingest that product, ultra-pasteurization will at least kill all the salmonella, but even so it doens't sound that great.

> However, what if the cow was injected with growth hormones to double milk output per cow, and then treated with prophylactic antibiotics to prevent the resulting udder infections, and locked in a stall and fed with alfalfa laced with three different kinds of herbicides and pesticides?

Then your meat and milk would be illegal to sell, in every country in the world but one.

If you know and trust your farmer, and if you are in good health, raw milk is great. We've fed it to our kids since age 2.

Used to drink raw milk as a kid when spending holidays at my grant aunt village. It was usually still warm.

It's the most delicious and easier to digest milk I ever had. I have wonderful memories of it.

I have a personal, non proven, theory about Salmonella. I think it used to be a in a lot of food, but we didn't care most of the time as we were used to it. With things getting cleaner, we got sensitive to it, and it's now a problem because our immune system can't fight it as well and people get very sick out of it.

I remember we used to get eggs from an old lady in my mothers village when I was a kid. Dirty eggs, full of chicken crap, very cheap (5 francs a dozen).

They had a rich and flavorful taste, texture was full and round, and you felt like eating a ray of sunshine at breakfast.

One day friends from the city that ate only supermarket stuff came by, and ate the eggs. They loved it.

And they also got very sick.