How Safe Is Raw Milk?

[Wendi]

The information available seems to vary from one extreme to another.

I've had it a few times... my family used to have a farm when my sister and I were real young. Our folks wouldn't let us drink raw milk, but Grandma had no qualms of letting us sample it about as fresh as you can get - straight from the cow

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I learn there is this huge controversy over whether or not people should be allowed to legally buy and sell raw milk. Some say it is a health hazard, others say the garbage they put in our milk that we buy from the store is the real danger

And on the rare occasion that I've seen anyone selling raw milk, the warning stickers about "may contain harmful bacteria" and "should not be consumed by infants, elderly, or persons with compromised immune systems" have made me too skittish to buy without conducting my own research first.

So, like the question says... how safe is raw milk? Do you drink it? Where do you get it from? If you're buying it from others how can you be sure it is safe (or is this not really an issue)?

 

[jamesmadison]

do calves get sick when they drink their mothers milk?
do babies get sick when they drink their mothers milk?

milk contains lactoferrin which has antibacterial/fungal properties that protect from harmful bacteria and strengthen the immune system. it is most likely destroyed during pasturization.

 

[mtmedlin]

Raw milk was consumed for thousands of years with the majority not having problems with it. I have heard one unconfirmed source say that they are lactose intolerant and are able to consume raw milk. Ive drank it personally and never got sick. I grew up in Indiana and it wasnt uncommon to get a gallon from the farmer. Tastes a little different but I suspect its safe. Small batches that are kept cold and dont sit around for a long time should be just fine.

 

[Birdlady]

Yes I am supposedly lactose intolerant and can drink raw milk with no problems. No bloating, gas, or cramps. Nothing. I still get very ill when I drink pus oh I mean conventional milk . "Organic" and goat milk make me sick too.

A women and her husband that I know here only drinks raw milk and they have never had any problems. With that being said, go and visit the farm. If it's dirty then don't buy from them. If it looks clean and the animals are well taken care of then you are safe. Ask people who have bought their milk before and see what they say.

 

[Corydoras]

the warning stickers about "may contain harmful bacteria" and "should not be consumed by infants, elderly, or persons with compromised immune systems" have made me too skittish to buy without conducting my own research first.

So, like the question says... how safe is raw milk? Do you drink it? Where do you get it from? If you're buying it from others how can you be sure it is safe (or is this not really an issue)?

For myself I would choose not to drink raw milk, but on the other hand I definitely wouldn't be scared by those stickers, either. Just don't feed the milk to babies, old people, cancer patients, people with HIV, etc.

Any milk is prone to breed germs, whether pasteurized or not-- that's what yogurt is, after all. If you're really worried about germs, the safest is canned or in one of those boxes like Parmalat.

Why not visit the website (or better yet, the farm) of the people who produce the raw milk you see for sale?

 

[olehounddog]

I'm 48 y/o and I'm still alive. Back in the 60's we never bought our milk from a store. We made our buttermilk and butter.
But then the holier than thou crowd took over.

 

[Birdlady]

I'm 48 y/o and I'm still alive. Back in the 60's we never bought our milk from a store. We made our buttermilk and butter.
But then the holier than thou crowd took over.

People have been brainwashed though. The amount of propaganda and fear that has been instilled within us is unbelievable.

My grandmother said that she used to drink milk basically straight from the cow. Today she tells me how dangerous it is to do that. Why has her attitude changed? Because she watches the darn TV and it says that it is dangerous. Even though she had her own personal experience on the matter, the TV knows all.

 

[Shavenyak]

I grew up drinking raw milk until I was 17. The Alta-Dena Dairy used to deliver it weekly to the door until it was banned. I never got sick from it, nor anyone else in the family. We went through a gallon a day, on average. 6 people total. Great stuff. I'd buy it again if I could find it, but I think it's outlawed to protect me from myself. Although I can go to 14 fast food restaurants within 1 mile of my apartment.

 

[McDermit]

Fresh raw milk is far better for you than anything you can buy at walmart or safeway. Best to get it from small family farms where the cows are healthy and not pumped full of antibiotics and hormones.

 

[Chester Copperpot]

UNfortunately, I live in NJ where the guy who started the whole milk pastuerization process lived.. Ive heard many good things about raw milk, even getting rid of peoples' illnesses.... Ive also heard quite a bit of stories about how raw milk can have cancer in it, bacteria, etc..

If I had to choose, I would prefer a completely organic raw milk. Its live food as opposed to dead food...probably much better for you..

 

[Chester Copperpot]

I grew up drinking raw milk until I was 17. The Alta-Dena Dairy used to deliver it weekly to the door until it was banned. I never got sick from it, nor anyone else in the family. We went through a gallon a day, on average. 6 people total. Great stuff. I'd buy it again if I could find it, but I think it's outlawed to protect me from myself. Although I can go to 14 fast food restaurants within 1 mile of my apartment.

Amazing but true statement.. How come we need the govt to protect us from raw milk, but not from the thousands of chemicals in mcdonalds?

 

[Man from La Mancha]

For myself I would choose not to drink raw milk, but on the other hand I definitely wouldn't be scared by those stickers, either. Just don't feed the milk to babies, old people, cancer patients, people with HIV, etc.

Any milk is prone to breed germs, whether pasteurized or not-- that's what yogurt is, after all. If you're really worried about germs, the safest is canned or in one of those boxes like Parmalat.

Why not visit the website (or better yet, the farm) of the people who produce the raw milk you see for sale?

Raw milk is so safe that if left out on its own it ferments into something called clabber milk and can be eaten like yogurt. Looks like sour milk was great for Scottish babies

A note from a baker: My grandmother and dad, both native Texans, referred to clabber milk as that milk which had started to thicken (I, city-bred, called it spoiled). They liked to mix it with cornbread in a glass and spoon it out as a treat. Dad also does this with buttermilk, which is certainly not the same as clabber milk.

clabber
A popular dish of the Old South, clabber is unpasteurized milk that has soured and thickened naturally. Depending on its thickness, icy-cold clabbered milk was (and sometimes still is) enjoyed as a drink. It may also be eaten with fruit, or topped with black pepper and cream or simply sprinkled with sugar.

Clabber is a food produced by allowing unpasteurized milk to turn sour at the proper humidity and temperature. Over time the milk thickens or curdles into a yoghurt-like substance with a strong, sour flavor. In rural areas of the Southern United States, it was commonly eaten for breakfast with brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, or molasses added. Some people also eat it with fruit or black pepper and cream.

Unlike many Southern dishes, which can ascribe their roots to African origins, clabber appears to have come from the many Scottish nannies who at one time took care of the children of the Virginia gentry. In fact, clabber is still sometimes referred to as bonny clabber (originally "bainne clàbar", from Scottish Gaelic bainne - milk , and clàbar - mud). Clabber passed into Scots and Anglo-Irish meaning wet, gooey mud, though it is commonly used now in the noun form to refer to the food or in the verb form "to curdle". In France an almost identical food is known as Crème fraîche.

With the rise of pasteurization the making of clabber virtually stopped, except on farms that had easy access to unprocessed cow's milk. You can, however, make pasteurized milk "clabber" by adding a couple of tablespoons of commercial buttermilk to a glass.

.

 

[DanConway]

I'm quite allergic to cow's milk. Not lactose intolerant, though, and I don't really drink milk, but I do like cheese, so I have goat, sheep, and buffalo cheese. These aren't produced very much in the US -- I currently have cheese from at least four countries (USA, Canada, France, and Italy) in my refrigerator.

To make it Ron Paul related: I spent a night at the home of a big Ron Paul supporter in New Hampshire. He had some goat cheese in his refrigerator that his wife had apparently made using milk from his neighbor's goat, and was nice enough to let me have some. It was quite good -- and as organic as it gets! -- and I enjoyed the thought of eating something (unpasteurized cheese) that a lot of busybodies would like to make illegal. I didn't get sick from it either, so that's one bullet (or hailstorm of bullets, as some would have you believe) that I dodged.

Yesterday I saw some raw-milk cheese in my local health food store. I'll go back and see if it's made from cow's milk, and if it isn't, I'll try some. I've been taking probiotics for the last seven weeks at a doctor's recommendation, and eating yogurt the majority of days (water buffalo yogurt -- http://woodstockwaterbuffalo.com/prod_yogurt.shtml ) so my digestive system, and the part of my immune system comprised by that, is in much better shape than it was, so I think I'd be OK to have it, and it might actually help. (My digestive system being compromised was probably the reason I became allergic to cow's milk in the first place -- fixing it may actually reverse that, as well as resolving many other problems.)

 

[olehounddog]

Taxes, could that be the real cause? When you buy direct from the farmer, the government don't get to steal their part.

 

[noztnac]

Someone might be able to track this down. I've heard that pasteurized milk is illegal in France, the reason being that they don't want milk being sold that is not fresh. Maybe that is no longer true but I'm pretty sure it was once the law.

 

[Alex Libman]

That answer will of course depend on the cow. In some cases it will be safer than pasteurized milk because it's easier to digest and contains more natural bacteria-fighting enzymes. And also because since you're buying it locally from a farmer that has to earn and maintain your trust, you know exactly which cow it's coming from. If you get sick from supermarket milk, you have no choice but to call mommy government...

But regardless of safety, the government should definitely NOT be involved in regulating what kind of milk I want to buy!

 

[DanConway]

I think we're heading towards a general principle here, that localization beats centralization. The typical collectivist criticism I've been hearing lately is that "free markets need information to function" -- well, getting milk from a local dairy farm instead of Big Farm Inc., Ltd., LLC, or getting electricity from your own solar panels instead of "the grid" (not yet, but someday), or having laptops and cell phone computers instead of whatever the equivalent of "any color as long as it's black" would have been for computers as a government utility (which is the direction, according to my operating systems professor, in which a lot of people once -- thirty or so years ago, I guess -- thought personal computing would go) means localization, and more information. In the last case we'd probably be hearing from the collectivists how thankful we should be that government provides us with computers, and what would we do without them?

I recall a study saying that beyond 150 people in a community, man exceeds their capacity to relate to each of them as an individual, and begins to need organized systems and hierarchies to figure out how they "should" relate to and act towards people. Maybe the number is different, but I think there must be some critical number around which this happens.

I'll leave you with this thought:

"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to other machines they must associate with. But men and women have to build the meanings of their lives around a few – a very few – people to touch and love and care for. If you're always getting rid of people, trading them off the way you've been taught to trade off things, you can't have much of a life. And if you fail in this vital endeavor of linking up with the right people for you, it doesn't matter at all how healthy the space program is or how many machines you own. You'll still be lonely in the middle of crowds."
--John Taylor Gatto, educator

 

[XNavyNuke]

So, like the question says... how safe is raw milk?

Depends on your source. In my case it's as safe as spinach from our garden, the fruit from our trees, the eggs from our hens, the fish from our pond, the beer that I brew, or the jar of deer meat that my wife pressure cans. We have yet to have a case of food borne illness.

Do you drink it?

Yes.

Where do you get it from?

My wife maintains a herd of IDGR registered Nubian goats.

If you're buying it from others how can you be sure it is safe (or is this not really an issue)?

Physically take a look at the pplace where it comes from. See the conditions first hand. Ask the person who your buying your milk (or spinach, or apples, or eggs) if they and their family consume the same food you are buying. (You would be surprised how many folks at the farmers market where I occasionaly set-up, purchase their produce from wholesalers.)

If you wake up in the morning, there is risk involved. Just because something is pastuerized doesn't mean it's perfectly safe.

State investigating rare outbreak in pasteurized milk

That means the listeria bacteria that killed two elderly men and sickened two others in Massachusetts entered Whittier Farms' milk supply after it was pasteurized.

Dead is dead, whether or not the product has a state seal of approval.

XNN

 

[SlapItHigh]

Milk pasteurization reminds me of socialism. Hurting the many to help the few.

 

[mtmedlin]

really, from reading all the stories, it comes down to handling. As with all foods that can contain bacteria, if a person simply chooses to use common sense in the handling of the food they should be safe. I wouldnt leave ANY milk out of the fridge fro several days and consume it. I wouldnt eat any food that I KNOW cam from a dirty, unkept farm. I used to work on farms in Indiana and there are some that dont do much to keep clean and they sold meat, eggs and milk to the local grocers because the FDA said they met the minimum requirements. On the other hand, i was talking to a guy from NH that says the farm he buys raw milk from is VERY well kept, because the people buy directly from him, he has to keep it up, it is in all reality his showroom. A grocery store cannot sell well if it is nasty and neither will a farm.
The more I here of NH the more I think about the Free State Project. I really hope to be a part within the next 2 years.