- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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It’s almost like pasturing milk is done for good reasons.
America: “RFK said to chug it with some raw sewage! Stop woke babies!”
Worth pointing out is that raw milk is not inherently dangerous. When you throw it through an industrial process that introduces contaminants, that’s where you run into problems.
I used to go across the street to a dairy farm for milk when I lived in Germany. It was raw, but the dairy was clean, and there were no issues.
To this day, I still shake milk before using it in cooking, even though I’m aware of homogenization. But back then, the cream was going to be hanging out on top without a good shake.
It also very much depends on how much a local farmer understands germ theory and adheres to a sterile environment.
Where I lived in the US growing up, there was a local farmer that sold raw milk in jars from a little fridge in an outbuilding attached to the barn where the cows were kept. It smelled strongly of manure and farm animal in that building, and some horse flies were buzzing around towards the ceiling.
My dad really got into that milk, and we would buy some there pretty much every week. One time when we went, we’d brought back a jar to be re-filled. The farmer then proceeded to open the vat of milk to dunk a non-sterile pitcher that had been sitting in the room into it, exposing all of the milk to flies and bacteria-laden air.
After seeing how little care was taken keeping the milk uncontaminated, I stopped drinking the milk. A few weeks after that incidents my dad got e-coli poisoning from a batch of milk that had an odd smell to it, which finally prompted him to stop buying the milk.
The only regulation the farmer needed to follow was placing a sign next to the raw milk that had some warnings on it about it being unpasteurized.
I hope in Germany there is more regulation around keeping raw milk safe.
I’d sometimes walk into the barn to find them cleaning a cow’s udder. Germans are nothing if not meticulous.
The milk from the cows went into a vat from which it was dispensed. No contact with their equipment.
That was the only time in life I’ve enjoyed cow’s milk. Pasteurization and homogenization have their place, but as with orange juice, once you start fucking with it, you lose why people liked it in the first place. In both cases, marketing sailed to the rescue, telling you the product was still just as good.
