The raw milk craze has been sweeping the nation and vacuuming some parts of Canada. And, why not? Regular pasteurized milk might taste good and provide protein and vitamins; but, raw milk includes the e. coli and salmonella that pasteurization thoughtlessly kills. Why pasteurize when it turns out that food poisoning is just a laxative in bacterial form? Raw milk is the healthier choice if you ignore the illness and death associated with it. That is actually the conclusion in some of the studies cited by raw milk advocates.
I started with e. coli and salmonella because “tuberculosis” is a scary scary word. Early in the twentieth century, over sixty thousand people in the UK died from contaminated milk-borne tuberculosis… or, as the Brits called it, “natural causes”. At the time, pasteurization became necessary because no one wanted to spend all day not breathing around other people only to come home, drink a glass of milk, and then contract the disease anyway…
New York city made pasteurization mandatory in 1910 after several years of what was called “summer diarrhea”. The less said about that, the better.
Now, twenty states forbid the sales of raw milk. In some of those states, you can buy it but not as people food: It is sold as animal feed or maybe rocket fuel or bath salts. My point is, there are ways of obtaining it. And, why not? Raw milk is cow’s milk as God intended except people are drinking it instead of calves. And, there is some evidence that it might help children avoid allergies. Of course, there is the downside of fatal diseases… which kind of makes me doubt their motives. Frankly, I think it is just an excuse to roll back science.
It’s a lot like the anti-vaxx movement. I know… I know, anti-vaxxers have a good point: We know HISTORICALLY vaccines have cured or controlled typhus, measles, mumps, polio… etc… BUT, we don’t know what they will do in the future. Maybe they’ll just stop working… or maybe a small pox vaccine will become the next Hitler. Are you willing to take that risk? I’m amazed at the size of the overlap with anti-vaxx and people who think that our government and the USSR worked together to fake the moon landing.
Sure raw milk has killed a lot of people, but that was in the past. We have no idea what it will do now… It may cure cancer all of the sudden; or, it may be the entity that finally kills small pox Hitler. Yes, raw milk has “a past” but you can’t hold it responsible forever. It deserves the same consideration we give to any public health problem:
A second chance…
Potatoes and the Promise of More Potatoes 
My husband was raised on a dairy farm and drank raw milk all the time.
Of course that might be why I haven’t seen him drink a single glass in the 41 years we’ve been married.
🥛
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I was talking to my mom, yesterday, and mentioned what I was writing. She told me that I had been drinking raw milk while we lived in Maine (Brunswick). My father had met a dairy farmer and started bringing raw milk home. So… I lived…
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Is it true that Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was under the influence of raw milk when he wrote “What does not kill me makes me stronger”? And was it hard to decipher because he wrote it in a hurry before running to the bathroom?
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I think it was Nietzsche who once said, “If you stare into the milk bottle long enough, eventually it stares into you”… or maybe that was Danny Kaye…
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I am clearly out of touch—or just have reasonable friends, family, and colleagues—I had no idea this was a current trend. Insanity.
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Almost as if they want to rollback any progress, eh?
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Yes, but I doubt they claim that’s the reason.
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