BarfBlog is a blog about food safety and public health. Today, they posted about raw milk. Out here in the boonies, we have a lot of people who are into natural living and if a little bit of natural living works for them, a lot more of natural living will be even better.
At the store, we get people asking about having us sell raw milk. As a (partly)trained biologist, this is a subject that I will not even contemplate. I am always polite but the answer is always: I cannot take the risks and lose the store.
From the excellent BarfBlog:
It’s a math thing: Raw milk is 3 percent of the market but causes over 50 percent of milk foodborne illnesses
Most people would be horrified if they went to a restaurant bathroom and saw the chef not bother to wash his hands after using the toilet. It’s a good thing raw milk fad health buyers do not understand cow milking for the same reason.
A new review finds that consumers are nearly 100 times more likely to get foodborne illness from drinking raw milk than they are from drinking pasteurized milk, which is a lower figure than the Centers for Disease Control, which puts that number at 150X. Though a tiny fraction of milk drinkers risk consuming the raw kind, the raw kind accounts for over 50 percent of milk-related foodborne illness.
Given the results, the scholars from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future join the chorus discouraging participants in the raw milk fad.
The problem is that milk is an insanely great culture medium for any kind of bacteria.
Also, the less the milk is "stepped on", the better it tastes.
There is a great local dairy that uses low-temp batch Pasteurization and they do not homogenize their product - the cream floats to the top of the glass bottle.
Their product shows the work they do - it tastes great. That being said, it is Pasteurized and we gallons of it.
The article has a lot more information - a good read.
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