Raw milk. Sounds gross, doesn’t it? And a little scary.
I’ll admit that we were very unsure about trying it. After doing the research, we decided to give it a go. We had to get on a waiting list, and our name came up sooner than we thought.
We bought our first gallon and brought it home. We shook it up to incorporate the cream into the milk and then poured a couple small glasses.
Matt being the brave guy out of the two of us, willingly sacrificed himself and took the first sip.
I watched to see his reaction and then waited to see if he’d keel over.
He said it was good (and he wasn’t doubled over in pain or running to the bathroom or vomiting uncontrollably) so I tried it.
And we’ve been drinking about a gallon a week ever since.
It’s been over two years now and we have no
intention of going back. We get asked quite a bit why we drink it, so I’m
taking the time to document some of what I’ve found that’s contributed to our decision
to go raw.
Disclaimer
Keep in mind that not all raw milk would be good to drink. If
the milk were raw from a conventional dairy where the cows are confined and fed
mostly grain, it could be pretty deadly because the treatment of the cow and
the conditions it lives in require the milk to be pasteurized before it’s safe.
But, if the milk is raw from cows that are cared for and eat
grass, it’s a very healthy option. That’s the kind of raw milk I’m talking
about from here on out. Not just raw milk in general.
Benefits of Raw vs. Pasteurized Milk
These are a few of the benefits of raw milk vs. pasteurized
milk (taken from Real Food: What to Eat
and Why by Nina Planck):
*Raw milk contains heat-sensitive
folic acid and vitamins A, B6, and C.
*Raw milk contains important
heat-sensitive enzymes: lactase to digest lactose; lipase to digest milk fats;
phosphatase to absorb calcium, which, in turn, allows for the digestion of
lactose.
*Raw milk has beneficial bacteria,
including lactic acids, which live in the intestines, aid digestion, boost
immunity, and eliminate dangerous bacteria.
*Raw cream contains a cortisonelike
agent (the Wulzen factor), which combats arthritis, arteriosclerosis, and
cataracts.
*Raw butter contains myristoleic
acid, which fights pancreatic cancer and arthritis.
*Pasteurization creates oxidized
cholesterol, alters milk proteins, and damages omega-3 fats.
“Over the past fifty years, people
in developed countries began showing up in doctors’ offices with autoimmune
disorders in far greater numbers. In many places, the rates of such conditions
as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease have doubled and
even tripled. Almost half the people living in First World nations now suffer
from allergies. It turns out that people who grow up on farms are much less
likely to have these problems. Perhaps, scientists hypothesized, we’ve become
too clean and aren’t being exposed to the bacteria we need to prime our immune
systems.
“What we pour over our cereal has
become the physical analogue of this larger ideological struggle over microbial
security. The very thing that makes raw milk dangerous, its dirtiness, may make
people healthier, and pasteurization could be cleansing beneficial bacteria
from milk.”
So raw milk from grass-fed cows has more nutrition and beneficial bacteria.
And less pus.
Because the dairy industry can pasteurize the milk, it can
get away with cows having infections and unsanitary conditions because all the
stuff that could hurt people is killed off in the process.
But the gross stuff is still there.
So maybe it’s more nutritious and less gross, but is raw
milk safe?
Safety of Raw Milk
One of the major objections to raw milk is that it will make
you sick and kill you.
We had to sign waivers in order to get our milk saying
that we know we are going against government recommendations at our own risk. (Who
needs skydiving if you’re drinking raw milk? We risk our lives to the degree of
needing a waiver every.single.day...until we run out of milk for the week.)
However, we got to thinking. How unsafe could it be when
people drank raw milk for thousands of years and survived? If milk needed to be
pasteurized to be safe, wouldn’t God have made it come out that way?
Pull up a chair and get comfy for this one. It’s a story on how
pasteurization and homogenization came to be. Quotes are taken from Real
Food: What to Eat and Why.
Once upon a time, milk in the U.S. came from a family cow or
a local dairy. But as cities grew, urban dairies began popping up.
“Owners put the dairies next
to whiskey distilleries to feed the confined cows a cheap diet of spent mash
called distillery slop. For distribution, the whiskey dairies were efficient:
in 1852, three quarters of the milk drunk by the seven hundred thousand
residents of New York City came from the distillery dairies. The last one in
New York City (in Brooklyn) closed in 1930.
“The quality of ‘slop milk,’ as it was known, was so poor it could not even be made into butter or cheese.
Some unscrupulous distillery dairy owners added burned sugar, molasses, chalk,
starch, or flour to give body to the thin milk, while others diluted it with
water to make more money. Slop milk was inferior because animal nutrition was
poor; cows need grass and hay, not warm whisky mash, which is too acidic for
the ruminant belly.
“As distillery dairies became
common around 1815, contaminated milk caused fatal outbreaks of diseases
including infant diarrhea, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, and undulant
fever (the human version of brucellosis). Infant mortality, often due to
diarrhea and tuberculosis, rose sharply, accounting for nearly half of all
deaths in New York City in 1839. Reformers blamed the outbreaks of disease on
slop milk.
“Reformers suggested
pasteurization to kill pathogens carried in milk. At first, no one suggested
that raw milk itself was unsafe, according to Ron Schmid in The Untold Story of Milk — merely that
milk should be clean. ‘Demands for pasteurization allowed for the continued
production and sale of clean raw milk,’ writes Schmid, a naturopathic
physician. ‘No one was claiming that all milk should be pasteurized, as even
the most zealous proponents of pasteurization recognized that carefully
produced raw milk from healthy animals was safe.’
“This view prevailed, briefly.
When a raw milk ban was proposed in New York City in 1907, a coalition of
doctors, social workers, and milk distributors defeated it, arguing that safe
milk should be guaranteed by inspections, not pasteurization. In 1908, however,
a panel of experts appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt concluded that raw
milk itself was to blame for food-borne illness. That was the final blow. In
1914, New York required pasteurization of milk for sale in shops. Other states
followed suit, and by 1949, pasteurization was the law in most places.”
So now that pasteurization was standard, a few new obstacles
presented themselves, leading to the need for homogenization.
“In the Unites States,
homogenization became common soon after pasteurization, largely because it
solved two practical problems for the dairy industry. The first was the
inconvenient separation of the milk and cream. With pasteurization it was
possible to ship milk long distances, but the cream rose in transit, which
meant the most valuable part of the milk — the fat — was unevenly distributed
from one customer to another. Homogenization spreads the cream throughout the
milk, so everyone gets a hare. The second problem was cosmetic. After
pasteurization, dead white blood cells and bacteria form a sludge that sinks to
the bottom of the milk. Homogenization spreads this unsightly mass throughout
the milk and makes it disappear.”
So convenience and profit produced bad cows that produced bad
milk that made pasteurization necessary.
Then fear made it widespread.
Then homogenization came into play to cover up the bad
effects of pasteurization.
Doesn’t that seem like a lot more trouble to go to than to
just go back to feeding cows some grass?
And what about the other food-borne outbreaks like spinach
and peanut butter and ground beef? Supposedly those are happening under the
watchful eye of the government that says raw milk is unsafe. Confused? I am.
Granted, things might get past people once in a while and
there are occasionally outbreaks from raw milk, but according to
this article,
it’s way fewer than those that occur with pasteurized milk.
Here’s another excerpt from
the article in
Harper’s Magazine that investigated a raw dairy farm that had been
accused of E. coli contamination:
“The illnesses didn’t stop raw-milk
sales. Even as the state ordered store managers to destroy the milk on their
shelves, customers rushed in to buy whatever they could. Several Organic
Pastures customers said regulators had simply pinned unrelated illnesses on the
milk. They pointed out that siblings and friends of the sick children had drunk
the same milk from the same bottles and didn’t get so much as diarrhea. Tests
for E. coli in one of the milk bottles in question had also turned up negative.
“Lab results had found the exact
same sub-strain of E. coli O157:H7 in almost all of the children who fell ill
after drinking unpasteurized dairy. Yet McAfee remained unfazed. How did it
help to show that the bacteria from each patient matched, he asked, when one
patient, an eighteen-year-old in Nevada City, claimed he hadn’t drunk the milk?
The disease trackers I talked to explained this by saying that sometimes germs
move indirectly. Someone else in the family spills a little milk. You wipe it
up. Then you wipe your mouth. But there was another theory I’d been hearing
from scientists working to explain why O157:H7 had burst onto the scene in the
1980s with such virulence. Maybe, they said, it wasn’t that the bacteria had
changed but that we had changed. In Brazil outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 are
unheard of, though the bacteria exist there. A pair of recent studies show that
Brazilian women have antibodies protecting them against O157:H7 and that they
pass these antibodies to their children through the placenta and their breast
milk. I found this interesting, especially in light of the fact that in every
case I learned about, the victims of the Organic Pastures outbreak had just
started drinking McAfee’s milk. Perhaps those who had been drinking the milk
longer had developed the antibodies.
“It’s an old story,’ McAfee said. ‘You see it again and again in the lists of outbreaks. City kids went to the
country, drank raw milk, and got sick; country kids didn’t get sick.’ But, I pointed
out, this explanation still implicates Organic Pastures. McAfee shook his head. ‘Look, if I made four kids sick, I made four kids sick. But show me the 50,000
kids I made healthy. We don’t guarantee zero risk. We aren’t worried about the
.001 percent chance that someone will get sick; we are worried about the 99
percent assurance that you are going to get sick if you eat a totally sterile,
anonymous, homogenous diet.’
“The problem for McAfee is that the
.001 percent is shocking and visible. A dying child will make people change
their behavior. The diseases that might stem from a lack of bacteria are much
more subtle. They come on slowly. It’s difficult to link cause and effect.
Businesses that contribute to chronic disease often flourish while businesses
that contribute to acute disease get shut down. McAfee, now clearly incensed,
dismissed this line of reasoning. “If my milk gets someone sick, I deserve some
blame, but not all of it. People have to take responsibility for maintaining
their own immune systems. And we have to look at an environmental level too.
Where did these germs come from? E. coli O157:H7 evolved in grain-fed cattle.
It’s amazing to me that we’ve sat by as factory farmers feed more than half the
antibiotics in the country to animals and breed these antibiotic-resistant
bacteria at the same time the food corporations are destroying our immune
systems. I believe our forefathers would have grabbed their muskets and gone
and shot someone over this. They would have had a tea party over this.”
So there are the health benefits to grass-fed raw milk. Add
to those the fact that pasteurization and homogenization happened as what seem
to be complicated means to righting a wrong as opposed to necessary for safety.
And then throw in that pasteurization may even
harm us by eliminating good bacteria and impairing our immune systems.
In our minds, that was 3 in the raw milk column, 0 in the
pasteurized column.
Raw Milk Works Harder
One final reason we love raw milk is its versatility. We didn’t know about this until after we
began drinking it, but whereas pasteurized milk goes rancid, raw milk goes
sour. And when it does, you can still use it to make butter, cream cheese,
yogurt and a host of other dairy products, which we’ve experimented with. So it
seems you get more for your money all the way around.
Raw milk just makes sense to us, given all the above
information and the fact that ultimately, we trust God’s design. Assuming men
are being good, diligent stewards of His design, it seems to be perfectly safe.
And that, my friends, in a very big nutshell, is why we
drink raw milk.
