Who knew we could find unity in the cause of killing children? Right-wing loonies and left-wing moonbats have been working together to erode food safety and loosening milk pasteurization laws and allowing ideological weirdness to be poured down the throats of innocent children. But at least it’s bipartisan!
The contentious belief that raw milk may be healthier than pasteurized is a bipartisan one, however, it has captured the imagination of, as the Atlantic put it in a 2014 story, “urbanite foodies (read: progressives).” That same year, Joel Salatin, which the publication referred to as a “food and farm freedom celebrity,” told Politico that it was nice to have some liberals join the fight for the mainstreaming of raw milk.
“When I give speeches now,” he said. “The room is half full of libertarians and half full of very liberal Democrats. The bridge is food.”
You know, we actually have data. We know that childhood mortality was greatly reduced when we required that milk be pasteurized. It’s a simple and relatively easy parameter to measure: when you require pasteurization vs. allow raw milk to be sold, how many dead kids do you stack up in each category? We know the numbers.
The CDC would want us to remind you here that, yes, you are allowed to take risks in private, but raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk.
When we were raising kids, we made the decision to exclude Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria from their diet as much as possible. It wasn’t just the cost and trouble of paying for funerals, but the nuisance of infants with diarrhea. Trust me, it’s no fun for anyone.
If you’d like to see an entertaining discussion of the thrills of raw milk, Talia Lavin has you covered.
Pasteurization changed the dairy game. By 1911, Chicago and New York had mandated milk pasteurization in commercial operations, with other major cities quickly following suit; by 1936, 98% of milk in the United States was pasteurized. This coincided with lots of other medical discoveries and improvements in public hygiene, but the milk-pasteurization push had particularly drastic effects: between 1890 and 1915, infant mortality dropped by more than half. By midcentury, babies drinking swill milk and dying of diarrhea was largely a thing of the past. Most people would agree that this is, generally, a good thing. I personally drink milk daily with my coffee; I am glad it doesn’t come with a side of typhoid.
I said that this movement was bipartisan, but now it’s fueled by a lot of right-wing “own the libs” influencers and nutcases.
It’s just that the contemporary opponents of pasteurization—the “raw milk” movement, as they call themselves—are so fucking dumb, and so knee-jerk about it. The movement is endorsed by such disparate grifters as Gwyneth Paltrow; RFK Jr.’s erstwhile running mate, Nicole Shanahan; Christian TikTokers; the existentially stifled Mormon tradwife that is the wanly smiling face of Ballerina Farm. The overwhelming number of recent raw-milk converts—and its loudest current evangelists—are on the far right: over in the raw milk aisle you’ll find an assortment of right-wing Fitness Guys with steroidal vasculation filming themselves chugging raw milk, alongside Alex Jones, QAnon influencers, the CEO of racist Twitter clone Gab, and a motley assortment of also-ran far-right Congressional candidates, plus organizations like the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance.
Now normally I might be willing to shrug off this suicidal insanity — let the kooks voluntarily weed themselves out of the population by swilling contaminated food — except that the primary victims of this lunatic movement are kids who have no idea of the risks, and who are simply expressing a natural trust in what Mommy and Daddy tell them. The problems arise when Mommy and Daddy are named Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones. That’s who the food safety laws are aimed at.
This is the latest raw milk disease outbreak. It happened this summer.
As PZ notes most of the victims are young children. With a median age of 7, very young children at that.
The US averages around 12 raw milk originated disease outbreaks a year.
In the village I grew up it wasn’t that long ago that everyone got their milk directly from the farm. Many of the older people didn’t see a problem with raw milk. My paternal grandmother got her milk from the farm next door when I was a kid. I quite enjoyed the taste of the fresh milk and loved visiting the cows when I went to fetch the milk with grandma.
It was common knowledge that you never gave unboiled milk to a toddler.
Childish contrarianism. They’d get hospitalized for dehydration before they’d heed your advice to take a drink of water.
I’ve had raw milk also; decades ago, my aunt and uncle had a small dairy herd (most milk sold and pasteurized but a small amount diverted for household consumption). I would be very wary about raw milk now.
As a cautionary tale in 1903 Stanford University and Palo Alto were hit with a typhoid epidemic due to contaminated milk from a local dairy. 120 students took ill and 9 died.
Many stories in the news over the years about foodborne illnesses. Lunchmeats, fast food operation packaged foods and fresh meats, but I don’t recall one instance of milk being involved in any illnesses.
Of course, the “rich” likely have the best doctors, or even possibly access to some drug that we have never heard of, which can kill the freaking stuff that is poisoning their kids over a few hours, but requires 4 injections over 24 hours, each one costing $10,000 dollars (but which actually only costs 32 cents to make), or something… And, yeah, that crap does in fact happen. For example, their is a drug called Sovaldi. It medicine under patent, they charge $1,000 a pill, and can not just suppress, but cure Hepatitis C in 14 weeks. The total cost of treatment is $84,000. Other methods do not attack the disease, just suppress its symptoms, and you just hope it goes dormant. What does it actually cost to make the pills? 83 cents per pill.
This is the BS you get from allowing companies to funnel 30% of the money they take into to TV ads, similarly stupid amounts to executive salaries, and “investor” payouts, and, and only 17% into R&D, then using this as an excuse to make a pill that is less than a dollar to make into one that costs $1,000.
BTW, you can also, apparently, make the dreaded (to conservatives) misoprostol for about 89 cents per pill (they normally charge $160). I knew the industry was insanely corrupt, but this article…. holy frack!!!
https://www.404media.co/right-to-repair-for-your-body-the-rise-of-diy-pirated-medicine/
So, yeah, wouldn’t put it past the industry to also have something you could literally swallow before drinking raw milk, but which no one but the rich idiots know anything at all about, and no normal victim of food poisoning can ever afford, which would protect you from it, or cure you overnight. Nor would I put it past them to a) not mention this existing, or b) assuming everyone can somehow magically get their hands on it.
My grandfather was head gardener and junior partner at a tuberculosis sanatorium. The only significant sources of the tuberculosis were unpasteurised milk, and people who had themselves acquired it directly or indirectly from unpasteurised milk. Antibiotics provided a far more effective treatment for the disease, but it was pasteurisation that made it a rare one in the UK. The sanatorium is now a private psychiatric hospital.
Perhaps they’re thinking…”Well, we have too many people, and you can kill more kids with raw milk than guns. Plus it’s less messy, and easier to hide from the general public.”
When I was a kid in the 50s, I would stay with grandparents who had milk cows, so raw milk was what they had. I didn’t like it mostly because the butter fat floating around. I liked the butter that my grandfather whipped up from it and I liked milk, but the little globs of fat put me off. So it wasn’t pasteurization that I favored in “store bought” milk, but homogenization.
At this point in my ancient life, I don’t drink cows milk of any kind and I rarely have butter.
stuffin @ 5
Well that settles it then.
Which means you didn’t read the first comment, written by me.
About the latest raw milk sourced disease outbreak a month ago.
The headline was “More than 165 infected with Salmonella in raw milk outbreak”
If you are having trouble, find someone to read it to you.
“From 2009 through 2021, unpasteurized raw milk was associated with 143 outbreaks.”
Raw milk is the cause of an average of 12 food borne disease outbreaks a year in the USA.
There is also a similar strain of people who believe the best cat and dog food is made out of raw meat, despite warnings from veterinarians about Salmonella.
stuffin @5, you missed the rather-recent news story about, when the state legislature of West Virginia legalized raw milk, the legislators celebrated the bill’s passing by all drinking some raw milk directly after the session.
Then, about a half-hour later, all of them went down with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and faintness. Karma!
Also, from the people who only consume raw water (a Silicon Valley craze), I suppose that you can’t expect much.
“Two waves of antimicrobial-resistant Salmonella typhimurium infections in Illinois totaling over 16 000 culture-confirmed cases were traced to two brands of pasteurized 2% milk produced by a single dairy plant. Salmonellosis was associated with taking antimicrobials before onset of illness. Two surveys to determine the number of persons who were actually affected yielded estimates of 168,791 and 197,581 persons, making this the largest outbreak of salmonellosis ever identified in the United States. The epidemic strain was easily identified because it had a rare antimicrobial resistance pattern and a highly unusual plasmid profile; study of stored isolates showed it had caused clusters of salmonellosis during the previous ten months that may have been related to the same plant, suggesting that the strain had persisted in the plant and repeatedly contaminated milk after pasteurization.“
But it’s safe…
Raw milk plus anti-vaxx? The US will head back to infant (and adult) mortality rates not seen since the 18th century. What on earth has gone wrong with your country PZ?
@14 It’s not just the US. There are plenty of raw milk advocates here in Australia. They skirt around the pasteurization laws by selling raw milk as bath milk, with a nudge – nudge, wink – wink, ‘you can do what ever you want to with it’ sales pitch.
I grew up on a farm. We usually had unpasteurised milk straight from the cows, but with a tiny family farm with just a few cows the risk one of them carrying disease was minimal.
Today you need a lot of animals to break even. Mixing their milk makes it absolutely necessary to pasteurise it.
Garnetstar @ 13
If I am to pay extra for water, it needs to contain anti-ageing nanites or DNA that will turn me into some weird Japanese shape-shifter.
Nomdeplume @ 14
A reminder to Americans: check if your skills are sought after in the labor market of the Scandinavian countries.
When the crazy becomes intolerable you need a bug-out option and a valid visa.
…and this is how I think of this new age alt medicine BS
‘Stuck in a dubbed anime (extended)’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=m00u9roZrr8
Kagehi–
Not defending drug company pricing manipulations, but manufacturing cost is not a meaningful indicator.
stuffin@5–
It may not make headlines, but it’s common. From 2013-2018 in the US, unpasteurised milk caused 75 disease outbreaks affecting 675 people. Completely unsurprising: the risk was much higher in states that allowed the sale of unpasteurised milk, and nearly half the cases were children.
Raw milk also isn’t homogenized so it has to be shaken like a vinaigrette dressing whenever you want to pour some. So it’s both inconvenient and dangerous.
The health benefits of raw milk seem very dubious, but I love the taste of raw milk cheeses in France. Some of them have pasteurized versions, eg camembert, which can be sold in the USA. But the tastiest ones don’t and I haven’t found anything approaching those flavors here. I always look forward to some Reblochon when I visit.
That said, I just googled “Reblochon contaminé” (contaminated reblochon), and I do see quite a few stories about illnesses and deaths tied to that specific cheese. And “In France over the last decade, 34%, 37% and 60% of outbreaks of salmonellosis, listeriosis and enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) infections respectively have been linked to the consumption of raw-milk cheeses. ” Hmm… I might still risk it but the “official designation” camembert is not for kids.
Walter Solomon@22: in Canada, homogenized milk is sold as “homo milk” — and I always wondered if that helped us normalize gay marriage about 15-20 years faster than in the US.
About the supposed health benefits I cannot say, in part because along with pasteurization, most commercial milk undergoes other processes, and probably also comes from cows that are inbred output monsters fed on who knows what. I’ve never really been sure how pasteurizing alone affects milk, because I’ve never had pasteurized milk that was not also processed in other ways.
I will say that when I was a kid, we had a local dairy that produced (and delivered) raw, untreated pure Guernsey milk, and when I moved to that town at the age of 7, I went from a reluctant milk tolerance to loving the stuff. Not only did it taste better but it came in bottles, when at the time (1955) most supermarket milk came in waxed cartons that often shed wax. It was a whole different thing from what you get at the market, and I’ve never liked milk since. Sometimes my dad would siphon off some of the abundant cream to use on his cereal, and sometimes my mom would do so and make butter. I mean in this case not just a little better, but an entirely different beverage.
But that farmer ran a true model farm. He was not some anti-science hippie, but a serious dairyman as well as a pilla4 of the community, who had his cows regularly and rigorously tested (bangs and tuberculin as I recall), and made sure his facility was clean. It was a small farm in which I’m sure every one of those grass-fed, free-range cows was known by name. He chose where they would graze,so that they would get the right mix of stuff, closing off the fields where apple trees dropped in fall so that the milk wouldn’t taste of green apples, that sort of thing. That was also a very long time ago. The farmer in question died in the 1970’s, and his successors were unable to sustain the operation, and it closed a few years later. Like the flower-fed buffaloes of spring, the flower-fed cows of childhood left us long ago.
I am forever glad I had that experience for a few years, but I’d never recommend raw milk now to anyone. Things have changed. When I was kid we ate plenty of raw hamburger too. The local butcher hand selected his half a steer, and when we ordered hamburger we got ground chuck: he’d take a piece of meat, and run it through the grinder as we watched. You could eat it raw without ever worrying. Never again. I wouldn’t recommend raw hamburger now to anyone unless I wished them ill.
I don’t know how the right-left politics of all this comes out, but I think whoever advocates raw milk and the like these days is likely unrealistically pining for a world that no longer exists, or at least no longer exists for the bulk of humanity. The poorest probably still get raw milk that’s unsafe or at least untested, and a few of the luckiest get raw milk that is safe, but the rest of us, if we still drink milk at all, had better go to the supermarket and get it there. Being old enough and well do do enough, I do like to shop for organic and small-farm goodies at the local market, and enjoy the results, but realistically I know that this is an exercise of privilege, and that the real challenge and real task, is to feed the whole world with food that is decently clean and decently safe.
Final hint, though: though I stopped drinking milk almost entirely as an adult, when I had kids I bought a lot of it. The various brands at the supermarket, even though priced the same and apparently the same, may not be. Here in Vermont, back some years ago, there were several different dairies, and their milk tasted quite different. I don’t think either of the local ones I used is running any more, but one was markedly better than the other. So if you’re lamenting the lousy taste of today’s market milk, check out alternate brands. You might find one that’s better.
There is a nutritional difference in milk after it has been homogenized and pasteurized, which is why it is routinely fortified with Vitamin A to replace the vitamin A content that is removed with the butterfat.
It is also fortified with Vitamin D, because it was discovered back in the 1930’s that fortifying milk was an excellent way to eradicate rickets and other childhood skeletal deformities caused by inadequate nutrition.
numerobis @24
Interesting theory. You can argue any member of Homo sapiens who’s truly sapient would support same-sex marriage.
REgarding #26, while there may well be a nutritional difference, I don’t think pasteurization by itself is the culprit. Milk is routinely homogenized before it’s pasteurized, but I don’t think it needs to be. I doubt it’s the culprit in the removal of butterfat, since when you pasteurize cream and butter there’s still something left at the end.
@Matthew Curie
The vitamin A that naturally occurs in milk is in the butterfat. That fat is skimmed off to make butter, cream, etc…and Vitamin A is routinely added back into milk to correct the deficiency. Whole milk is 3% fat, and then there is 2%, 1%, and skim.
Homogenized milk doesn’t separate, otherwise the cream portion would float on top. Pasteurization kills any bacteria that can live in milk.
I’m with mordred, ealloc and Matthew Currie on this one. Raw milk is delicious and does taste quite a bit better than the pasteurized milk you get in the grocery stores but it comes with a laundry list of caveats.
I am old enough to remember getting milk deliveries (in glass bottles no less) where the delivery person would drop off a gallon or two in the morning into a milk box (usually a metal box by the door) and you’d retrieve it in minutes and put it in the refrigerator. I also remember drinking certified raw milk when I was a preschooler in California. The milk (and cows) were tested daily for a variety of pathogens; any failed test meant that the entire dairy in question couldn’t sell raw milk for a specified period of time (usually several weeks) and had to pass inspection before selling raw milk. As an adult, I also really love the taste of raw milk cheeses but only choose the hard aged varieties–the age and the hardness of the cheeses generally means that listeria and the like can’t survive the cheesemaking and aging process, so it is generally considered safer than the soft cheese.
That said, I am floored by what is considered acceptable for raw milk sales. Bring your own container? WTF?! There is no way that anyone should be transporting raw milk in anything other than a recently sterilized container. You are just asking for trouble with BYOC. And frankly, raw milk should not be transported for more than a half hour, IMO, just for the health risks alone.
I used to take care of a (small, boutique teaching farm) as a teenager for some neighbors when they went on vacation; one of the fringe benefits was getting to keep and use all the milk from their one milch cow. The cow grazed on the lawn (and the vegetable garden when she broke out of her pasture–the farm owners were penning her in with goddamn chicken wire, so if she got bored, she would wander; it was infuriating dealing with it) so her living conditions were about as clean as you could hope for but there is no way you could replicate those conditions at scale. I drank the milk and cooked with it but I also used a sterile portable milking machine, stored it in sterile containers and immediately froze the milk for future use. Never got sick but we are also talking about a lot of effort and freezing within 15 minutes of milking. You can’t really replicate those conditions commercially, not at a large scale. And I would never dream of drinking raw pooled milk, that way lies madness and listeria.
Cooking and cheesemaking with raw milk also gives a far superior (IMO) than pasteurized milk; I learned how to make mozzarella and ricotta from scratch; if you use commercial pasteurized milk, you have put in a lot of chemical additives to get the cheese curds to form, which is not the case with raw milk. Freshly made mozzarella has a taste and texture completely unlike the rubbery blob wrapped in plastic that you get in the supermarket but it is a crazy amount of work to DIY.
That said, while pasteurization on the whole is a public and medical good, it unquestionably has a darker side.
From Talia Lavin’s article:
Animal cruelty like tail docking and CAFO dairy farms would not be possible without pasteurization. Pasteurization, along with grotesque amounts of prophylactic antibiotics, allows you to keep cows in horrific unsanitary conditions, feed them garbage feed, keep them penned in in their own feces and still have milk that is legally salable. You can’t do that with a raw milk dairy; you’d be out of business in a few months.
@ 25, 26 Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin (like Vitamin D and E). If you remove the fat, you remove the fat-soluble vitamins. Also, while pasteurization does kill off pathogens, it also destroys some of the vitamins–the amine portion of the vitamin is heat-sensitive, just as the proteins in the pathogens are heat-sensitive. Pasteurization is basically denaturing heat-sensitive proteins, which is why vitamins have to be added back into the milk after pasteurization.
Homogenization is just milk being forced through a micro-mesh to prevent the milkfat from congealing together. It’s kind of like pureeing or ricing the milk.
Milk flavor is also really dependent on what the cows are eating, which is why spring milk and butter tends to be yellower than summer or fall milk; the spring grass/pasturage has a higher content of carotene, which causes the yellow color. Assuming that your milk cows are grazing on pasture and not being fed commercial feed in a CAFO.
@7 Why were most of the sanatorium patients acquiring tuberculosis from milk? The most common way to get tuberculosis is through respiratory aerosols. Which, if the farmer or farmhand milking the cows has tuberculosis, would explain how it got into the milk. But a sick food worker could have just as easily contaminated the milk after pasteurization.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441916/
More than 100 years after The Jungle was published, the US still has the majority of food workers as low paid employees generally without paid sick leave or benefits. You would have thought the US would have learned by now that forcing sick food workers to work while sick just makes everybody else sick too but the US loves money more than it loves good health.
From Talia Lanvin’s article
While I have no doubt that pasteurization did its part to reduce pathogen transmission, the real game changer for diphtheria was vaccination. A thing that the militant anti-science, antivaxxer dimwits also oppose.
https://www.cdc.gov/pinkbook/hcp/table-of-contents/chapter-7-diphtheria.html#:~:text=A%20more%20rapid%20decrease%20began,less%20than%201%20per%20year.
Beware of any organization with ‘Freedom’ in their name because typically freedom is a thing they endorse the least.
@silvrhalide,
What additives other then rennet and an acid did you need for your pasteurized mozzarella? I’ve made it maybe a dozen times from supermarket milk, and that’s all that was required. Unless you were using UHT milk, or maybe they pasteurize differently in your country (I’m in Canada).
UHT is kind of the norm in US supermarkets. I used a rennet powder and I think calcium chloride? I’d have to look it up, but I do remember when I took the class, the instructor did mention that you needed additional chemicals because of the UHT pasteurization. It’s been years since I’ve done it, I just don’t have the time anymore, unfortunately. Wish I did. BTW, it affects making homemade yogurt too, if you use the UHT pasteurized milk. (My Italian neighbor taught me how to make it, it’s actually a lot easier and faster than mozzarella but cleanliness is still next to godliness if you are going to make either one.) With UHT milk, if you don’t use additional additives, you just kind of wind up with a grainy souplike mess, you never get the elasticity and congealing.
I’ve been buying ultra-pasteurized milk since I discovered it on the supermarket shelf. Higher temperature for a longer time. Shelf life measured in months instead of days.
I’m sure the extra processing removes more of the nutrition, but since I’m not a calf or a baby I don’t get any significant portion of my nutrition from milk.