Raw milk is back in the spotlight

September 2, 2023 by
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Raw milk is getting a lot of attention again due to a plethora of TikTok videos and endorsements by celebrities touting the alleged health benefits of drinking the unpasteurized dairy product. Tom Parker-Bowles recently wrote that raw milk has endured “no pasteurisation, homogenisation or standardisation, meaning it still contains the full complement of vitamins, minerals and natural digestive enzymes, as well as providing the most lusciously creamy mouthful of pure dairy delight; rich, sweet and voluptuously full-bodied.”

Clabbered raw milk from Cultures for Health

Proponents of raw milk say it is a nutritional powerhouse, and claim that it’s a better choice for people who are lactose intolerance or who have autoimmune and allergic conditions. But there lurks a dark side to the beverage. It can harbor harmful bacteria such as listeria, campylobacter, salmonella, and E coli. Every year hundreds of people are sickened by contaminated raw milk. According to the CDC, “Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2 percent of the (U.S.) population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6 percent of the population, caused 96 percent of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products.” They don’t recommend that anyone drink raw milk, especially children and those with compromised immune systems, including the elderly. Advocates say those fears are overblown, the data is flawed due to anti-raw milk bias, and that the percentages of people who fall ill from raw milk are miniscule relevant to the number of those who drink it.

The EYB Library contains about 150 recipes for raw milk products, ranging from yogurt to sorbet to various types of cheese. In some of the recipes the raw milk is cooked, which would render it safe, but most keep the milk in its natural state.

When I was very young, my grandparents milked cows on their small farm, and my grandfather once filled a small tin cup with milk straight from the cow and gave it to me. I tasted it and decided that raw milk wasn’t for me; I preferred the more mildly flavored milk that had been run through the pasteurizer and refrigerated. I wonder if I would now enjoy the more robust flavor of raw milk, but I am not interested enough to seek it out, even though it is available for sale in my state.

Category: Antipasto

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8 Comments

  • FuzzyChef  on  September 3, 2023

    Not inclined to drink it, but I will make cheese from it.

  • Indio32  on  September 3, 2023

    Spent ~8 years living on an organic dairy farm as a child and drunk exclusively unpasteurised milk. Its still possible to buy it relatively easily here in London and its never made me or anyone I know sick.
    I suspect that like chlorination of chicken pasteuration of milk has more to do with big foods propensity to produce food in filthy conditions which are made ‘safe’ by pasteurisation or chlorination.

  • Xyz123  on  September 3, 2023

    It’s funny how the powers that be don’t mention how many people are sickened by food that HAS been approved and inspected by the FDA.

  • lselke  on  September 3, 2023

    Pasteurization saves lives and, like vaccination, is one of the great public health innovations of the 20th century. I’m not ready to give it up by a long shot.

    That said, I have tasted raw milk and it lacks that caramel note that pasteurized milk has (and that I didn’t know wasn’t inherent to all milk until I tasted the raw stuff). I like it — it’s somehow *milkier* and yet milder, to my palate. So I’ll take the risk once in a while.

  • jayw  on  September 3, 2023

    The public health benefits of banning raw milk certainly saved many lives, however there are links between elemination of consumption of raw milk products and the rise of allergies. An unintended health consequence of what appears to be good public health law. There are now anti allergy pills in Europe that contain raw dairy!

  • StokeySue  on  September 6, 2023

    Usually I think of Tom P-B as pretty sensible – but really. As a biochemist who spent years in clinical research most of what he has said about raw milk is just daft to me.

    First, no minerals will be lost during pasteurisation and homogenisation, and not many vitamins, if any. I don’t know what good he thinks digestive enzymes from another species will do for a human, but the answer is quite definitely nothing whatsoever (and the enzymes for digesting milk are formed in the calf’s stomach, not the cow’s udders).

    The idea that raw milk might be good for the immunocompromised is really very scary; raw milk frequently contains dangerous bacteria such as E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter or Brucella, just what you need if you can’t fight off infection.

    Pasteurisation became the normal process mainly because milk was a significant spreader of TB, a disease which is still hard to treat and eradicate, and the move to pasteurised milk was led to a great extent by public health bodies rather than processors – though it does tend to keep longer without souring.

    Because it sours well, raw milk is good for making tasty cheeses, and I do eat raw milk cheese – though I am careful who else I feed them to.

  • JeannetteMenasce  on  September 9, 2023

    I live in South Africa.
    On family farms in the E Cape mountains I drink skimmed raw milk and use whole raw milk when cooking and baking. No after effects in 73 years.

    At Home in Gauteng Province need to drink lactose-free low-fat milk so as not to have diarrhoea.

    I suspect homogenisation has something to do with this

  • popthebubbly  on  September 13, 2023

    Grocery store Pasteurized and Ultra Pasteurized milk is truly a Useless food as far as any real health benefits. It might as well be in the same category as “Process Foods” which is what it really is.

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