It’s the worlds smallest violin, and it’s playing My Heart Bleeds for You.
In Oregon, the food safety laws have said, for quite a long time now, that if you want to drink unpasteurised milk, you need to have your own dairy herd. This terrible misuse of government police powers (Men! With guns! Forcing you to BOIL YOUR MILK!) for no reason other than to protect people against E. Coli, Listeria, and Salmonella, has enraged a large community of raw milk drinkers who feel that the government should not prohibit them from feeding pathogens to their children.
A while back (a year ago? Two?) some enterprising raw milk dairies thought they'd found a way around the oppressive state regulations by shipping raw milk into the state, but labelling it "DOG OR CAT FOOD ONLY" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink! know what I mean?) This happy state of affairs went on for some time, with the (wink!) pet food being shipped into the state in large (large for this sort of wifty cult food) quantities, until a dozen unenlightened people had the temerity to come down with E. Coli poisoning, at which point the evil state said "oh, and the ban on raw milk? It applies to pet food too. Take it off the shelves and don't sell it here."
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth followed, as many people realized that they their pets would have to maintain their own dairy herds to keep drinking the raw milk.
Today, one of the raw milk dairies got into the act, writing an impassioned letter to the Portland Clackamas Tribune about how mean the state of Oregon was being to all of those poor people who would not drink that horrible pasteurized milk, and how the milk is perfectly safe and if people drink pasteurized milk, well, it's because the mean government is trying to destroy their immune systems.
The letter talks about people. Not cats. Not dogs. people. 12 column inches of indignant letter, and what it comes down to is that this dairy is indignant because the government is not turning a blind eye to their deliberate lawbreaking. Poor babies.
Comments
Raw milk does definitely taste better, though I think that’s got something to do with not having been homogenized more than not having been pasteurized.
Dairy farmers tend to be clean freaks; five thousand litre milk tanks full of Mutant Yogurt are expensive, never mind biblically disgusting. But once you ship the stuff, even with refrigeration, you’ve got about fifteen unrefrigerated minutes or contact with one unsterilized anything before the risk gets stupid.
(Of course, that’s based on Ontario, land of the milk quota and regular inspections and many, many food safety rules for producers.)
The goat, well. It’s not enough to have the goat; you also have to be able to milk the goat. Sometimes that involves getting the goat out of a tree.
You really haven’t researched raw milk or the pasteurization process, have you? It’s strange that when people have the temerity to contract E. Coli from pasteurized milk, no one bats an eye. Why is that? It happens much more frequently than you seem to know.
Amagad! It looks like the blog from gattaca or dunno some futuristic, grown in a bottle society.
There are people somewhere that have the guts to drink milk that is not additivated, filled with e-s and somehow distilled, then has his fats added to it etc. And instead they chose to drink natural milk. And that is illegal. Ok I now officially think that if you took off the safety labels off everything - US will be depopulated in a matter of days.
I’ve had unpasteurised milk. It’s yummy (though that may because fresh-from-the-cow milk has a spectacularly high butterfat content.) But I drank this milk when I was at the dairy farm where that milk came from (my grandfather-in-law’s [now demised, alas] dairy farm in North Carolina), and I knew that the milk had been out of the cow no more than 24 hours, had been properly handled, and hadn’t been shipped any further than across the barnyard.
I could trust this milk because it was fresh milk, it was being consumed on the premises where it was produced, and because the farmer was a member of my family.
I don’t extend this level of trust to merchants, PARTICULARLY when the milk is shipped in from other states. If people weren’t getting sick from drinking raw milk, Louis Pasteur would never have needed to develop his process.
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If you really want to drink raw milk all you need to do is get a goat.