That said, I’m for people being idiots. I’m just done paying for it. If you’re chugging raw milk during a bird flu epidemic and your family gets sick because of it, basic insurance and the public should only pick up the cost after you’ve declared bankruptcy.
Similarly I wish I could enact carveouts so I wasn't supporting peoples health problems related to commenting way too much on the internet, hackernews in particular.
Milk is my main drink. I don't drink beer or wine, it's mostly just plain milk for me. And while there is a substantial taste difference based on the % of fat, I have never seen a difference in taste between pasteurised and non-pasteurised. I actually bought a bottle of raw milk from a farmer just to try it. No negative effects, but it just tasted insipid compared to 5.4% fat milk I can get at the supermarket.
People who claim a taste difference between raw and pasteurised, I'd very much like to see someone taste the difference on the same cow's milk blind, before and after pasteurisation. I just don't think it affects the taste much, and certainly not as much as fat %.
And for people who claim health benefits, I would like to see a double blind study demonstrating those benefits.
I think the main difference is fresh. When I was in high school I stayed with a dairy farmer who brought in a jug of milk from the tank for breakfast after milking the cows. After that I can't drink regular milk.
Pasteurization does affect taste though. Around me there are two different dairies, one does regular pasteurization and one does vat pasteurization and I can tell the difference. There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross. I've never put unpasteurized head to head against equally fresh pasteurized though, and given what I now know I'm not going to.
I love ultra pasteurization. I'm lactose intolerant so I have to drink "lactose free"[1] milk and in Canada such milk is often UHT pasteurized since it has to stay on the store shelf longer (lower inventory turnover). It's amazing that we can, non-chemically, disinfect a dairy product in such a way that it will stay good for months even without refrigeration.
In Mexico I suspect that almost all milk is ultra pasteurized since it's not refrigerated in stores and has wicked-long expiration dates. It's also some of the best-tasting milk I've had so I think that flavour has more to do with some of the other milk processes (like skimming) and the livelihood of the cows rather than with how it's pasteurized.
[1] In practice this is just milk with the lactase enzyme added at some point during production.
I have no doubt that milk that is 15 minutes old tastes great. My question is if that jug of milk was divided in two and one half was pasteurised, would people be able to tell the difference? You're saying yes, I'm saying I'd like to see blind tests of people tasting both.
IF you read close you will see that I didn't say yes. I said that I don't know and am not willing to be part of such a blind test. I will state clearly that all the unpasteurized milk I had was less than an hour old and tasted great, while all the pasteurized milk was unknown age but likely at least a day old and tasted worse. Is it fresh or pasteurization that makes a difference is not something I know.
What the cows eat matters for how milk tastes too. Cows can get sick. Udders can get infections. Milking processes (machinery) and its ease of cleaning can vary. Bacteria is everywhere. Pasteurization is a cheap, effective and has no real drawbacks. This whole raw milk thing is just silly and has become political for some silly reason.
You may be onto something about the different cows. This was while I lived in France temporarily. I had no idea that I was drinking raw milk. I was commenting how delicious it was and a coworker said "oh is that the stuff you have to boil". Me "wut". It was much better than the supermarket milk I could get.
The confounding factor is milk fat. In my experience higher fat milk just tastes better regardless of any other factor and milk straight from the cow will have up to 5% milk fat compared to 3.25% for "whole" milk. Try drinking a shot glass of 10% cream sometime, it's amazing.
And we enjoyed our milkborne tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and septic sore throat thoroughly, too. The risks actually doubled the joys. Why does a supposedly enlightened society step all over my right to choose which eliminated diseases to bring back?
Sickness caused by bacteria doesn't happen as soon as one bad bacteria (bacterium?) enters your body, a certain critical mass is usually required. This is very similar to the concept of "viral load" where a certain amount of viral genetic material needs to be exchanged before the viral infection can take hold.
The "beneficial bacteria" on your skin and in your gut make it harder for bad bacteria to take root in many different ways, one of them simply being they provide competition, "crowding out the bad guys".
Another way is that many, many, many types of antibiotics were originally discovered as metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi (examples include penicillin, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline).
And for completeness sake, milk kefir contains many Lactobacillus species that are also a natural part of the mammal microbiome (which makes sense when you think about it; Lactobacillus are named for consuming lactose, an ingredient of mammal milk).
> Raw milk is delicious, my ancestors have been drinking it for millennia.
Before refrigeration most milk was made into butter, cheese and other products. Unless your ancestors actually herded the animals themselves they probably didn’t drink much raw milk.
