As for the argument that people who want to take the risk should be allowed to drink raw milk, I say yes. If you want to risk your life for milk, be my guest. You aren’t hurting anyone else.

The problem is that people are taking this risk without being fully educated as to the extent of this risk. Also, the people selling the milk are not fully informing their customers as to the extent of this risk.

I agree 100%. And let’s remember that many of these people are probably feeding the raw milk to their children, immunodepressed people, and/or senior citizens, all of them at greater risk in case of foodborne illnesses.
My mother is a bacteriologist, and works in the local Bromatology (=food microbiology) department. For infants and small children, a foodborne illness is not just diarrhea or discomfort – babies DIE. So once again, education is the key, so that people get the message: Do what you want with your body, but don’t endanger others.

It’s like being offered $5 in your hand or a million in a vault you can’t open.

Moot point anyway, since who still boils vegetables? Steamed, roasted, glazed or stir-fried tastes far, far better.

Too many libertarians seem like selfish dicks.

KLiM!!!

There is Lower risk, that I will give you, but No risk? Absolutely not.

Because given the actions of organic food producers to date I can’t see them putting any sort of warning label which accurately states the risk on their products.

“Mark Frauenfelder in reply to thebelgianpanda

And letting your kid skateboard or play football, too.”

No, this is more like you arguing that kids shouldn’t wear helmets in either of those two sports–or seat belts when in cars. Arguing for unpasteurized milk is like arguing for cars not to have seatbelts.

Watch this documentary and then comment again about “how safe and good our food system is”.

Actually, that is rather accurate, because if everybody drove carefully there would be almost no need for seat belts. Just as if dairies kept themselves properly sanitized and milk was handled properfly from cow-to-table, there would be little need for pasteurization.

I have mixed feelings about the delivery bit. I’m lucky because the farmer I buy from is only 5 miles from my house (In NY, you are only allowed to buy on farm). This does make things fairly inaccessible for just about everyone in Metro NY.

As for the risks. My toddler gets the pasteurized stuff. There is a risk no matter how clean the farmer’s operation is. I know well from the bout I had with camphylobacter. When it happened, I got several calls from the state checking in on us. One of the other requirements is that they keep a sales log (including phone numbers). As I see it, NY does a pretty good job of advertising the risks, and also dealing with any outbreaks.

So…why do I keep drinking it if it made me sick? I spent two years with chronic digestive problems. I won’t get into the gory details, but it wasn’t fun. I hated milk at the time. Chevy Chase sums it up well: http://www.break.com/tv-shows/saturday-night-live/milk-626351.html
Anyhow, my digestion was way out of balance, so I decided to try it because of the claims of probiotics. To my surprise, I liked it. Even more surprising, my digestive problems started to ease within 2 weeks. Pasteurized milk still sends me running for the toothpaste. Yup, this is all anecdotal, but it works for me. And to be honest, yogurt would probably be just as good on the probiotic front. I don’t love yogurt, so that’s me.

I completely agree with @Calimecita: “Do what you want with your body, but don’t endanger others.”

It was mostly my job to milk her, and sometimes, maybe because I was hurting her or my hands were cold, she’d lift up her back leg and try to move my hands away. Usually I’d just block her with my forearm, but occasionally she plop her (cowpoop covered) foot into the bucket.

When Ethel put her foot in the bucked, we’d usually drink the milk anyway, because we were a big family without much money. We never got sick.

Now, modern, more crowded, non-pastured cows are much different, and arguably more dangerous, microbiologically speaking, but I still can’t get too excited about an absolute need for pasteurization. However, my family does drink store-bought organic milk.

What matters is that YOU, nor anyone else, has any natural right to prevent them from the food they want.

If they want to eat cow manure, YOU, nor ANYONE ELSE, has the right to prevent them from doing so.

Self-ownership is the most fundamental of human rights.

Let’s be clear what you are calling for when you are calling for raw milk to be made illegal: you are calling for men with guns to go and intimidate the buyers and sellers. If they resist this intimidation, they will be killed or put in a cage.

That’s why it doesn’t matter if his football analogy is off or anything. It doesn’t matter if it has a 90% FATALITY RATE. NOBODY has the right to prevent other people from doing something that they believe is in their best interest.

If you are against raw milk, then find studies showing it’s danger, and peacefully spread them and spread awareness.

The whole issue is – SHOULD SOCIETY BE RUN WITH PEACE OR VIOLENCE. Should decisions be made peacefully by individuals or enforced at the point of a gun? Do we trust people to watch over themselves, or do we give a gun to a completely fallible and human authority to make decisions for them? That is the issue here.

A a side note, I wonder if anyone has recreated this study recently?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_feeding#Pottenger.27s_cats

The state tends to go after the producers after a large number of children get near fatal sickness from it, and their families all have dairy products tracing back to one farm.

Just because they make it to the hospital before its too late, doesn’t mean that there aren’t children that are put in un-necessary harm and illness from drinking it.

You are also far far more likely to be killed by smoking, second hand smoking, lightning, falling out of bed, or taking FDA approved over-the-counter medications. I guess we should ban all of that stuff too, just so Big Brother can give everyone and their ickle-little-brat absolute security?

Admittedly, probably my fault for pushing the envelope and drinking it up to 5 days after purchase, when most recommend no more than 2-3 days. But who has time to go buy milk every 2-3 days? And if you live alone how can you drink a quart in 2-3 days? Who doesn’t feel a sense of remorse pouring half the $8 quart of raw milk down the drain after a few days?

Raw milk makes sense if you live on the farm and drink it out of the teat, but for us city slickers I dunno.

Ah, Mark, I ran your numbers through, and found a few problems with them.

Yes, only 2 people died from Raw Milk related foodborne illness. However, You neglect to mention a few things in relation to that, For example, That of ALL reported dairy related foodborne disease outbreaks between 1973 and 2008, raw milk and cheese were responsible for 82% of those outbreaks.

In just the decade of the two deaths you noted – 1998 to 2008 – you also fail to mention the 86 outbreaks that were related to the consumption of Raw milk or Raw milk products, which resulted in 1,676 illnesses, 191 hospitalizations, and the aforementioned 2 deaths. As a last note, among the 86 raw dairy product outbreaks from 1998 to 2008, 79% involved at least one person less than 20 years old.

Also, this is noting one thing – REPORTED outbreaks. What’s to bet that the actual illness are a larger number?

Also, you linked a blog further up the comment thread that is, well, to put it in the language of the internet, the stupid, it burns. What do you honestly think that linking a very Pro-Raw milk article that’s trying to show that pasturised milk causing foodborne illness is far more prevalent than Raw milk causing foodborne illness among the population is going to prove?
The only thing they’ve proven is their inability to understand statistics – less than one percent of the population drinks raw milk. Of course there is going to be more outbreaks in regular milk in the US, because there is in the order of two or three hundred million more people drinking it.
It’s like saying that more English speaking people in the USA have car accidents than Esperanto speakers in the US do.

http://frenchletters.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/got-raw-milk/

I don’t drink milk so it really makes no difference to me. (I did have a big glass of raw milk last summer.) But think about this: the reason most milk in the US must be pasteurized is because the animals it comes from are sick from their diet of corn and overcrowded living conditions; they have to take antibiotics and are given hormones (which people then consume but that’s another entire discussion). Once pasteurized, the milk contains dead bacteria and other organisms (they’re harmless, but they’re still in the milk); the cows often have mastitis (a bacterial infection of the udder). Those are just a few reasons milk grosses me out. All sorts of things are done to pasteurized milk at “the factory” but really the hormones cows are given is a big deal; remember that rBGH is a growth hormone.

When I look at the world around, I see a class of health authorities that are, in many ways, crazy.

They give strong psychoactive drugs, including amphetamines and drugs linked to suicde, to millions and millions of youths.

They promote a “pill for every ailment,” and generally downplay the crucial role of nutrition.

So, when you say “public health” what you are actually saying is giving these authorities more coercive power over the health decisions of each individual.

The thing is: Every person is already interested in their own health. People have an intrinsic interest in maintaining their own health. In this case, raw milk buyers don’t go to all these lengths out of flight of fancy or culinary desire..they do it FOR HEALTH REASONS. They do it because they want to be healthy! But you propose to stop them, in the name of “public health?!?”

The public should, through the democratic process, decide what subset of the population to give guns to…so that that subset can make decisions for them? What the hell kind of sense does that make?

Here’s a crazy and revolutionary idea: LET THE PUBLIC ITSELF DECIDE WHAT THE PUBLIC HEALTH IS.

I thought America was all about freedom. I guess not.

I live in the rural US and have access to a wide range of milk products. I only use milk for cutting the tannin in my tea and try to get goat milk, which has less fat. Priorities for selecting milk go this way here: Organic > goat > locally raised > low price > no ergosterol (dont get me going on that) > pasteurized. If I was in the city it’d be the other way around. That said, I don’t advocate distributing raw milk or drinking it by the full glass. And you really have to know the farmer to trust anything you stick in your oral hole. I feel sorry for all the kids who have no other source of milk besides cows fed hormones and antibiotics.

Cows milk doesn’t really belong in kids, that is why we have mothers. Now it turns out some mother’s milk is has enough concentrated organochlorines to make it qualify as toxic. So why don’t you science types just waltz on over to the nearest breastfeeding mom and tell her that.

Hence, your body gleans more nutrients from badly boiled, nutritionally-leached vegetables than from raw ones brimming with them.

Although that does appear to be true, I think that it’s probably better described as an accident of fate than as an evolutionary change.