I have no problem with that. But I presume that you lived on a farm and drank the raw milk that came from your own cows – yes? So you had control over how clean you kept your cows, how much you washed and sanitized the udders before milking them, you could observe first hand if a cow looked or was acting sick and could isolate that cow and choose not to milk it? And that’s what any responsible dairy farmer should do whether they are pasteurizing their milk or selling it raw.
The problem as I see it is that “raw milk” just like the “organic” and “sustainable” or the “whole foods” trend: is just that, a food trend, a fad. And with its increasing popularity, there comes a good many inexperienced and in some cases not so ethical farmers who are looking to cash in by selling raw milk to the greenies and foodies who think that it must be more “natural” and “healthier” and can charge the gullible a hefty premium for it. Let the buyer be ware.
The truth is that pasteurized milk is just as “healthy” as raw milk but without the risks of getting Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria.
But heck, if anyone wants to drink raw milk, by all means be my guest. I’m not all for criminalizing its sale or consumption, but with the facts on my side, I’ll pass on the raw milk, thank you. The “alleged” and rather dubious claims of the health benefits of raw milk do not outweigh the very real risks.
I would also add that the “good ole days” were not all that good in many cases. Just walk through an old cemetery, one that goes back 100+ years, a time before “modern” medicine, immunology, vaccinations, antibiotics and advancements in food safety and food handling, and look at the grave stones – all the infants and young children who died, all the people who didn’t live to a ripe old age because they succumbed to now treatable and preventable illnesses and better overall nutrition.
The trend or fad is rooted in the efforts of the big-money-controlled foundations and non-governmental organizations. They work hand-in-hand with the State Dept USAID to get into third world countries and completely takeover their food systems. This is dovetailed in with control of their international trade, banking and medical sectors.
In the US, it’s the same deal but the takeover was accomplished a century ago. The top echelon of wealthy families in America long ago brought the top colleges under their control through finance and set up foundations which carry on their agendas, the big three being, of course, Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, but there are now thousands of foundations with aligned goals.
Now it was quite easy for these powerful interests that have controlled the Ivy League educations of corporate directors for many decades to include a little “organic” side movement within all their other “movements”. Eating food without it being adulterated is nothing new, but having their own workerbee activists from the left leading a enough pro-organic organizations enables the big money folks to then control the movement and keep it from really catching on and making life difficult for their big food industry companies.
Too many conservatives see that young long hairs and liberals are eating organic foods and instinctively oppose the movement.
Part of understanding what’s really going on is understanding that big business does not have a problem with big government regulators. This is because the big money and power people who simply want to continue to financially dominate have the government in their pocket. They a) expand government control to keep out small competitors, b) preserve a tax code that enables big companies to pay little or no tax and c) preserve big government spending that largely gets rung up as sales for big businesses.
Control of a publicly-held company is had by having people working in your interests on the board of directors. The board is the ultimate decision maker on how the company’s resources are deployed, so one does not need to own every share then of a company to direct its policies and strategies.
Little by little, the food industry is shutting down direct access from farmer to consumer. Pasteurization is so-called safety, the easy way: kill all organisms in the milk, instead of handling the cows and milk properly. Trouble is, we only want to kill bad ones if they’re actually in the milk, and usually they are not in the milk. Hmmm, so it benefits the food industry to be able to have bad bacteria in the milk as a result of their bad practices - pasteurization just cleans up all their mistakes. They can now comfortably have feces in the milk and know that the pasteurization machine will still output a product that won’t cause the milk drinker to immediately get sick and thus blame the milk for their sickness. But Americans now are missing out on the biggest health benefit in the milk, the organisms (oh, no, I’d have to actually have to read and understand to know about that health benefit). With today’s technology, we should instead be working towards good milk handling - and (duh) efficient testing of milk prior to being sold to the consumer. But instead we continue with the cheap and dirty.
Most people are so brainwashed they outright refuse to consider anything other than pasteurized milk. Not only that, we outright refuse to read up on what’s really going on in our gut. How many people realize that everyone has bacteria in their gut and have an inkling as to what essential functions they perform ? Wait, I’m talking about science outside of the food and medical industry “accepted science”, something conservatives are forbidden to speak of. God forbid I want to get off the “pill train” once I realize that the food man is making me sick and the medicine man has me in a lifetime of pills trap, er, allows me to “live with” my sickness.
The big money folks floated out the idea from the beginning of their takeover of the medical industry that they were some magnificent benevolent force for good. Most people now reliably parrot the meme about how much advancement there has been in medicine and food, all a result of obedience to our corporate benefactors and their greater wisdom.
But we forget a few basics. Like the limits on variation in the diet in the old days for most people, when many people undoubtedly had various deficiencies in their diet over their lifetime. We also forget the amount of physical labor and hardship. Long working hours six days a week, drafty, cold homes in the winter, etc. We forget the simple health practices and medicines that were not common then and thus health could deteriorate or sickness could ensue because of problems with simple cleanliness, warmth, nutrition, etc., i.e., it’s far better being home with the flu today than home with the flu in a drafty house, poor sanitation, etc. It’s really not that surprising that people would often succumb to sicknesses that the body would recover from given only a better environment, food and the simplest of old-fashioned medicines.
After hundreds of billions of research spending over many decades, countless basic disease questions still persist, as the medical industry moves forward with better ways to “live with” diseases.
People are certainly waking up to all this, hopefully that trend will continue.