I don’t want to get into the argument on Raw vs. Pasteurized.
However, I’m old enough to remember back in the day when a great uncle of mine had a prize winning dairy in Dallas county. One of the great childhood memories I have is drinking a glass of milk that came right from the milking barn.
I still drink at least a gallon of milk a week, but the stuff we drink today for healthy reasons simply doesn’t have the flavor. It’s a shame that more folks never had the chance to savor raw milk.
The problem with raw milk isn’t salmonella, it’s tuberculosis.
During WWII my family kept a couple of cows. I remember, as a child, screening the bits of dirt and cowshit from the milk through a cloth funnel; but we drank the unpasteurized milk with no problem. It was probably better for us than the pasturized milk bought from a store.
However, one tubercular cow can infect the mixed milk from a dairy herd of a hundred or more cows. This milk could infect thousands, and did. City children during the winter, low in vitamin D with impaired immune systems, were particularly affected. Tuberculosis (“the great white plague”) was one of the leading causes of death in the United States in the early twentieth century. Pasteurization, more that the antibiotics which came later, reversed this. Only now, with TB largely controlled, there is this movement against Pasteurization because people aren’t losing friends, relatives and loved-ones to this disease. Both my grandfather and father died from TB, as did one of my first girl friends during the early 1950s.
By the way, tuberculosis is coming back in a more antibiotic-resistant and virulent form.