this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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collapse of the old society
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I don't drink it any more (having kids changes everything), but holy shit raw milk is delicious.
Unprocessed milk is much healthier and tastier than processed milk... but only if the cows graze on grass. The problem with unprocessed milk isn't the milk itself; people have been drinking it for thousands of years. The problem with unprocessed milk is risk of contamination. When bottling it, It needs a clean environment, clean cows, attention to the health of the cows, and as a failsafe, pathogen testing. Mass production of milk in the US's current environment of aged, sick, corn-fed, hormone-dosed cows standing in cages in their own excrement is not conducive to unprocessed milk. It's so filthy that pasteurisation is a must. Creating and maintaining a clean environment, healthy appropriately fed herd, and testing, for the production of unprocessed milk is not economically viable at mass scale. If you want to produce millions of gallons of milk per annum, you unfortunately need dense cages. You need to keep your expenses low so you feed them cheap corn feed which they're not designed to eat. This lowers their immunity so that they often get sick, and have mastitis. So you have to load them up with antibiotics. They remain unhappy and unexcercised cows with poor quality milk which often contains a percentage of pus.
Smaller farmers and operations can often invest the time and money to do what's necessary to produce clean unprocessed milk from healthy cows in a clean environment. In my country we have vending machines on farms for unprocessed milk. And each batch has a testing and pathogen report posted to verify it's good and healthy.
In the US, the mass milk producers would rather everyone think that unprocessed milk is inherently dangerous, rather than a solveable issue surrounding process and scale.
You left out the pus bacteria from milking machines.