I grew up in the country. Our house was on a small dirt road with three neighbors. One of those neighbors was a dairy farmer.

When I was little we used to walk down to their house to get milk and eggs. Best stuff on earth. If you have never tasted raw milk you are really missing out (not that we ever called it ‘raw’ milk, to me it was just milk). Same with fresh eggs from an old school farm. Not the fake free range things they sell in the supermarket, and definitely not those from a factory farm. Those are disgusting. Taste like cardboard.

Not only did it taste good, it was the cheapest eggs and milk you could get.

Now I ask you this: do you think that my folks were breaking the law by doing this? The answer is yes. You see it is illegal in my state to purchase raw milk (that is milk that hasn’t been pasteurized).

This idea of pasteurization came from a guy named Louis Pasteur. He figured out that if you heat milk up you will kill off all of the bacteria in the milk (Pasteur was one of the founders of bacteriology). He figured this out in 1862.

So they pasteurize milk by heating it to a high temperature. In doing so the various organic chemicals in the milk are degraded and/or destroyed (along with the organic chemicals in any bacteria that is in the milk). But here is the part that they didn’t understand in 1862: Those organic chemicals are where the good stuff is. And you know what else? There are also BENEFICIAL bacteria in raw milk!

Why would you want to take the good stuff out of milk? Well, back in the day before refrigerators, milk would often heat up a bit before it got in your belly. So in the time that the milk was sitting on your porch (remember milkmen?) an environment was created in the bottle that would allow bacteria to grow. If it was e-coli or something similar people would get a stomach bug and end up sitting on the pot for a day or two until their bodies took care of it.

The worst case scenario is that you would die. But the worst case scenario to opening your front door and going out is also that you die. If you take the necessary precautions (like keeping your milk at a temperature at which bacteria won’t grow well) you are probably going to be all right in either leaving your home or drinking raw milk. Hell, an asteroid could hit your house too. Then you’d be in a fine mess.

Anyway, I was very much incensed when I read this:

Arlie Stutzman was busted in a rare sting when an undercover agent bought raw milk from the Amish dairy farmer in an unlabeled container.

Now, Stutzman is fighting the law that forbids the sale of raw milk, saying he believes it violates his religious beliefs because it prohibits him from sharing the milk he produces with others.

Read the whole story.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 8:19 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.