I drink raw milk sold illegally on the underground market | Grist
Very good article about raw milk. But I think many of the responders to the article do not know the history of why and how milk came to be pasteurized. I think understanding this process will explain how we have arrived at the position we are in regarding the “conspiracy” of milk. Like most conspiracies, the pasteurization of milk was not started to hurt people, just the opposite (please see links below). However, also like most conspiracies, once a change becomes the norm, and people make a lot of money from it, it becomes heresy to try to change it, even with emerging new science to support going against the entrenched way of doing something. For some details please check out the links below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
http://ssh.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/31/3/411
Below is an excerpt from the above article from Duke University on the history of milk pasteurization in the United States:
“Evans’s (Chicago Health commissioner in early 1900′s) ambivalence to the procedure confirms this interpretation. In conference speeches for the AAMMC,8 Evans promoted pasteurization as allowing the poor to afford “safe†milk (AAMMC 1909: 56; Halpern 1988: 60) but also suggested that city officials “are up against a practical question. . . . we would like, of course, to have a perfectly produced milk [but] . . . [p]asteurization does not put anything into milk that is not there†(Chicago Tribune 1909e). Evans’s support for pasteurization in the early years of the ordinance thus appears tepid, even though the city eventually succeeded in pasteurizing over 50 percent of the milk supply in 1909 (Chicago Depart†ment of Health 1919).”
The adoption of milk pasteurization, as accounted by most researchers, was simply an attempt to certify that milk was safe and affordable to most people. There was a lot of poverty in the early 1900′s, and many small local farmers were not able to provide the best care for their animals. This resulted in cows getting sick and passing on pathogens in their milk. Pasteurization provided the easiest, most efficient and cheapest way to get safe milk to the masses in the early 1900′s. But as the quote above points out, they recognized, even then, that it wasn’t the “best” milk, but it was a pretty good alternative.
Now, fast-forward 100 years. I think we would all agree that science has been progressing over the past 100 years, and we might possibly know a few more things now than we did in the early 1900′s. We now know that when we pasteurize milk, it degrades the nutrient content of the milk, as well as destroys certain healthy bacteria that really supports much of our immune system. There is also science emerging that says that heating certain proteins found in milk to a high degree can actually distort them to the point that they trigger autoimmune responses from our bodies.
So, with this knowledge, combined with the fact that we had ingested raw, natural milk for thousands of years, and hence our bodies have imprinted the chemistry of raw milk into our DNA, it would seem that raw, natural milk from healthy animals would be our best option. We also have the technology today to ensure that our farmers provide safe and healthy milk without needing to pasteurize it. But here is where the conspiracy comes into play. We now have huge agribusinesses that produce most of the dairy products in this country and pasteurization definitely offers the cheapest and most efficient way for them to provide safe milk. They would have to spend a lot of money converting their systems, and of course they are not going to want to do this. It also affords an easy check point for agencies such as the FDA.
And as the consumers are becoming more proactive in their health and choosing more “natural” foods, the dairy “industry” is very nervous and will fight to the death to ensure that the smaller farmers do not take away their business. And standing behind long-held beliefs such as the supposed life-saving methods of pasteurization is the scare tactic they use as their biggest defense. But the “food revolution” is gaining strength and people are realizing that the reason they are getting sicker, and fatter is due to the industrialization of food. I guess it comes down to who is more trustworthy: a group of people questioning the health and safety of pasteurization or the people who are profiting from it? I am betting on the side of the heretics.
Robin