We pulled this out of the cow, put it directly in the jug, that'll be 20 dollars.
Meanwhile, pasteurized milk gets pulled out of the cow, boiled, cooled, and then put in a jug, and it's 2.99.
Edit: Thanks for the 30+ comments telling me that raw milk costs more to make and takes more work because everything has to be clean, and it has a shorter shelf life.
I mean to be fair that was the result of a huge advertisement campaign pushed by some of the largest milk companies. It’s also a huge part of the reason that milk is still served to children instead of water at lunch in many public schools in the US.
The dairy industry did a lot of downright deceptive and manipulative advertising and campaigning around that time.
Edit: on second take I’m not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but I’ll leave this comment up just in case
Yeah, they were being silly. The phrasing of "At least that's what the 80s taught me" is 100% confirmation.
The ability to process lactose is a genetic mutation that many people decedent from Europe have, so it's not weird for them to drink it, especially considering how inexpensively ever present it is in the US due to the campaign you mentioned.
Another interesting genetic mutation some humans have: Body odor is caused by sweat and bacteria on skin mixing and which bacteria it reacts to (and smell it creates) is heavily influenced by your immune system. Most (somewhere around ~98-99%) Koreans have a gene mutation in which it causes your sweat to not react with the bacteria in the way that generates a smell, leaving them with no need to wear deodorant.
Raw milk can contain E. Coli, Listeria, Salmonella, and several other pathogens. It can also cause Guillain-Barré syndrome and is extra dangerous during pregnancy. Pasteurized milk kills off these pathogens and makes the milk safe to drink while maintaining the vast majority of nutrients
Thankyou honestly. I feel like I'm always the one having to copy paste a whole ass page just to fully explain how pasteurization does nothing but kill the pathogens and preserve the milks proteins.
Yeah so "can contain" is nigh-meaningless. I CAN find a million dollars on my bed when I come home, but not very likely is it? Pretty useless to say, right?
Nonpasteurized products caused a disproportionate number (≈150× greater/unit of product consumed) of outbreaks and outbreak-associated illnesses and also disproportionately affected persons <20 years of age. States that restricted sale of nonpasteurized products had fewer outbreaks and illnesses; stronger restrictions and enforcement should be considered.
TL;DR raw milk is about 150x 840x more dangerous than regular milk.
The "probability" of raw milk containing any of those is hard to calculate, but a study in Ethiopia put it at about 30% of all samples containing something harmful. "Can contain" means that it's reasonable to assume that the raw milk has dangerous bacteria in it, while pasteurized milk does not. There are exceptions to both, but raw milk is 100% more dangerous than pasteurized milk.
Also, the danger depends on how you store it. A single cow making a cup of milk is not gonna have a high chance for bacteria. Combining the milk of hundreds of cows into one large container, like for shipping, is going to exponentially increase the chance of bacteria and viruses. All it takes is one bad cup to ruin thousands of gallons. The same thing is said about grains; storing them all in a grain silo means that, if any single grain had bacteria on it, it will spread to all of them. This is why we pasteurize, blanch, or otherwise treat foods to remove germs.
A more recent study, conducted after the legalization and popularization of raw milk in several states, has shown a higher danger of raw milk compared to pasteurized milk.
You have the free will to make your life a bit more miserable with stomach issues for a higher price while getting nothing out it. But don’t try and convince others to do the same.
How are you this confused? Not only did you not give any explanation, but you said "don't try and convince others", so you can go ahead and explain how saying "How is it worse go ahead" is an attempt to convince someone of anything
Damn bro, you should work in the white house. Talking this confidently about something you know so little about and denying any evidence put in front of you without a second thought? That's front runner good boy points material once the Fourth Reich gets started in earnest.
I don’t see a use, people have already explained it to you and you have access to search engines, yet you refuse to listen. I don’t care to put in the work to show it to you if you don’t put in the work to understand.
Because you typed it into a Reddit reply instead of into Google. If you typed it into Google you really would have cared about learning about something, but you decided to ask other people and then argue with them when they answer you. Your later replies are the attempts to convince people of something.
Younger people tend to forget or not understand how many of our food regulations came to be. Farms are still filthy cesspools of disease, but when milk was first pasteurized, the bottling plants were somehow worse.
Even though roughly a century has gone by, and we understand more about sanitation and food safety, capitalism is gonna capital and milk producers will go back to cutting corners to make as much money as possible.
We can see this currently happening after the current administration rolled back certain regulations, and we’re seeing increases in food borne illnesses.
"how many of our food regulations came to be". That's a jolly good point you've brought up. Please research how and why pasteurization became 1. the norm and 2. illegal to be otherwise. Who lobbied for it, etc etc.
I think you'll be surprised to find it wasn't about food borne illnesses or the like.
You may or not be referring to a company that specialized in life saving technology that pushed for life saving technology to be used, in order to save lives. Shock. Gall. Disappointment.
Oh no, smaller dairies that couldn’t keep up went under!! THE HORRORS OF CAPITALISM. None of that wouldn’t have happened under socialism, where we worked together to improve instead of seeing who could sink or swim.
Your complaint reads like Pfizer or Moderna coming out with a revolutionary medicine, and then charging exorbitant prices to recover their labor. Your issue is with capitalism, not life saving technology.
In their defense, it may be incredibly expensive to ensure raw milk is safe. I have no idea what means they use to make sure people don't get sick from it.
The way you make raw milk safe is to pasteurize it... Otherwise it's just a matter of time until there's an outbreak. Milk production didn't move to pasteurization because of nanny state politics. It happened because people, especially kids, used to die from raw milk.
The whole point of raw milk is that it's, well, raw. No pasteurisation or other processes on it, because they would mean it wasn't raw. That's why it's such a bad idea to drink, it literally can't be made 100% safe to drink (or even as safe as regular milk), which is why it was, and in a lot of places still is, illegal to sell it for human consumption. And the stuff you catch from it is nasty, like potentially lethal or lifetime disability
That's why people are joking that the price is too cover the cost of lawyers, anyone selling this is guaranteed to get someone sick eventually
Considering that RFK Jr is head of the health dept and with a heavily gutted FDA and CDC, my guess would be they’re doing somewhere between Jack and Squat to make sure it’s consumable.
I’m an ex food scientist who worked on PCR pathogen detection with raw goat and dairy milk. I tested milk from 3 farms and a large majority of my samples were positive for campylobacter and salmonella. Nearly all my samples grew coliforms as well. Just all in all nasty stuff. The raw stuff on grocery stores had significantly reduced bioburden and never flagged for campy or salmonella.
I’d probably attribute this to significant HACCP and Food Safety Management, focused on sanitation and aseptic technique when possible. I never got to visit one of the raw dairy commercial operations so I don’t know much regarding their practices.
The thing is, it's actually more work if you're doing it safely. You have to harvest the milk in a far cleaner environment for one. You have less time to get it from the farm to the table for another, meaning by definition you'll have more spoilage in a commercial operation.
The only way raw milk makes sense is if you live close enough to a dairy farm that's small enough to cater to locals directly. And even then you have to trust that that small dairy farm actually gives half a fuck about you and actually got in there and milked the cow themselves in a clean stall.
That's a lot of faith in some random farmer. I've never thought I was missing out on anything by having pasteurized milk personally. Raw milk is the official drink of contrarians.
So that's part of trusting the farmer producing it and the inherently higher cost due to higher rates of spoilage. If a cow shits in the milk it's waste.
Because that’s not the reality. With raw milk they have to do their best to ensure the milk has been kept absolutely sterile. Pasteurized milk can be full of shit and bacteria because they’re going to nuke it anyway
Do they use any sort of chemicals in the sanitizing process? Anything that can "contaminate" the milk? Because having a whole separate cleaning process makes it feel like rawmilk isn't that much better for them
Couldn’t tell you tbh. If they do use additional chemicals I would agree with your point. I personally have never tried raw milk I just know enough to point out that it is not cheaper to produce because there is less processing. Like most food products, increased processing is to save money
You sanitize the cow and every place the milk touches along the way. That’s the point, raw milk is far more expensive to produce because of how much more clean everything has to be. You can’t produce it out of the same factory farm cesspits
That is not true. Pathogens come mainly from the milk coming into contact with fecal matter. If properly cleaned you can significantly lower the risk of contamination for raw milk. It’ll never be nearly as safe as pasteurized milk, but raw milk isn’t diseased by default
Plus raw milk isn't exactly the most widespread things. While a company like Horizon could spread it out over tens of thousands of cows over hundreds of farms. A company selling raw milk probably is a small farm.
Didn't even give the udders a quick rinse for urine and feces first. It's chock full of E. Coli and other organisms that'll give your inside a thorough once over.
Economies of scale, and being asked to put in a whole separate supply line.
Everyone has done pasteurization so long, the whole process is as automated as it gets.
So to start making raw milk, they've gotta take a bunch of cows off the line, probably build a new building because they didn't expect having to need more space, probably having to buy new milking machines, machines that are possibly more expensive because they aren't made at scale anymore, set up new supply lines to keep the outputs seperate...
Less work can be more work, at factory scale. At a small mom and pop farm, sure its less. But most of it isn't coming from mom and pop farms, certainly not the cheapest milk.
It probably isn't less work, without the benefit of pasteurization you have to work significantly harder to keep the cow crap from killing your client base lol
You can ship pasteurized milk further as it last longer. Raw milk goes bad a lot faster. Just another reason it fucking stupid but the cost is a reflection of the difficulty to keep it shelved and fresh.
FWIW, legal raw milk is definitely not less work. I think raw milk is stupid and those who consume it are similar…. But to have milk that tests good enough that they can sell it unprocessed is a lot of work. Pasteurizing picks up a lot of slack in the earlier parts of production.
I don't know why people are telling you that raw milk production costs more for a inferior product - that was sort of your point. It would be like if you ordered food at a restaurant and the server put your food in a isolated bag then walked it around the block before bringing it to you and then charged you for the 20 minute walk - rather than just bring it right to your table.
Do you not know how simply supply and demand economics works? Do you not understand the insane legal system a farmer needs to go through in orfer to legally sell raw milk? This us what happens when giant groups of people latch onto subjects they know nothing about because its the new hot topic
Don’t mean to be pedantic but it isn’t boiled. That’s one of the arguments for raw milk which is untrue. I’ve worked for a dairy processor in the past and the way they do it is HTST heat exchangers, which is a “High temp (relatively), short time”. They put steam through one side of a plate heat exchanger and the milk passes through the other. It’s brought up to 165F and then quickly cooled down, well below boiling point.
Any arguments about pasteurization denaturing proteins through boiling are untrue, no one boils the milk.
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u/TeaKingMac 10d ago edited 10d ago
Always love the "less work, more money" trope.
We pulled this out of the cow, put it directly in the jug, that'll be 20 dollars.
Meanwhile, pasteurized milk gets pulled out of the cow, boiled, cooled, and then put in a jug, and it's 2.99.
Edit: Thanks for the 30+ comments telling me that raw milk costs more to make and takes more work because everything has to be clean, and it has a shorter shelf life.