Can anyone explain to me why conservatives love raw milk so much? Is it like more profitable or something? Why the hell does this keep coming up?
As far as I can tell: It’s partially the same shit as the anti vaccine mixed with being angry about government regulations.
A lot of the anecdotes I’ve heard about raw.milk being safe, are from small farms with few dairy cows.
It’s anti vax and anti regulation so basically a maga wet dream. Squeeze cow, milk, ta da. In reality to the other 3/4 of humanity it’s a microbial breeding ground for unfiltered mutations and diseases because you’re just trusting the entire food chain leading up to the cow has been healthy and unmutated.
Pasteurized milk goes through a process where you filter out unwanted microbes or unsafe mutations before bottling the milk. It’s like boiling water before drinking vs drinking from a puddle.
Pasteurized milk goes through a process where you filter out unwanted microbes or unsafe mutations before bottling the milk
Not filtering. You heat the milk. And it’ll do nothing to “mutations.” It suppresses bacteria and at least some viruses. If you double-pasteurize, it’ll also suppress bacterial spores.
The only half reasonable argument I’ve seen is that requiring pasteurisation (supposedly) makes it difficult for small dairy farms that want to sell direct to consumer, and forces them to sell to large milk companies for a far lower price. I have no idea how valid that argument is.
I don’t think so. I remember that we bought milk directly from the farm as a kid (Germany, so experiences may vary), but it always got collected in a big container that automatically pasteurized it during storage. Every farm had those, so they couldn’t have been that expensive.
Science-denying anti-intellectualism mixed with “you can’t tell me what to do!”
Exactly. And we should exploit that by telling them it’s not safe to consume Arsenic or lick a lead bar multiple times a day, every day. They’ll be like, “oh yeah! watch me lib tard!”. And the population will shrink. :)
How about a glass of Hemlock juice? All those intellectuals and “city doctors” will try to get you away from that stuff, so it must be good!
Hey, it turns out that lead acetate is a natural, calorie-free, sweetener! In fact, the ancient Romans used it. The FDA doesn’t want you to use this because they’re in bed with Big Sugar and the Splenda people.
In addition to what everyone else has said, I think it’s also from ideas of “return to tradition” and a veneration of a kind of rural lifestyle that largely doesn’t exist anymore. My extended family are farmers and even they got out of livestock when I was really young because there’s not enough profit except at obscene scale. But milk fresh from the cow was a thing I grew up hearing about from cousins, it was apparently viewed as safe enough for the older kids as long as you cleaned the teat and it was really really fresh. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the conditions in factory farms added another layer of risk that just wasn’t there in the 90s on the last remaining family farms.
Edit: also some of them are operating under the mistaken idea that raw milk is healthier or more nutritious (it’s not), or that or tastes better (actually possible, I actually heard it tasted slightly better as a kid).
Return to tradition is not the whole story.
For conservatives, power is wielded or power is seceded. In a government that you don’t trust, that’s forcing you to drink pasteurized milk, the idea of raw milk is kind of that “the government is hiding something from us” and not “the government is protecting us”. While there is some overlap between “the government can’t be trusted with milk” with “the government can be trusted with immigrants”, for the most part they aren’t necessarily the same people but they are cut from the same cloth.
They don’t want the government to control them. The government controls other people.
It’s why people like RFK are so dangerous because he now has the power to remove many of the safety nets we have grown accustomed to. Instead of Trump’s first term where COVID was downplayed, we won’t even test for avian flu. We won’t even research cures.
Not only that, given the sheer kowtowing media outlets are doing we likely will have challenges reading outbreaks in other countries.
This is not an exaggeration. We are in fascism today.
When consuming raw milk directly from your own cow its a lot safer than anything related to shipping, holding and selling it. Raw milk always contains bacteria and other microbes. These take time to grow so drinking it immediately doesn’t give them time to grow. But any amount of time between that allows them to go crazy. So it can be safe to drink raw milk in the old method where it came directly from your own cow with no time between. Its anything with scale that causes all the issues.
as long as you cleaned the teat and it was really really fresh. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the conditions in factory farms added another layer of risk that just wasn’t there in the 90s on the last remaining family farms.
I think you’re hit the nail on the head. There’s a concept in engineering (Hyrum’s Law) that where systems interface with each other (e.g. software), the design of one will ultimately rely on every aspect of the other, intentional or otherwise. In the case of industrially produced milk, pasteurization permits a relatively high degree of filth on the supply side when compared to practices in the EU or UK (they ship more raw product). So, it stands to reason that this isn’t just likely but exactly what’s going on since everyone can get away with it.
If no one else has mentioned it, there are also those idiotic fascists (but I repeat myself) that were/are big on guzzling milk to show how “superior” they are because lactose intolerance is fairly common, but even more common among non-whites.
Extra Nazi points if it’s raw milk, maybe?
My mother’s been on the “natural health” train for a while now and claims that pasteurizing milk removes most of the nutrients (verifiably false). No amount of my protesting or pointing her towards sources for the contrary have convinced her to stop consuming that garbage.
The conscription of the granola moms.
I think it’s just that it’s a regulation, and regulation bad. I don’t want the gunment telling me I can’t drink raw milk. No, fools, the government doesn’t want people selling raw milk.
A lot of the US understands capitalism as purchasing choices at the store. Therefore if I can buy more stuff at the store I’m more free. Regulation bad.
This is handy for actual capitalist that want to abuse their workers and their customers by selling poison or watered down milk with plaster of Paris for color and liquified calf brains for texture miles from cows that are fed sawdust and literally dying. 👈 Why we regular milk now because this is all literally what was occuring.
Regression. World is scary. Milk brought safety during infancy and the limbic system remembers.
Let them. Darwin wins.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Avian flu and other viruses can potentially spread from cows to humans, where it’s more likely to mutate and spread. It’s never the risk-accepters that suffer most. It’s always the sick, the poor, the very young and the very old, and the healthcare workers who suffer. The people who refused to get vaccines or take even basic precautions with COVID killed a lot of people, while the vast majority of those assholes survived.
A coworker of mine (African American) lost three cousins to COVID. Minorities are less likely to have good healthcare or the resources to pay out of pocket when necessary. I’m mostly on team Darwin too but I agree it’s not just the idiots that will get hurt. The way things are going schools might even start teaching that raw milk isn’t that harmful.
Avian flu and other viruses can potentially spread from cows to humans, where it’s more likely to mutate and spread.
Every single person that contracts the HPAI H5N1 virus is a few billion chances for the virus to mutate and generate a strain that is able to spread from person to person. These people are throwing dice over and over and when they come up snake eyes, we are all going to lose.
Fun fact: nearly 40% of all foodborne illnesses were caused by raw milk consumption. Pasteurization has reduced that number down to less than 1%, except in places where raw milk consumption is still allowed.
Been only buying organic milk for 10+ years now out of preference, it stays fresh for much longer than normal milk. This is because USDA Organic milk is ultra-pasteurized in almost the same way as shelf-stable milk.
I searched and found this article and they reported that there’s virtually no difference in nutrients between the options:
https://www.100daysofrealfood.com/is-ultra-pasteurized-milk-bad/
So if all the nutrients are the same, the only difference in less pasteurization is more bacteria. Fuck that!
I think it definitely affects the taste though doesn’t it? I prefer the organic ones that are vat pasteurized due to that reason, ultra feels sweeter to me.
Under certain conditions, and it still poses a risk as the proper labeling of it suggests.
The NLH has some literature on the unnecessary amount of people that are made sick, and some that have died as a result of consuming raw milk.
If you want to believe it’s harmless, and consume it despite warnings, you are free to do so. But I can’t in good conscience allow you to misinform people without due diligence. Now everyone can weigh the risks after having been given both sides of the argument.
Back in my country, I drank raw milk my whole life and I’d never had an issue. It was sheep milk, not cow, so it could be different. Literal raw milk straight from the udder to the bowl to my stomach. I’m ok with raw milk as long as it’s coming from what I raise. Not gonna touch it from a bottle at Walmart god knows where it came from and now how much shit it went through. Plus, all these farms owned by huge corporations feed their cattle shit. So, no thanks.
Edit: to clarify a little more for some folks who might have misunderstood my point. Raw milk in and of itself isn’t and shouldn’t be harmful at all. It’s the condition you put the animal in, the food you feed it and the way the milk is being served that kills people. Our animals were never in cages, they roamed in “god’s earth” as some say. They grazed whatever grass came out of the ground and they drank river water. We’d never fed them anything they weren’t supposed to eat. We weren’t in a hurry for a “profit” to sum it up, we were just living normal. So we didn’t have to do shit that would cause chaos. Hope this makes sense. Also, this comment wasn’t meant as political at all, just something I got reminded of when reading the post
Raw milk is also an active transmission vector for bird flu, which has a mortality rate, by some measures, of about 51%. COVID was about 1 or 2%.
Although this is anecdotal evidence I think you have a few good points. I’d be willing to let the practice be more common as long as the product stayed local (within the county) and the cows were kept in specific conditions (not shoulder to shoulder 24/7). The data regarding this is very small so I wouldn’t want stuff to start being transported hundreds of miles until there’s some kind of established safety record.
Agreed 100%. And it is 100% anecdotal. Certainly my personal story. Grew up a framer and herded over 400 sheep back home. Had 2 horses and over 10 dogs. We had a huge land (my family still does back there now). That was our main breakfast. Raw milk and home made bread my mother made. Not sure why some folks are upset about it and started downvoting. lol. Other nations and other cultures do exist, and it’s not all just the USA.
there’s also a big difference between drinking minutes old raw milk directly straight out of the teet, vs commercial operations where the milk is a few hours to days old and is bottled with equipment that isn’t perfectly cleaned between each bottle and then consumers sticking it in a fridge for a week. The former is just something farmers are going to do if they want and isn’t really a serious public health concern imo (although still not without risk) and can’t really be regulated away anyway. the latter exposes way more people and is way more dangerous, and that IS able to be regulated out of existence.
It takes time for the microbes in raw milk to grow to become dangerous. So drinking it on your own farm with your own cow isn’t an issue since there is no time for them to grow. Any processing adds time which gives bacteria more time to grow. For a reference, in ideal conditions E. coli can double its population every 20 minutes.
I for one want to allow all conservatives to consume as much raw milk as they want.
They will catch viruses that will kill the rest of us. Protecting the population against communicable diseases requires altruism and cooperation, of which conservatives seem incapable.
I understand where you’re coming from, but then they just become a vector for nasties (e.g. avian flu when it finally overcomes the human-to-human transmission barrier, and you can be sure they won’t take adequate precautions to avoid spreading it) as well as risking the health of their children.
