i mentioned this in class today bc we were talking about a TB documentary i showed them last week. mentioned the part about childhood TB being cut in half.
I jammed out a report a while back that noted the recent resurgence of raw milk stuff that got a bunch of eye-rolls about it being "irrelevant" and you can bet I'm rubbing this piece in some faces lmao
The crypt is amazing. The museum is also not bad. And what I like most is that his old fact house in which all this is placed is surrounded by tons of huge chemical facilities and research labs that grew around it over time. A bit like up the movie but with a villa
I grew up around the family dairy farm in rural Vermont - really nice, clean, small farm where the cows were treated beautifully - and even though they knew exactly where it came from NOBODY in my family drank raw milk. The unnecessary risk of drinking it is just dumb as hell.
It's weird how in addition to fashion or art, even knowledge is cyclical. We figure something out, then eventually forget or reject it, and then have to rediscover it. I'm being generous by saying "we" though.
I do love that these same numbskulls are the ones which made me paranoid to bring my daughter out of the house until she was old enough for her first round of vaccines.
Good writeup. As a dairy goat owner it's insane to me that people are drinking raw milk without even a cursory understanding of its provenance. For my part, I've taken to thermizing milk as a way to get most of the bad bacteria and preserve its cheesemaking character.
I was a goat farmer, milk, cheese, all that shit. The owner of the farm didn’t believe in pasteurization either she was very magical thinking, but I was there all day. I had to refuse to sell to a guy who said he was gonna give the raw goat milk to his newborn baby instead of formula.
I make raw milk cheese from cow’s milk in the UK. We have some pretty strict controls on the condition of raw milk before it can be sold but you can always be safer. What is thermizing and can it be done on the home kitchen scale please?
what is wrong with people? I can't help wondering if there is also some subcontext that says-- "Oh, look, those, um, "cosmopolitans" messed with our milk!"
Gah, running down this thread and suddenly n-slur on some Nazi spam. Reported and blocked—sorry, don’t know how to share with others without spreading. It’s the dumbass with the lion meme.
I especially loved the anti-Mexican racism that "Paul" dude snuck in at the end. Just a totally unnecessary shot that telegraphed his entire political position. "Those damn dirty Mexicans and their diseased bathtub cheese!"
Too bad we can’t all have it right outta the cow. But not possible with so many people on the planet, in each city and town. We had someone doing here. The trumpy owner took it back. Then it tasted weird so we quit getting it. The overlap of healthy leftie and right wing nut is getting so weird.
"Almost no dairy products cause illnesses". Of course not, they are pasteurized. Duh. They don't even think long enough about the "evidence" they copy-paste.
It actually sucks that the concept of “consensus reality” even has to exist. We (collectively) used to trust and subscribe to medical advancements because we trusted scientific consensus, but now that trust is starting to break down.
My grandfathers both lost little brothers under the age of 2 and there's a mysterious 8-year gap between my grandma and her only sibling. With raw milk evangelists and anti-vaxxers both I just want to drag them all to actually-not-that-old cemeteries, so I can show them the ages on the markers.
My Grandmother cried happy tears after every vaccine I got as a child because it made me safer and less likely to die. She still remembered the old times.
(The boys died in 1921 and 1933, and that grandma was born in 1914. One of my grandpas also lost two older brothers at young ages to conditions [like cardiomyopathy] that were almost certainly due to what are now preventable illnesses. *And* one step-grandma [born 1932] had a limp from polio.)
im trying to figure out how to ban commenters lol. leaving substack might have been the right moral move on some levels but damn if it ain't inconvenient sometimes
Seems like the market for “a not crappy competitor to substack” has a pretty big opportunity to me, this is very not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment
Thank you for this! Also, good grief. My father and all of his siblings had diphtheria in 1922 (yes, I'm old). He survived, but his baby sister didn't.
My favorite raw milk fact is that after WV legalized consumption of raw milk in 2016, the Republican legislators involved in passing the law held a “raw milk party” celebrate, and then all had to call in sick.
My least favorite fact is that 8 years later, after the embarrassment over the CDC … 1/2
There certainly is a crunchy-to-supporting-fascism pipeline that’s developed since the pandemic. There’s been a significant uptick in urine drinkers who think that’s the cure for everything. It’s wild.
… investigation died down, the Republican legislators finally worked up their nerve to pass a complementary bill legalizing the *sale* of raw milk. 2/2
Not to my knowledge, which gets at what’s so frustrating about Republican pols: even when real world experience and embarrassment prevent them from enacting their stupid policies while the world is paying attention, they ultimately enact them anyways to satisfy their crazyass base.
What I just can't wrap my head around is people I've seen talking about how great unpasteurized milk is and how they make it safe by boiling it. And like... you just pasteurized it. Heck, you didn't even have to bring it to a boil.
I have a question, since you've _had_ raw milk: does it taste differently from pasteurized milk? The raw milk enthusiasts are always on about how much more delicious it is. I mean, lead paint chips taste sweet, that's why kids eat them. I'm just curious.
I had raw milk as a kid, one time while visiting some friends of my parents. It was delicious and did have a distinctive taste. (I asked my mother if I could have it again and she said it was only safe if you're "on a first-name basis with the cow," basically the same take as Talia.)
I'll add to this that another friend of mine says that the real key is the freshness of the milk -- if you get yourself incredibly fresh raw milk and then pasteurize it yourself and cool it, it will taste like the raw milk I remember. (I haven't tested this.)
The freshest milk I've had as an adult was while studying in Nepal & staying with a family that owned a water buffalo. In Nepal everyone boils their own milk, so the milk I had was both fresh and home-pasteurized. It was amazing! But it was also water buffalo milk, hard to compare.
Yes this, as a teenager I worked at a dairy that kept milk on hand for max 12 hours before pickup by the cheese factory; fresh was amazing, after a week in the fridge I'd honestly rate it worse than store bought whole milk
Meat is the same. The meat we would get from the farm next door tasted so different from store-bought that I couldn’t believe it was the same. I still cooked it, rather than eat it raw, though. I’m not grotesquely stupid.
I mean this was a long time ago, but I remember it was cool to skim the cream off, and it was slightly warm. I don't recall it tasting wildly better than store milk but taste is a fickle memory!
It is possible to have pasteurised milk that isn't homogenised. It was the normal milk in Britain in the 1980s, so the cream separated, and you had to shake the milk to get anything but skimmed.
I worked on a Swiss farm for a while, with dairy cows so had to have a taste, fresh from the udder. Warm, inhomogeneous with creamy film, even lumps. But most of all, super cow-y. Tasted like grass and the smell of cow
I regret to inform you that it is actually fucking delicious. Though you can get almost all the way there with low heat pasteurization and not homogenizing. My state has legal regulated raw milk and it's a treat I have very very rarely (as an informed adult who accepts the risk).
IMO the taste problems people have with milk are down to ultra-pasteurization and homogenization which denature protein and oxidize respectively. Those processes are why most store bought milk is unsuitable for cheesemaking.
I've had non-homogenized pasteurized milk and it tasted noticeably different from homogenized. Mostly it was creamier tasting for the given fat content. I would guess that raw milk would have the same creaminess, regardless of whether the pasteurization specifically caused any taste change.
I worked on a Swiss farm for a while, with dairy cows so had to have a taste, fresh from the udder. Warm, inhomogeneous with creamy film, even lumps. But most of all, super cow-y. Tasted like the smell of cow, same way raw cheese does. Although that may have partly been the proximity of the cows
Funnily, when we were in Mexico, they had a flavor of ice cream which the waitress translated as "burned milk". She also insisted we, as Americans, would not like it.
But being contrary, we had to try it, (In my defense, I was thinking it would taste like dulce de leche). I can thus report, we, as Americans, did NOT find the flavor of Burned Milk Ice Cream appealing.
Honestly, if right wingers want to off themselves by refusing vaccines and consuming poisoned/infested food, then let them do it. Just let them do it away from all the rational people, please.
"The freedom to shit yourself to death is a beautiful American freedom and it’s a parent’s inalienable right to feed their child tubercular freedom milk."
I remember buying raw whole milk from a farm in Iowa in the late 70’s. When the cream separated from the milk, we skimmed it and made homemade butter. Sometimes, we set out to make whipped cream, and still got butter. It was delicious, but alas that was a different era.
I grew up with raw fresh milk from the neighbors and low temp pasteurized, non homogenized milk is fantastic and tastes identical to raw at least as far as I can tell.
UHT (ultra-high temp) is 140 C for four seconds (so right at the edge of causing Maillard reactions), and the regular kind, flash Pasteurization, is 72 C for 15 seconds. You want to swing temps as fast as possible, to limit thermal damage; steam & vacuum was fastest before heat exchangers got better
Good read! The only way I would buy raw milk would be from a local farm I had a relationship with, and so I could do a low-temperature pasteurization process myself before using it in cheesemaking. You can fix homogenized milk, but higher temp pasteurization makes inferior cheese.
cholera infantum & summer complaint-haven’t encountered those 2 dxs since the last time i read a book featuring a 19th century doctor. spoiler: the kids always died.
People are entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. There are people who genuinely think that the Earth is flat. That is unsettling if you think about what this implies.
That video you linked is hilarious. Like the literal hydrochloric acid in your stomach and battery of digestive enzymes in your mouth & intestine aren't going to completely destroy the enzymes & glycoproteins just as effectively as boiling.
Raw milk probably kills fewer people than oysters (I say this without checking) but vomming and shitting all day isn't a pleasant way to spend an afternoon and I've never fed an infant an oyster.
Unless it's been turned into ice cream or cheese I want nothing to do with milk. And I prefer the non-lethal, pasteurized variety of ice cream and cheese. Thank you.
Learning anything about the history of milk borne pathogens (or the way infant formula was wildly adulterated) before food safety regulations makes me physically nauseated.
Rabies was one of those horror-show infections that I read about obsessively as a kid ("How to make the Scary Thing go away? Learn all I can to stop it!"), so Pasteur is my hero.
Then I grew up and they made my birthday World Rabies Day. Life is extremely weird like that.
There's a lovely statue of Pasteur in the park across from Cook County Hospital.
This is on the back:
“One doesn’t ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says, You suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me and I shall help you.”
I once met a man so far along the contrarian road he insisted gravity did not exist and propagation of the gravity lie was absolutely part of some unarticulated free floating conspiracy.
It is sad when things go that far, but also kind of fascinating.
we had a user at work just yesterday trying to tell us the sun isn't real. a few months ago another one was insisting that the moon (the entire thing, not just moon landing) is fake.
NASA or the freemasons. these people frequently blame the freemasons for making us believe the earth isn't flat.
like i get that the earth may seem flat from the ground. but the sun and the moon, you can see those with your own eyes, and yet you choose to believe they're not really there???
In college, we had a disparaging saying for each department. For the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences it was, “There’s no such thing as gravity, the Earth just sucks.”
What gets me is that Team Pasteur and Team Raw (I am Team Pasteur & am eating cheese at this very moment) both seem to share the same belief, which is that cow's milk is absolutely essential for the human diet. It is not. It is essential only for calves.
Most of the world is lactose intolerant (65%). But because (most) Europeans can digest it, we declared ourselves the norm & decided that everyone else has a disorder. Mammals like us do not require milk after weaning. It is strictly optional.
This topic is complex enough on its own. To add another layer of complexity, we have the fact that bird flu has jumped to cows, raising concerns about the safety of raw milk consumption. So that can, well, bring 2020 back
And there are people who encourage raw milk drinking *specifically because* of bird flu. They claim it will keep them safe (somehow), rather than giving the bird flu extra chances to hop into humans.
Comments
We live in aggressively stupid times.
https://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2016/05/museum-mysteries-murder-bottles.html
Also disgusted by all those people drinking out of the milk jug. A great way to contaminate the reagent, i.e., unpasteurize it.
(Thank you for this explainer.)
My least favorite fact is that 8 years later, after the embarrassment over the CDC … 1/2
They'd eat their own shit if they deeply believed it would make them immortal
"The freedom to shit yourself to death is a beautiful American freedom and it’s a parent’s inalienable right to feed their child tubercular freedom milk."
Thanks for the article; informative and a pleasure to read.
Then I grew up and they made my birthday World Rabies Day. Life is extremely weird like that.
This is on the back:
“One doesn’t ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says, You suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me and I shall help you.”
It is sad when things go that far, but also kind of fascinating.
like i get that the earth may seem flat from the ground. but the sun and the moon, you can see those with your own eyes, and yet you choose to believe they're not really there???
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-intolerance-by-country