The revolution will not be pasteurized
Nathanael Johnson at Harpers - pretty good coverage of the science and politics of raw milk. I mostly avoid milk, since my colds are much milder without it, but I have found raw milk to be worlds better than the pasteurized/homoginized variety. Raw milk is alive, vibrant, real. Pasteurized is dead, boring, mechanical. Public health my ass. If people want to drink raw milk, it ain't nobody's business. [root]
If the police actions against Schmidt and other farmers have been overzealous, they are nevertheless motivated by a real threat. The requirement for pasteurization--heating milk to at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit for fifteen seconds--neutralizes such deadly bacteria as Campylobacter jejuni, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and salmonella. Between 1919, when only a third of the milk in Massachusetts was pasteurized, and 1939, when almost all of it was, the number of outbreaks of milk-borne disease fell by nearly 90 percent. Indeed, pasteurization is part of a much broader security cordon set up in the past century to protect people from germs. Although milk has a special place on the watch list (it's not washable and comes out of apertures that sit just below the orifice of excretion), all foods are subject to scrutiny. The thing that makes our defense against raw milk so interesting, however, is the mounting evidence that these health measures also could be doing us great harm.
Over the past fifty years, people in developed countries began showing up in doctors' offices with autoimmune disorders in far greater numbers. In many places, the rates of such conditions as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn's disease have doubled and even tripled. Almost half the people living in First World nations now suffer from allergies. It turns out that people who grow up on farms are much less likely to have these problems. Perhaps, scientists hypothesized, we've become too clean and aren't being exposed to the bacteria we need to prime our immune systems.
