Comment by bsder
4 days ago
> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.
"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.
The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.
Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.
And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.
I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.
Nope. Don't believe you.
And the reason I don't believe you is because my family two generations back milked cows just like you claim. And everybody in the family boiled their milk religiously.
Folk wisdom was "boil the milk" and they didn't worry much about what it did to vitamins or taste.
Even worse, they would freeze the milk afterward. I still remember the horrible taste of that stuff. Yuck.