Do you drink unpasteurized milk from your goats/cows?

[Petal to the Metal]

It's illegal to sell raw milk in some places, despite its recent rise in demand. Getting caught can lead to huge fines and even getting shutdown. But, it's fine to drink your own of course. Do you regularly drink unpasteurized milk? I still don't. I can't get over my parents drilling it into my head that it was bad to drink it. Mom always pasteurized our home supply before we could have any.

 

[FarmHand]

I'll be blunt here. Anybody drinking non pasteurized cow's milk is basically a dumbass asking for sickness. Straight from the cow you're probably be okay as long as the cold chain isn't broken but with every passing hour the pathogen growth increases and it doesn't take long to get to a level that's dangerous for humans. The internet is full of quacks and actresses who who think these ideas are good for you much like anti vax or in this case non pasteurized milk. I say this having grown up on a dairy farm and drank raw milk as a kid. Did I ever get sick from it? Maybe, who knows. But any time I hear people yakking about this I try to shoot it down the same way I'd shoot down the idea of skipping a polio shot

 

[drjackthevet]

My daughter pasteurizes all the milk she uses, for two reasons. She has young children and doesn't want to risk challenging their immune systems with raw milk. Number two, our milking cow is a BLV carrier (as are a high proportion of dairy cows in the US, btw). There is a suggestion that BLV can be a risk factor for development of human breast cancer. Pasteurization eliminates that worry. I use raw milk to make cheese, except for cheeses that are to be consumed at less than 60 days of aging (where acid development destroys harmful bacteria and supposedly the BLV virus.) My wife and I do use the fresh unpasteurized milk for our coffee, cereal and cooking, but we are old people and worry less about long term effects of BLV. The milk is handled and chilled quickly and hygienically by me personally. We also test fairly regularly for presence of dangerous E. Coli organisms in our milk cow. Not recommending raw milk consumption, just giving our perspective on things. I don't necessarily buy into the claims of great health benefits of raw milk, but I think it tastes better (and makes better cheese!)

 

[Urban Homestead]

Supposedly, drinking milk straight from a goat is safer than drinking straight from a cow. Well, I'm no expert. That's just what I've heard. Either way, I always pasteurize the milk we consume. I pretty much only use it for products and baking because my kids are too used to drinking the tasteless stuff from the store.

 

[Charli1]

Never! There is just too much information about the dangers of drinking it straight from the cow. I know nothing about goat milk. There is too many other things that can make you sick, I'm not giving it to my kids.

 

[Amanda]

Raw milk and raw water are both popular in my neck of the woods. I don't understand it myself, but some people equate "raw" with "healthier."

 

[Qapla]

From the time I was 8 years old until my mid-twenties I drank raw milk daily. Never suffered from it.

However, these days there are far more problematic bugs around then when I was a kid ... not sure if I still would. Back the we had fresh milk every day and slimmed our own cream. We made our own butter and whipped cream..

Perhaps if it was from my own cow I still would ... but, I don't buy any.

We have a friend who used to own a dairy and we would get raw cream from time-to-time and I do miss that ... the real "heavy" cream is much thicker then the stuff they sell in the stores marked "heavy".


My biggest complaint with the raw milk wasn't the lack of it being pasteurized ... it was that it wasn't homogenized - having to shake it up before every use to put the cream back in the milk got old.

 

[RichZ]

It depends. I'm sure the dairy you sell your milk to tests it. When we had our goat dairy, we had an extremely low bacterial count. We kept the milk house exceedingly clean, we made sure the goats' udders were well washed before hooking the take offs to them, we kept the pipeline and bulk tank clean and we kept the temperature of the bulk tank set at 34 degrees, to slow bacterial growth. We drank milk directly out of our bulk tank, We never had a problem.

 

[Syd. L]

That^
Unpasteurized milk, in and of itself, is not unhealthy. It's the cleanliness of everything involved that will make or break it.
This process actually began with wine to keep it from going bad.

Is Pasteurized Milk Safe?

Pasteurization supposedly makes milk safer because it kills harmful bacteria but this is not actually the case. Pasteurization does not guarantee safety. Th

eatgenius.com

 

[naykid]

We drink raw milk. We need to call it "pet milk" when it is bought/sold.