Someone was raving to me about it yesterday. Not sure where or how I would source it. Thanks a bunch
I am skeptical and prefer the comfort of knowing that I won't get a foodborne illness from the milk that we drink.
ETA: If you don't want to go with anecdotes, and instead prefer real science, you can work your way through this summary of the data by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, interesting discussion starting on page 17: https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/joh...
I grew up in a rural area in the middle of Wisconsin-- the Dairy state. The majority of my classmates lived on dairy farms.
Roughly 65 percent of my farming friends drank pasteurized milk. These were families that could walk out their back door to get milk from cows that they had raised from birth. But they didn't do that.
The other 35 percent did drink raw milk, BUT,
1). They had been drinking it for years and therefore had built up some resistance, and
2). The milk they would drink was extremely fresh (less than 24 hours) and went directly from the cold tank in the barn to their refrigerator. Because it was so fresh there wasn't a lot of time for pathogens to grow. They didn't worry about dumping out extra milk because they could always get more, and
3). They never, ever served raw milk to me or any other non-farming guests.
Some people claim that raw milk is safe because people used to drink it all the time. But dairy farming today is very, very different than it was before the industrial revolution. IMO today's cows are less healthy than they were 200 years ago.
To me, the risks of drinking raw milk far outweigh the benefits.
Ick. The bacteria from it? No thank you. I had friends who had a dairy farm, and I saw what that milk was like from the cows. Pasteurized is SAFE. Just because someone raves about something doesn't mean you should listen to them.
Coming from another person in NYC -
Raw milk is very hard to get because of all the laws against it, but in NYC there is apparently a bit of a "black market" for it. You should be *very* careful if you decide to try purchasing off the milk black market (and obviously should not serve that stuff to your children). Ask around at your local farmers markets and food coops and find out who "knows a seller".
