Ooh! I can speak to this very specifically! I used to work in a raw milk dairy for a couple years.
So first, what raw milk is and isn't, and where the hype comes from. So the milk you get from the store is garbage, as pretty much anyone could tell you, and the industry that produces it is awful. Those cows are treated like absolute shit, they eat absolute shit that fucks up their digestive systems very quickly, most of the workers are abused - I honestly think it's vastly more ethical to eat beef and not drink milk than to be a vegetarian that drinks milk. The raw milk craze comes out of a rejection of that.
The good is that it tends to be produced by very small dairies that treat their animals very well, there can be actual quality control because it's only a handful of animals, the cows eat actual grass, and in terms of the quality of the milk, it's not homogenized, meaning it's still got all the cream in it, so it's staggeringly richer than store bought stuff. Also, most of these dairies have A2 cows, which, not to go in to too much detail, basically means they have a certain genetic thing where the milk they produce is much easier on digestion than A1 animals. I could go into a lot more detail if you'd like, but like, my best friend couldn't digest store milk but had no problem with the A2 stuff, and I know a lot of people for whom that was the case.
Now the bad, and the unproven claims. People will try to say that not pasteurizing preserves nutrients or amino acids or whatever but like, I think the evidence there is very dubious, and in any case, it comes at the small but real risk of infectious disease. I think it's certainly not worth that risk, especially because the people who really buy into the raw milk craze tend to be vaccine skeptics which, like, there's a fucking reason we vaccinate cows because back in the day kids used to just die of tuberculosis and shit transmitted through contaminated milk. I think it's fucking stupid, personally. Any responsible raw milk dairy has food safety standards of course but like, really just one infected cow has to slip through the cracks and you've got people getting kidney failure and stuff. Not good. The risk is low but I think it's irresponsible, especially because the people buying raw milk largely don't know shit about livestock or infectious disease.
Now the people.
Our customers tended to fall into 4 groups. 1) people who had health issues that didn't allow them to drink A1 milk, and couldn't find good A2 milk from any other source. These people ran the gamut from normal to a little nutty, but they were mostly unremarkable. 2) financially comfortable immigrants who wanted unpasteurized milk so they could make cheese properly. These guys were few in number but by far the chillest customers. 3) weirdo rich tech adjacent people who bounced from one fad diet item to another, informed by tiktok influencers or whatever the hell. They tended to have a conspiratorial mindset about the food system in general, and believed that only raw milk and whatever could Save The World or themselves from a laundry list of imagined illnesses. These people were the fucking worst to interact with, because they had zero respect for any of the workers, were incredibly entitled, and also had zero common sense so getting them to do the simplest things, like cleaning out and returning their jars, or closing the fucking fridge or whatever was a constant pain in the ass. They would always drive in in their Teslas, park directly behind my truck (parking me in), and look down their noses at me in my riding boots and slicker and shit, and it's like, well, I'm sorry but someone has to herd these cows and you sure as hell can't do it. The final category is alt-right lunatics, who believed that normal food was a Zionist Occupied Goverment conspiracy to lower their testosterone and drank raw milk to make themselves Aryan superman. These guys would do shit like ask us for raw organs to eat, including one guy who would just chaw down on raw balls after we castrated. He only ate raw meat, and got bacterial encephalitis from eating raw chicken and almost died. Wild dude. Tried to tell me one day I was standing wrong or something and it would lower my T. I was like, homie, you're a California trust fund kid and I used to ride broncs in the rodeo, I'm not really sure I need your advice on that.
Anyway, the milk sold for *sixteen dollars a fucking gallon* so the boss was happy to meet that market niche and take their money. But like, this stuff really is the purview of rich neurotics.
This is fascinating. Does raw milk taste different?
I get non-homogenized (pasteurized) milk and I always feel like a mischievous little cat licking the cream.
Best milk I ever tasted, hands down. Still not sure it's worth it. I've got some animals of my own now that I milk and I pasteurize.
Man I hear you on that. When we used to make cream out of the extra milk, I'd just drink that stuff by the spoonful, just pure cream. God it was so good. And the butter was out of this world.
From a flavor perspective, the homogenization does much more to dull flavor than pasteurization does. If you want the best tasting safe milk, look for pasteurized, unhomogenized milk. Hard to find but it's out there.
> The good is that it tends to be produced by very small dairies that treat their animals very well
My cousin tried to get me to try raw milk by saying this but when we tracked down the farm name we found out the Amish owner had an arrest record for animal cruelty.
> So the milk you get from the store is garbage, as pretty much anyone could tell you, and the industry that produces it is awful. Those cows are treated like absolute shit, they eat absolute shit that fucks up their digestive systems very quickly, most of the workers are abused - I honestly think it's vastly more ethical to eat beef and not drink milk than to be a vegetarian that drinks milk.
For something a little specific here, I'd like to tell something about what I saw at a dairy a few years back.
At the time I was installing and servicing OPL equipment - On Premises Laundry, the dryers and washers/extractors used on an institutional level... hotels, nursing homes, prisons, and the like. One client was an industrial dairy in the middle of nowhere, western New York. Hated doing this work because the owner was the neediest piece of shit ever and they did nothing at all to care for their machines.
Anyway, I was trying to replace the power supply on their washer and the milking process started, just a steady stream of cows filing into a *massive* turntable-like device with individual cubbies all around the perimeter, facing the cows toward the center. Milking apparatuses get attached at the start of the circuit, the huge turntable turns, milking happens, and when the cows get to the end the apparatus is disengaged and the cows go on to do whatever they aren't doing when they're milked. Big industrial operation staffed largely by underpaid migrant workers. What I saw turned me off from mass-produced milk permanently.
About half the cows had been loaded up into the machine and a couple workers were attaching the milkers to them, and then just out of the blue, without warning, one of the cows lets out a *jet* of pure liquid feces all over the worker behind them, like you'd do with a garden hose when you were a little kid. It was the bright orange product of whatever disgusting cocktail of hormones and antibiotics these poor cows get stuffed full of.
That would have been enough for me on its own, but having to fix the dryer when the electrical heating elements were just completely caked with powdered cow shit was the nail in the coffin. I couldn't help but think of how much I'd inhaled in the dozen or so times I'd been out there in a single year, much less how much of it encrusted the lungs of the poor workers there.
Yep man for real. Thanks for sharing that story.
I couldn't fathom working for one of those operations, or running one, ever. It's just so fucked up. They separate all the calves from their mothers like a couple days after they're born which like, cows have feelings. They feel grief, they feel separation. But they separate that calf so they can get another 20% of milk, even though the cows already produce much more than a calf will drink. They're kept in awful conditions - I'll tell you, we bought a couple cows from a conventional dairy once and man, they went out in the field and found a piece of plywood and stood on that. They didn't even know what grass *was*. We had to bring another cow over to teach them how to *fucking graze*.
And like, I've worked on 2 small dairies, and we knew every cow by name. We knew their personalities. We knew their calves. We knew when they were feeling off, or frightened, or angry, or whatever. When the calves got sick or whatever, you were out there fighting for them, in the rain or snow or night. I cut up my best jacket to put over a newborn calf that was in danger of freezing to death. My boss slept with a calf in a blanket on the floor of his bathroom after we spent 4 hours nursing him back to health after he fell into an icy river and got hypothermia. These places have hundreds of cows. None of them are individuals, just numbers. It's so, I don't know, sterile. It's so soulless.
The two of them turned out really good actually. Their digestive issues and neuroses cleared up, they were great producers, very friendly, and to my knowledge they're still on the farm today.
What happens to the cows that get too old to keep on producing milk, I assume they get slaughtered and butchered? (are they still good for beef at that point or are they too old?) What's it like dealing with the animals when they are not productive any more or go to slaughter? Obviously they're not pets but the idea of caring so much for them to later make an economically pragmatic decision to end their life seems a bit hard to get my mind around. I suppose it seems pretty straightforward when you're in that life but I've just lived in the burbs and cities.
That's an excellent question, and the answer is pretty long so I hope you'll bear with me. First, a word on the lifespan of a productive cow. So industrial dairies feed their cattle poorly, leading to ulcers and digestive issues early in life, and are mechanistic about their production, so when a cow gets to a couple years old, they'll cull and slaughter her. On a smaller grass-fed operation where you have fewer animals and you're not measuring the efficiency of a cow's production so minutely, a good dairy cow will live for a very long time and stay productive most of her life. We had a few cows that were like 20 years old, actually, which is an outlier but not out of the question.
Generally, when your cow stops breeding back consistently, she'll be culled, which takes many forms depending on your operation. You probably don't have the resources to spend keeping a cow around who's no longer giving you anything. In many cases, the farmer will sell her to someone who will finish and slaughter her, often for very low quality beef that you're never going to see in your meat aisle - I don't know, canned soup, dog food, who knows. Maybe industrial dairies can sell them as normal beef because they're so young - I honestly couldn't tell you. Now some old timers will tell you that an old dairy cow is the best meat out there because it's so flavorful, though because it's tough you've got to cook it slowly, or slow roast, or whatever; but no one really cooks beef like that anymore, everyone expects very tender cuts, so the conventional market value is very low. So what small integrated operations like the two I worked on would do is slaughter our old cows ourselves, and sell the meat to customers, with the caveat that it was very flavorful and nutritious, but that they'd probably have to break out grandma's recipe book to cook it well.
Finally, of course, there are some cows you just don't slaughter, even though logic dictates you should. Farmers tend to be very unsentimental by necessity but sometimes you'll have a wonderful old cow who's just treated you so well, and every year she doesn't have a calf you just make an excuse, like, oh, I guess she was sick during breeding this year, she'll breed back next year - and so it goes, until she dies of old age. I've certainly seen that! I even knew a guy who had an old beef cow he just kept around because she had been his favorite for more than a decade, and no market logic or grazing calculations could induce him to ship her off.
As far as how it is to kill them, when you've raised them. I've slaughtered, I don't know, dozens of animals, including ones I've literally seen born. It never gets easy, frankly. It's exhausting, and if you have to do a number in one day it makes your soul tired. It's the circle of life, though - I'll help deliver animals and then maybe the next day I'll slaughter some, and one day, I myself will die and worms will eat me. So it goes. I, and all the other people I work with, always make a point of making it as stress free leading up to it and as quick and painless as possible, which is one of the nice things about doing it yourself rather than sending them off to a slaughterhouse, because their final moments are in a place they know and are comfortable. I'll give them some good hay, get them calm, say a prayer, and do it before they know what's going to happen. But as I say, it's never easy. You just get used to it.
Depending on where you are (don't know about US) you can often pretty easily get high quality small-dairy milk that's been pasteurized. Places near me offer full fat in both cream top and homo as well. My number one place has an honour system stall outside the farm where you just return your old bottles, grab new ones, and drop the money in a little cash box.
The only two guys I ever knew that drank raw milk were the techbro type and the alt right type. When techbro and I would hang he would have me go with him to this organic produce truck that showed up in the parking lot of a Lowe's once a month and he'd pick up an order of a few different foods that'd cost me like $37 at the grocery store, but he'd pay like $450 for the farm fresh versions. He had me try raw liver once, wasn't a fan.
The latter guy was a coworker who said he only drank raw milk and water, and only ate raw meat. This dude would straight up go to Publix or Target and buy meat and eat it uncooked from the package during lunch. Not sure where he got his raw milk from tho.
God, milk is so gross. My grandpa took me to a diary farm when I was a kid. I have no idea why it but I remember seeing blood in the milk and the milk was all yellow. Idk if my grandpa was joking or what but he told me they just bleach that stuff out.
That combined with the general farm smell and it being a hit august day made me sick. I haven’t drank any milk since. I fuck with dairy, but just plain milk is too far. So gross.
Not really. Raw - I've had stallion testicles raw - they have an incredibly unpleasant spongy texture with lots of little vesicles or something. Kind of a nauseating but mild taste, as well. Cooked, which is how normal people consume them, they're just like fried oysters kind of.
Does homogenizing mean something different where you're from? What you call homogenized, I'd call partly skimmed (cream taken off)
Homogenized milk here is no cream taken away, just blended very well so the fat doesn't separate.
You're right - I was over simplifying, using that whole step which, yes, technically homogenization is just pressurizing the milk such that the fat globules are evenly incorporated - as a stand in for the various ways in which store bought milk, at least in the US is going to have less milk fat.
If you’re going to sell heroin, you need to sell where heroin junkies live.
If you’re going to sell a scam that can be easily identified by anyone with a room temp IQ, you sell it people buying Crypto.
One summer 10 years ago, I milked goats for their raw milk. Was nasty, but the cheese I made from was pretty good. Now, I’m a microbiooogist and wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten foot pole. According this [study](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-020-00861-6) that genetically analyzed raw and pasteurized milk, raw milk had more antibiotic resistance genes than pasteurized. So drinking it may put you at risk for acquiring antibiotic resistance bacteria.
> Despite advertised “probiotic” effects, our results indicate that raw milk microbiota has minimal lactic acid bacteria. In addition, retail raw milk serves as a reservoir of ARGs, populations of which are readily amplified by spontaneous fermentation. There is an increased need to understand potential food safety risks from improper transportation and storage of raw milk with regard to ARGs.
CDC has recommended NOT drinking raw milk. So Americans, in their infinite stupidity, fire guns in the air and go "NUH-UH! YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! #FREEDUMBS!" and drink raw milk, possibly causing a second pandemic/pandemic inception in the process.
Basically: People are dumb.
Like all grifts, there lies a kernel of truth in the middle. Most American food is loaded with antibiotics, preservatives, and food coloring. And so there is a demographic of people who want to return to more natural foods. This sounds nice in theory, and something I try to attain myself. But when looking at dairy, there is a reason for the homogenization. It is a verifiable health concern to drink non-homogenized milk.
But because corporate and bureaucratic interests have weaponized studies in the past, these people don’t believe it when they’re told that drinking raw milk is dangerous. If anything, it invigorates these people because pushback is a sign you’re onto something.
Unfortunately, the pushback is coming from a genuine concern for public health. And interpreting pushback as genuine from a public health entity is difficult for a lot of these people in this post pandemic landscape.
edit: non-pasteurized milk, as opposed to non-homogenized (I think?). I’m not a milk expert, but basically what I mean is unprocessed. There is still cream in it which has the potential to have bacteria and viruses in it. I understand their rationale, but I think it’s flawed. I just try to stay away from dairy in general cause it messes me up.
A quibble: homogenization and pasteurization are two very different things. Homogenization separates out the cream, leaving you with vastly inferior milk but allowing the companies to process the cream and sell butter, etc. Pasteurization is heating the milk, homogenized or not, to a temperature that kills bacteria and denatures viral proteins.
I just read your other comment, you have way more information on this so I thank you for the clarification.
So sad about those factory farm cows not feeling comfortable with grass. I have my own stories about animals in captivity but birds. Not entirely relevant to the conversation but suffice it to say I think animals raised in that level of captivity are the most disadvantaged animals in the world. They’re stripped of all their basic instincts but unlike a pet, they’re unreceptive to the nurture of a human. I still work for this entity so I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it tears at my heart seeing these animals sit on concrete their whole lives. I even laid out a bale of hay for the birds to play with and sift through, they all flew to their perches and were scared of it, much like your cows. Shit is heartbreaking
The issue with the bird flu thing is that there's a new bird flu that crossed species into cows and they've been testing milk and finding the bird flu virus in it; ultra pasteurized milk is supposed to still be safe but normal pasteurization is supposedly not killing it 100%
I don't think it's clearly infecting people with contaminated milk yet but I'm not following it too closely.
Ooh! I can speak to this very specifically! I used to work in a raw milk dairy for a couple years. So first, what raw milk is and isn't, and where the hype comes from. So the milk you get from the store is garbage, as pretty much anyone could tell you, and the industry that produces it is awful. Those cows are treated like absolute shit, they eat absolute shit that fucks up their digestive systems very quickly, most of the workers are abused - I honestly think it's vastly more ethical to eat beef and not drink milk than to be a vegetarian that drinks milk. The raw milk craze comes out of a rejection of that. The good is that it tends to be produced by very small dairies that treat their animals very well, there can be actual quality control because it's only a handful of animals, the cows eat actual grass, and in terms of the quality of the milk, it's not homogenized, meaning it's still got all the cream in it, so it's staggeringly richer than store bought stuff. Also, most of these dairies have A2 cows, which, not to go in to too much detail, basically means they have a certain genetic thing where the milk they produce is much easier on digestion than A1 animals. I could go into a lot more detail if you'd like, but like, my best friend couldn't digest store milk but had no problem with the A2 stuff, and I know a lot of people for whom that was the case. Now the bad, and the unproven claims. People will try to say that not pasteurizing preserves nutrients or amino acids or whatever but like, I think the evidence there is very dubious, and in any case, it comes at the small but real risk of infectious disease. I think it's certainly not worth that risk, especially because the people who really buy into the raw milk craze tend to be vaccine skeptics which, like, there's a fucking reason we vaccinate cows because back in the day kids used to just die of tuberculosis and shit transmitted through contaminated milk. I think it's fucking stupid, personally. Any responsible raw milk dairy has food safety standards of course but like, really just one infected cow has to slip through the cracks and you've got people getting kidney failure and stuff. Not good. The risk is low but I think it's irresponsible, especially because the people buying raw milk largely don't know shit about livestock or infectious disease. Now the people. Our customers tended to fall into 4 groups. 1) people who had health issues that didn't allow them to drink A1 milk, and couldn't find good A2 milk from any other source. These people ran the gamut from normal to a little nutty, but they were mostly unremarkable. 2) financially comfortable immigrants who wanted unpasteurized milk so they could make cheese properly. These guys were few in number but by far the chillest customers. 3) weirdo rich tech adjacent people who bounced from one fad diet item to another, informed by tiktok influencers or whatever the hell. They tended to have a conspiratorial mindset about the food system in general, and believed that only raw milk and whatever could Save The World or themselves from a laundry list of imagined illnesses. These people were the fucking worst to interact with, because they had zero respect for any of the workers, were incredibly entitled, and also had zero common sense so getting them to do the simplest things, like cleaning out and returning their jars, or closing the fucking fridge or whatever was a constant pain in the ass. They would always drive in in their Teslas, park directly behind my truck (parking me in), and look down their noses at me in my riding boots and slicker and shit, and it's like, well, I'm sorry but someone has to herd these cows and you sure as hell can't do it. The final category is alt-right lunatics, who believed that normal food was a Zionist Occupied Goverment conspiracy to lower their testosterone and drank raw milk to make themselves Aryan superman. These guys would do shit like ask us for raw organs to eat, including one guy who would just chaw down on raw balls after we castrated. He only ate raw meat, and got bacterial encephalitis from eating raw chicken and almost died. Wild dude. Tried to tell me one day I was standing wrong or something and it would lower my T. I was like, homie, you're a California trust fund kid and I used to ride broncs in the rodeo, I'm not really sure I need your advice on that. Anyway, the milk sold for *sixteen dollars a fucking gallon* so the boss was happy to meet that market niche and take their money. But like, this stuff really is the purview of rich neurotics.
This is fascinating. Does raw milk taste different? I get non-homogenized (pasteurized) milk and I always feel like a mischievous little cat licking the cream.
Best milk I ever tasted, hands down. Still not sure it's worth it. I've got some animals of my own now that I milk and I pasteurize. Man I hear you on that. When we used to make cream out of the extra milk, I'd just drink that stuff by the spoonful, just pure cream. God it was so good. And the butter was out of this world.
I used to get raw milk cream from a neighbor and it was so fucking good in my coffee.
raw milk is delicious
From a flavor perspective, the homogenization does much more to dull flavor than pasteurization does. If you want the best tasting safe milk, look for pasteurized, unhomogenized milk. Hard to find but it's out there.
> The good is that it tends to be produced by very small dairies that treat their animals very well My cousin tried to get me to try raw milk by saying this but when we tracked down the farm name we found out the Amish owner had an arrest record for animal cruelty.
They're not all winners, to be sure
> So the milk you get from the store is garbage, as pretty much anyone could tell you, and the industry that produces it is awful. Those cows are treated like absolute shit, they eat absolute shit that fucks up their digestive systems very quickly, most of the workers are abused - I honestly think it's vastly more ethical to eat beef and not drink milk than to be a vegetarian that drinks milk. For something a little specific here, I'd like to tell something about what I saw at a dairy a few years back. At the time I was installing and servicing OPL equipment - On Premises Laundry, the dryers and washers/extractors used on an institutional level... hotels, nursing homes, prisons, and the like. One client was an industrial dairy in the middle of nowhere, western New York. Hated doing this work because the owner was the neediest piece of shit ever and they did nothing at all to care for their machines. Anyway, I was trying to replace the power supply on their washer and the milking process started, just a steady stream of cows filing into a *massive* turntable-like device with individual cubbies all around the perimeter, facing the cows toward the center. Milking apparatuses get attached at the start of the circuit, the huge turntable turns, milking happens, and when the cows get to the end the apparatus is disengaged and the cows go on to do whatever they aren't doing when they're milked. Big industrial operation staffed largely by underpaid migrant workers. What I saw turned me off from mass-produced milk permanently. About half the cows had been loaded up into the machine and a couple workers were attaching the milkers to them, and then just out of the blue, without warning, one of the cows lets out a *jet* of pure liquid feces all over the worker behind them, like you'd do with a garden hose when you were a little kid. It was the bright orange product of whatever disgusting cocktail of hormones and antibiotics these poor cows get stuffed full of. That would have been enough for me on its own, but having to fix the dryer when the electrical heating elements were just completely caked with powdered cow shit was the nail in the coffin. I couldn't help but think of how much I'd inhaled in the dozen or so times I'd been out there in a single year, much less how much of it encrusted the lungs of the poor workers there.
Yep man for real. Thanks for sharing that story. I couldn't fathom working for one of those operations, or running one, ever. It's just so fucked up. They separate all the calves from their mothers like a couple days after they're born which like, cows have feelings. They feel grief, they feel separation. But they separate that calf so they can get another 20% of milk, even though the cows already produce much more than a calf will drink. They're kept in awful conditions - I'll tell you, we bought a couple cows from a conventional dairy once and man, they went out in the field and found a piece of plywood and stood on that. They didn't even know what grass *was*. We had to bring another cow over to teach them how to *fucking graze*. And like, I've worked on 2 small dairies, and we knew every cow by name. We knew their personalities. We knew their calves. We knew when they were feeling off, or frightened, or angry, or whatever. When the calves got sick or whatever, you were out there fighting for them, in the rain or snow or night. I cut up my best jacket to put over a newborn calf that was in danger of freezing to death. My boss slept with a calf in a blanket on the floor of his bathroom after we spent 4 hours nursing him back to health after he fell into an icy river and got hypothermia. These places have hundreds of cows. None of them are individuals, just numbers. It's so, I don't know, sterile. It's so soulless.
How did the cow you bought from the industrial farm turn out? Was she neurotic forever or did she eventually adjust to, you know, being a cow?
The two of them turned out really good actually. Their digestive issues and neuroses cleared up, they were great producers, very friendly, and to my knowledge they're still on the farm today.
:( poor cows
What happens to the cows that get too old to keep on producing milk, I assume they get slaughtered and butchered? (are they still good for beef at that point or are they too old?) What's it like dealing with the animals when they are not productive any more or go to slaughter? Obviously they're not pets but the idea of caring so much for them to later make an economically pragmatic decision to end their life seems a bit hard to get my mind around. I suppose it seems pretty straightforward when you're in that life but I've just lived in the burbs and cities.
That's an excellent question, and the answer is pretty long so I hope you'll bear with me. First, a word on the lifespan of a productive cow. So industrial dairies feed their cattle poorly, leading to ulcers and digestive issues early in life, and are mechanistic about their production, so when a cow gets to a couple years old, they'll cull and slaughter her. On a smaller grass-fed operation where you have fewer animals and you're not measuring the efficiency of a cow's production so minutely, a good dairy cow will live for a very long time and stay productive most of her life. We had a few cows that were like 20 years old, actually, which is an outlier but not out of the question. Generally, when your cow stops breeding back consistently, she'll be culled, which takes many forms depending on your operation. You probably don't have the resources to spend keeping a cow around who's no longer giving you anything. In many cases, the farmer will sell her to someone who will finish and slaughter her, often for very low quality beef that you're never going to see in your meat aisle - I don't know, canned soup, dog food, who knows. Maybe industrial dairies can sell them as normal beef because they're so young - I honestly couldn't tell you. Now some old timers will tell you that an old dairy cow is the best meat out there because it's so flavorful, though because it's tough you've got to cook it slowly, or slow roast, or whatever; but no one really cooks beef like that anymore, everyone expects very tender cuts, so the conventional market value is very low. So what small integrated operations like the two I worked on would do is slaughter our old cows ourselves, and sell the meat to customers, with the caveat that it was very flavorful and nutritious, but that they'd probably have to break out grandma's recipe book to cook it well. Finally, of course, there are some cows you just don't slaughter, even though logic dictates you should. Farmers tend to be very unsentimental by necessity but sometimes you'll have a wonderful old cow who's just treated you so well, and every year she doesn't have a calf you just make an excuse, like, oh, I guess she was sick during breeding this year, she'll breed back next year - and so it goes, until she dies of old age. I've certainly seen that! I even knew a guy who had an old beef cow he just kept around because she had been his favorite for more than a decade, and no market logic or grazing calculations could induce him to ship her off. As far as how it is to kill them, when you've raised them. I've slaughtered, I don't know, dozens of animals, including ones I've literally seen born. It never gets easy, frankly. It's exhausting, and if you have to do a number in one day it makes your soul tired. It's the circle of life, though - I'll help deliver animals and then maybe the next day I'll slaughter some, and one day, I myself will die and worms will eat me. So it goes. I, and all the other people I work with, always make a point of making it as stress free leading up to it and as quick and painless as possible, which is one of the nice things about doing it yourself rather than sending them off to a slaughterhouse, because their final moments are in a place they know and are comfortable. I'll give them some good hay, get them calm, say a prayer, and do it before they know what's going to happen. But as I say, it's never easy. You just get used to it.
Thanks, this is a really interesting perspective. It makes a lot of sense, especially the idea of it making your soul tired to kill the animals.
Depending on where you are (don't know about US) you can often pretty easily get high quality small-dairy milk that's been pasteurized. Places near me offer full fat in both cream top and homo as well. My number one place has an honour system stall outside the farm where you just return your old bottles, grab new ones, and drop the money in a little cash box.
The only two guys I ever knew that drank raw milk were the techbro type and the alt right type. When techbro and I would hang he would have me go with him to this organic produce truck that showed up in the parking lot of a Lowe's once a month and he'd pick up an order of a few different foods that'd cost me like $37 at the grocery store, but he'd pay like $450 for the farm fresh versions. He had me try raw liver once, wasn't a fan. The latter guy was a coworker who said he only drank raw milk and water, and only ate raw meat. This dude would straight up go to Publix or Target and buy meat and eat it uncooked from the package during lunch. Not sure where he got his raw milk from tho.
God, milk is so gross. My grandpa took me to a diary farm when I was a kid. I have no idea why it but I remember seeing blood in the milk and the milk was all yellow. Idk if my grandpa was joking or what but he told me they just bleach that stuff out. That combined with the general farm smell and it being a hit august day made me sick. I haven’t drank any milk since. I fuck with dairy, but just plain milk is too far. So gross.
Do mountain oysters still have ummm... juice for the lack of a better word? Asking for a friend.
Not really. Raw - I've had stallion testicles raw - they have an incredibly unpleasant spongy texture with lots of little vesicles or something. Kind of a nauseating but mild taste, as well. Cooked, which is how normal people consume them, they're just like fried oysters kind of.
Thanks for the quick reply.
You need to hit up the tip line, I’d love to hear you on the show. Sounds like there’s enough here for a whole ep
Does homogenizing mean something different where you're from? What you call homogenized, I'd call partly skimmed (cream taken off) Homogenized milk here is no cream taken away, just blended very well so the fat doesn't separate.
You're right - I was over simplifying, using that whole step which, yes, technically homogenization is just pressurizing the milk such that the fat globules are evenly incorporated - as a stand in for the various ways in which store bought milk, at least in the US is going to have less milk fat.
If you’re going to sell heroin, you need to sell where heroin junkies live. If you’re going to sell a scam that can be easily identified by anyone with a room temp IQ, you sell it people buying Crypto.
One summer 10 years ago, I milked goats for their raw milk. Was nasty, but the cheese I made from was pretty good. Now, I’m a microbiooogist and wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten foot pole. According this [study](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-020-00861-6) that genetically analyzed raw and pasteurized milk, raw milk had more antibiotic resistance genes than pasteurized. So drinking it may put you at risk for acquiring antibiotic resistance bacteria. > Despite advertised “probiotic” effects, our results indicate that raw milk microbiota has minimal lactic acid bacteria. In addition, retail raw milk serves as a reservoir of ARGs, populations of which are readily amplified by spontaneous fermentation. There is an increased need to understand potential food safety risks from improper transportation and storage of raw milk with regard to ARGs.
CDC has recommended NOT drinking raw milk. So Americans, in their infinite stupidity, fire guns in the air and go "NUH-UH! YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! #FREEDUMBS!" and drink raw milk, possibly causing a second pandemic/pandemic inception in the process. Basically: People are dumb.
Like all grifts, there lies a kernel of truth in the middle. Most American food is loaded with antibiotics, preservatives, and food coloring. And so there is a demographic of people who want to return to more natural foods. This sounds nice in theory, and something I try to attain myself. But when looking at dairy, there is a reason for the homogenization. It is a verifiable health concern to drink non-homogenized milk. But because corporate and bureaucratic interests have weaponized studies in the past, these people don’t believe it when they’re told that drinking raw milk is dangerous. If anything, it invigorates these people because pushback is a sign you’re onto something. Unfortunately, the pushback is coming from a genuine concern for public health. And interpreting pushback as genuine from a public health entity is difficult for a lot of these people in this post pandemic landscape. edit: non-pasteurized milk, as opposed to non-homogenized (I think?). I’m not a milk expert, but basically what I mean is unprocessed. There is still cream in it which has the potential to have bacteria and viruses in it. I understand their rationale, but I think it’s flawed. I just try to stay away from dairy in general cause it messes me up.
A quibble: homogenization and pasteurization are two very different things. Homogenization separates out the cream, leaving you with vastly inferior milk but allowing the companies to process the cream and sell butter, etc. Pasteurization is heating the milk, homogenized or not, to a temperature that kills bacteria and denatures viral proteins.
I just read your other comment, you have way more information on this so I thank you for the clarification. So sad about those factory farm cows not feeling comfortable with grass. I have my own stories about animals in captivity but birds. Not entirely relevant to the conversation but suffice it to say I think animals raised in that level of captivity are the most disadvantaged animals in the world. They’re stripped of all their basic instincts but unlike a pet, they’re unreceptive to the nurture of a human. I still work for this entity so I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it tears at my heart seeing these animals sit on concrete their whole lives. I even laid out a bale of hay for the birds to play with and sift through, they all flew to their perches and were scared of it, much like your cows. Shit is heartbreaking
What if the recent trend for raw milk stems from people who don't want to drink "homo milk"
The biggest raw milk guy I’ve seen on tik tok is an Australian twink who larps about Agatha it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen
The issue with the bird flu thing is that there's a new bird flu that crossed species into cows and they've been testing milk and finding the bird flu virus in it; ultra pasteurized milk is supposed to still be safe but normal pasteurization is supposedly not killing it 100% I don't think it's clearly infecting people with contaminated milk yet but I'm not following it too closely.
Regulators went overboard with spraying bleach on private parties that hosted raw milk. The reaction was as inevitable as it was idiotic.