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When I was a kid, we lived in a village in northeastern Slovakia. On the hill above the village there was a farm with a big herd of cows. And every morning at a
by mngnt 5y ago
When I was a kid, we lived in a village in northeastern Slovakia. On the hill above the village there was a farm with a big herd of cows. And every morning at around 5, a tractor would bring a few dozen litres of milk down to a small shack just by our house. People were usually waiting in line already, in a room that stank of rancid milk, to get a liter or two.
When we brought the milk home, we'd pour a cup and let it sit a few minutes, to let the cream to get to the top. You could see the line between milk and cream with your eye an scoop the cream with a spoon. We drank the cream, it could have been 20% by volume, we made cocoa with the milk and no one got sick that I remember. I believe it was because we were usted to it, an "untrained" person would get sick too.
Then one year they put up a sign, saying the milk should only be used as animal feed and a few years back the laws changed again and there was no more selling and drinkig grey market raw milk, because someone decided for all the people that it's dangerous.
I thing my distaste of regulations and prohibitions can be traced back to that time.
Funny thing, I think I would get violenty sick if I tried raw milk again... The law is a self fulfilling prophecy.
- RC_ITR 5y agoIt’s amazing that in a supposedly science-driven forum, an entire set of comments can imply that pasteurization, one of humanity’s great accomplishments, is a folly. People die from drinking raw milk. It is genuinely a risky thing to do. Not everyone will die but enough that society should work hard to limit it as much as possible.
- oneepic 5y agoIt's just a forum. People share science AND personal stories.
- rtpg 5y ago“I did this and was fine. Therefore I think it is fine” is half of these stories. It is of course possible to say “I was fine but probably was lucky”, which is at least acknowledging that food science is a thing and probably closer to the truth than your singular personal experience. GP is pointing out that people take personal stories and turn them into some science-sounding conclusion. If the internet existed in the 18th century people would talk about how London didn’t have sanitation systems but loads of people survived so all this nonsense about sewage management is silly.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI'm seeing "it was fine for me", nobody recommending that raw milk is a good and healthy choice...
- rtpg 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809457 Heavy implication that the rules don’t make sense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809207 Making some argument that our bodies could handle it if we had more bacteria https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809218 Literal “I was fine so it’s fine” Lots of “is this just factory farming being an issue” comments which are at least in good faith and usually questions, though! So people are trying to get more details It’s not every comment but lots of it.
- chii 5y agoI think instead of straight prohibit, raw milk should be purchasable if the buyer understands the dangers, and knows how to treat their own usage so that it's safe - for example, they boil it themselves. There's plenty of things that are dangerous and can kill you, but we don't and shouldn't prohibit it all. Instead, society should aim to educate, and also put in warning labels etc.
- saagarjha 5y agoGenuinely curious: why would you want to pasteurize your own milk? I get the “homemade cake” reasoning for desserts but I see very little benefit to pasteurizing milk yourself.
- ngngngng 5y agoI don't care if it's pasteurized by me or someone else, I just don't want it homogenized. It's more fun that way.
- deserted 5y agoYou can pasteurize it yourself with very little extra effort when making espresso drinks, since you need to heat the milk with a steam wand anyway. The flavor and especially foam of a cappuccino are slightly better when made with self-pasteurized-while steaming raw milk vs equivalent non raw Jersey milk in my at home blind taste tests.
- idontwantthis 5y agoIf you understand the danger then is a hospital still required to treat you? That’s private benefit and socialized risk. If you’re going to be taking communal resources then you should need to uphold some community standards.
- onionisafruit 5y agoAre you calling hacker news a science-driven forum? It was created by venture capitalists for venture capitalists and their employees. I don’t mean this in a negative way. HN is what it is and I love it. But don’t confuse it with a scientific journal.
- lupire 5y agoHN is a forum for people who are even smarter than scientists. It's the most rational, as seen by how much money users make, or will soon.
- novok 5y agoI don't think people are saying it's a folly, but that it does taste better and have better nutrition, if you can get it at it's absolutely freshest. Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most. Also pasteurization was invented in the mid 1800s, while mass market electric refrigeration was invented in in the early 1900s. Before that it was a bunch of awkward ice boxes, and not used much.
- tsimionescu 5y ago> Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most. Fresh milk from a dirty udder, or from an infected cow, or sitting in a bucket that has traces of yesterday's milk, is not safe to drink. Pasteurization (or boiling or fermentation and other preservation methods before that) are all ways to make pretty sure that the milk is safe to drink, regardless of freshness.
- zuminator 5y agoI'm not going to advocate in favor of drinking raw milk. But on the other hand, there are a lot of smug responses here totally discounting the experiences of the rural-dwelling commenters who have apparently been drinking milk raw safely for years. "It's risky." Absolutely. On the other hand, the entire reason many adult humans are lactose tolerant to begin with is that humans have been drinking cows milk for thousands of years. Milk pasteurization has been around for less than 200 of them. Clearly raw milk consumption was safe enough for humans to evolve a mutation permitting us to chug even more of it. So maybe let's not be so quick to jeer at the people here who report they have been doing it with no ill effects. Especially since most of them don't appear to be proselytizing, just relaying their personal experience. I agree there's no need for anyone to drink milk raw in the 21st century, and that it is always going to have some inherent risk compared with drinking pasteurized milk. The same can be said for many uncooked foodstuffs that we consume, and other enjoyable but non-risk-free activities we undertake.
- iamacyborg 5y agoWas drinking milk a significant part of human diets or did they consume milk processed in a variety of ways? ie cheese, yoghurt, rancid butter (in North African cuisine), etc.
- RC_ITR 5y agoYou're discounting the stories of all the people in those communities who dies of TB. It's indicative of the similar problem of vaccine hesitance - everyone remembers their grandparents living, and not the 2-3 great uncles/aunts who died before they bore children. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:text=tuberculosis%20complex%2C%20is%20a%20pathogen,human%20TB%20caused%20by%20M https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
- watwut 5y agoI think that what you do here is fallacy. And very typical one for HN, where you ignore details and extrapolate original statement to mean something else. OP did not said pasteurizarion is folly. You do it to preserve milk for longer term. Which something entirely different then drinking milk right after it was taken out of cow.
- RC_ITR 5y agoUh, I think you're the uninformed one here. People catch TB from milk that comes from a cow that also has TB, regardless of how 'fresh' the milk is. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:text=tuberculosis%20complex%2C%20is%20a%20pathogen,human%20TB%20caused%20by%20M https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te.... EDIT: This is exactly the problem that I am trying to point out. You (likely an otherwise very educated person) assume that pasteurization is intended to preserve milk because that is the (unscientific) tone of these comments, when in fact that is very far from the reason (you can preserve unpasteurized milk as yogurt/cheese, we've known how to do that for centuries, but it will still potentially give you TB).
- lupire 5y agoAlmost none of the comments show awareness of the difference between fresh raw milk and week old rotten raw milk, a distinction that by design does not exist in pasteurized milk. Also, some commenters ignore the relevant distinction between pasteurization and homogenization and fat separation.
- RC_ITR 5y agoJust to make a very important distinction here: Bacteria like TB do not need a significant time out of the udder to infect a human with TB. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:text=tuberculosis%20complex%2C%20is%20a%20pathogen,human%20TB%20caused%20by%20M https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
- rtpg 5y agoIf you made cocoa you boiled the milk right? Thats you pasteurizing the milk, right? I’ll also contend that you probably did get sick but did not put 2 and 2 together at the time (just like how loads of people run around with a cough and a fever and are like “yeah but it’s not COVID”). The whole “I drink this all the time so it’s fine” is basically the whole point of food sanitation things in general. High risk stuff is still not going to be a 100% thing, so it’s harder to figure out the correlation without large scale efforts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- watwut 5y ago> you made cocoa you boiled the milk right? Thats you pasteurizing the milk, right? No, there is no reason to boil it. But put sugary chocholate powder in it and mix. > I’ll also contend that you probably did get sick but did not put 2 and 2 together at the time No, the practice of drinking raw milk was super common in villages in that region. If you drink it fresh, the bakterias has no time to develop yet. If sickness was so sure, people would be sick constantly.
- paganel 5y agoI commented about it above, also, we (me and my brother) used to do the same thing when we were kids, in rural Romania (a village near the Carpathians). Immediately after our grandma or our our grandpa had finished milking the cows we (meaning me and my brother) would eat out with a spoon the foam-y thing that was forming on top of the bucket full of milk that had just come out of the cows. We did that my entire childhood (so from when when I was about 5 to my early 20s, so into my early adulthood), never had any health-related issues with it. In fact that is one of my fondest memories when it comes to my grandparents.
- michaelmrose 5y agoYou for practical purposes can't easily immunize yourself to bad milk by exposure. The problem is two fold. In the first place there are over 2500 types of salmonella identified and surely more extant and as a product of metabolism they produce toxins that are deleterious to your health Salmonella being only one culprit as well. You are probably as safe as you ever were. Your idyllic view of the past may have other challenges in terms of perspective. Firstly we tend to remember the good things and forget the bad especially since food poisoning can have an incubation of 1-2 days we may blame one sort of food stuff instead of another or forget that we were incautious with raw foods in the kitchen the night before and blame a restaurateur without good cause. We also may not differentiate between an illness brought on by food and one from a bug. This rose colored view is especially easy to adopt if we remember pleasant consumption and the costs were borne by another. Even with education and standards we have 48 million cases of food borne illness in the US and 3000 deaths annually. This brings is to scale. Pasteurization can be trivially adopted at scale and has been shown to be effective. Maybe your dairy was highly sanitary had excellent practices that enabled a very much above average performance. Replicating it all over creation may not be tenable but universal pasteurization is. If you want to see an interesting account of the real "good old days" before either of us were born you may peruse this. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-fight-bacteria-ridden-milk-embalming-fluid-180970473/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-f... To maximize profits milk was thinned with water then recolored with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust with formaldehyde added to preserve freshness. Pureed cow brains stood in for rich cream and in addition to all the current maladies like listeria and salmonella consumers had to worry about bovine tuberculosis, undulant fever, scarlet fever, typhoid, and diphtheria. > Those were the days my friend We thought they'd never end We'd sing and dance forever and a day We'd live the life we choose We'd fight and never lose For we were young and sure to have our way