Raw Milk

One of the most dangerous fads about the food we eat is that unpasteurized milk is more healthful than pasteurized milk. Some people believe that pasteurization removes certain nutrients from the milk. I don’t know any other arguments in favor of raw milk, but I grew up on a farm, and I know what goes into the milk bucket besides milk when you milk a cow by hand.


Cows are evil animals, and they like to put their hoofs into your bucket of milk. Their hoofs are typically covered with manure, as are their tails, which swing to and fro above the bucket. So we strained our milk and sent it to the creamery, where the workers got rid of the small particles of manure and its diseases by pasteurizing it. We then used part of the money we got paid for our milk and bought pasteurized milk for our own consumption.


Nowadays, dairy farmers use milking machines that make it impossible for a cow to put her hoof into the milk. The farmers wash each cow’s teats before attaching the machine, but cows don’t sleep on clean sheets every night, so the dairy farmer can’t always get the teats perfectly clean. The milk truck comes around every day, collects the milk, and takes it to the creamery for pasteurization.


But for reasons unknown to your aging farm boy, some people want unpasteurized milk. Because dairy farmers use milking machines, they’re somewhat unlikely to get manure in their milk, and some people buy raw milk from dairy farmers willing to sell it to them. What’s left to worry about? I’ll tell you what’s left.


Tuberculosis. That’s what. Louis Pasteur didn’t go to a great deal of trouble just to invent a better milkshake.


Some diseases that kill animals can also kill humans. Tuberculosis is one of those diseases. Some animals can transmit their diseases to humans. Cows can transfer their tuberculosis to humans. How? Drink a nice cold glass of raw milk from a cow that has tuberculosis, and you can have tuberculosis, too. Or you can drink pasteurized milk from that cow until it dies, and you’ll never get that cow’s tuberculosis.


In Iowa, the state where I live, specialists from the Department of Agriculture routinely test all milk cows for tuberculosis, but it’s impossible to destroy all the tuberculosis microorganisms in every milk cow in Iowa. This is also true for all the other milk cows anywhere in the world.


In Iowa and throughout the United States, as a matter of law, grocery stores may sell only pasteurized milk. During a recent visit to the local Hy-Vee Food Store, I counted seven brands of milk, all of which said “Pasteurized” on the labels. These seven brands included Lactaid, Land O’ Lakes, Anderson Erickson, Hy-Vee, Roberts, Organic Valley (”Ultra Pasteurized”), and Country Fare.


I explained all the arguments in favor of pasteurized milk to a friend many decades ago, but she ignored me. One day I happened to drop by her house just when she was bringing in the groceries. I sat on a kitchen chair while my friend’s gallon of milk sat on the counter beside the refrigerator. The woman put groceries here and there and finally turned toward the milk. She peered at the gallon of whiteness for a few seconds. “What’s that on the jar?” she said.


“That?” I said with my innocent farm-boy voice. “That’s cow manure.”


My friend stopped drinking raw milk.