Raw milk makes sense

There was much discussion about raw milk at the recent Weston A Price Foundation conference held near Chicago, Illinois. As this writer was not able to witness all of the lectures personally, this will be a layman's perspective on why raw milk is the better, healthier choice over pasteurized milk. This will be, essentially, a question of common sense and of history.

It is probably ingrained within each of us not only to strive for personal and cultural betterment, but also the assumption of it as well. This is a grave mistake that is nearly always overlooked until it is too late, whereupon something catastrophic occurs to remind us of our humanity. We as humans simply assume that progress is good in and of itself, and that assumption could not have been more wrong than in the application of pasteurization to the process of milk production.

Before pasteurization, all milk was raw or fermented. People have consumed milk since Biblical times or earlier. It is plain, common sense that had raw milk actually ever been as dangerous as we typically assume now, we would not be alive today. But it wasn't and isn't dangerous - not until mankind decided, due to rising urban pressures and industrialization, to try to streamline the process. The poor sanitary conditions of the cows and workers used in this streamlining process only contributed to the deaths of many people - especially infants over the coming years of industrialization. The only solution, then, for massive dairies to provide milk free from contamination was to pasteurize it, thus killing all the good parts along with the bad.

Around the time of World War II there arose a media-driven attack on local, farm-raised milk. Who knows? Perhaps the owners of such magazines as Ladies Home Journal, The Progressive, or Reader's Digest were friends with major mainstream dairy producers and were, God forbid, financially motivated to denounce opposition to their producer friends. However it happened, the smear campaign against milk successfully frightened the people into believing that "raw milk can kill you".  Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of years of history were forgotten with the wave of a dollar.

Decades passed then, with the proponents of industrial dairies having apparently "won" the battle of the cow. But truth never goes away and is always remembered and practiced by a very few. Today, thanks to unavoidable news such as E.Coli infected, mass-produced beef, or the more recent swine flu, the public slowly begins to awaken, sleepy-eyed and stretching, to the abominable state of industrial agriculture. People are beginning to talk to their neighbors who raise cattle and drink their raw milk - and learning that nothing harmful is happening to them! Isn't it amazing? Then those people get online and share it with more friends, and the word spreads.

The cow is considered wealth in many countries, and has been considered wealth in almost all countries in the past. People are finally realizing once again that milk is life, and doesn't need to be pasteurized killed.

---

Resources:

• http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/milk_history.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk#History
• http://greenlivingjournal.com/page.php?p=1025
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/business/global/17iht-rbofmilk.html