What is raw milk and why does it matter?; I try my hand at science writing

Milking by hand is at once strenuous, kind of gross, and great fun (I admit I often find the last two to be synonymous). Cow teats: wrinkled, squishy, and limp. There’s a trick to squeezing them downward to get the milk out, and then aiming into the milk bucket rather than your boots. I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it - I did Sunday night’s milking solo!

We usually get about a gallon of milk with each milking, which happens twice a day. It goes in the milk fridge, which is *always* full of milk. So much milk! They make kefir (essentially a yogurt equivalent) and skim the cream to make sour cream (the skimmed milk goes to the chickens); I made butter once, and I kind of want to try my hand at cheese.

What this means, though, is that we’re drinking raw milk – a contentious substance and topic in the world of food. Depending on who’s doing the talking, raw milk is either a healthful panacea or a deadly poison. It’s been a little difficult for me to sort out the facts from the two polarized viewpoints, but I think I’ve finally got the gist.

The main trouble is that cows everywhere don’t care if they get a little brown and crusty with stuff that’s only partly mud. No matter how careful people are, milk is still going to be a bit contaminated – this holds for milking done by both hand and machine. If raw milk is allowed to stay warm for too long it can start growing populations of bacteria that can cause food poisoning. When you’re only milking one or two cows, it’s easy to take the milk straight to the kitchen, filter it, and put it in the fridge to prevent that. But when you’re milking a hundred cows with a milking machine, it’s much harder to prevent bacterial growth: the milk cools more slowly when it’s collected in a big tank where fresh, warm milk constantly coming in, and the more equipment involved in the process the harder it is to make sure that everything is clean for every milking. Add the equipment and time for shipping and processing at a central plant, and the risk of dangerous contamination increases. That’s why mass-produced milk is pasteurized – by heating the milk, all the bacteria are killed and the milk can sit safely on the grocery store shelf for longer.

The raw milk enthusiasts point out that pasteurization denatures the enzyme lactase, which helps to break down the sugar in milk (lactose) and make it more digestible and bio-available; they also hold that the low level of microbes in fresh and safely stored raw milk is good for one’s immune system. I can attest that the raw milk we’re drinking is safe and delicious, and we can enjoy it because we’re being safe and careful with it. For anyone who’s dead-set on drinking raw milk but can’t keep a cow, the most trustworthy and safest raw milk will be the same stuff the farmer and her or his family are drinking.