“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”
…
“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens.
I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them.
Later that day, I learned otherwise.
“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”
Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.
The thing that pisses me off the most in all of this is the fact that it’s not the pasteurization that changes how milk is processed in the gut the most, it’s homogenization.
Dude could make his milk 100% as safe and industrial milk if he just pasteurized it and left the long-chain milkfats and solids alone.
It’s when the milk is homogenized, after the cream is separated that the fat chains are shattered and the gut absorbs the fats, instead of passing them through.
You won’t get the shits from whole raw milk and as you get older and you can consume cream and butter and it doesn’t cause digestive problems.
I lived on a farm and we traded eggs for milk from a neighbor that had two Jersey cows, We’d get a gallon glass jug of milk from her and it would sit in the fridge and the cream would separate… dad would skim it off and it would be used for coffee and baking and the remainder was for us to drink and whooooo… Jersey cows have the highest milkfat content of all the breeds… It was creamy, rich and filling.
Would go to school with nothing but a glass of milk in the morning and was fine - all through my junior and senior years… If there was a question that the milk got a bit of something in it, (usualy the cow would flick it’s tail while getting milked, or hair would get in the pail…) she’d let us know so we’d just coddle the milk for 15 to 30 seconds at 165 degrees farenheits…
The rest of it, that cooking depletes nutrient quality, it’s baloney. It’s the homogenization that causes more degradation of the milk quality than anything. It’s all bullshit marketing since the mid-60’s anyhow, FFS, in the 1950’s “skim milk” was considered unfit for human consumption because it had been stripped of most of the milkfats and solids. (which, honestly, the solids are gross to those who’ve not encountered them…)
This farmer’s a jackass. Coddle the milk, dipshit, if it’s making people sick because you’ve got too many cows to maintain a clean milking environment. Feh!