I'd sometimes walk into the barn to find them cleaning a cow's udder. Germans are nothing if not meticulous.

The milk from the cows went into a vat from which it was dispensed. No contact with their equipment.

That was the only time in life I've enjoyed cow's milk. Pasteurization and homogenization have their place, but as with orange juice, once you start fucking with it, you lose why people liked it in the first place. In both cases, marketing sailed to the rescue, telling you the product was still just as good.

They prefer their milk darwinized.

they think

you give em too much credit

I was briefly interested in raw milk in the early 2000s. There was a lot of info floating around about how pasteurization destroyed beneficial bacteria that healthy people could benefit from, to avoid risk to those with compromised immune systems, infants and elderly, etc. The gut microbiome was just starting to be talked about, and we didn't know much, but people were curious about improving it.

Fortunately I did a little digging and realized it was a fairly radical and unproven concept, but it's not just the belief they're adding something harmful. It's the belief they're removing beneficial bacteria that would somehow improve our health.

Considering how the last 20 years have been full of mostly unproven probiotic and prebiotic marketing insanity, it's not surprising, it's the same base concept. But science has been demonized since then, people actively think science and medicine is trying to keep us unhealthy now, and the top levels of government are promoting that bullshit.

Yeah, the problem is these people bond over being ignorant pieces of shit.

It gets to the point where everyone is supposed to know the "meta" information and anyone who tries to be serious about something is ridiculed.

Google find me a website about why pasteurization is bad.

ChatGPT explain why raw milk is good and pasteurized milk is bad.

Imo these people are often being served what they want. The easiest things to do may be a series of truth in advertising related laws:

A) make chatbot companies liable for anything a chatbot tells a user (regardless of disclaimers),

B) a law that encodes similar levels of editorial process for large websites and social media power users as wikipedia: citations needed for any claim. (Note such a law would probably kill the right wing media overnight, if enforced)

C) affiliation disclosure requirements. For both social media users and websites. Farmers selling raw milk shouldn't also be hosting misinfo sites on pasteurization.

And finally: D) media algorithm transparency

Good point. Sadly it's too easy to spread misinformation and remain unchecked.

Rugged individualism is a cancer that prevents us from enacting change on systems.

I'm all for going after people who purposely spread misinformation. But I don't think this is solely on them. It's to easy to just blame them and absolve the individual of any responsibility of critical thought. It's not like information about pasteurized milk and the benefits isn't readily available. But they choose to ignore it, so that's on them too.

Can't fix stupid, I guess. These are the same people that would fall for the "there's chemicals in water, called DHMO!" meme.

They swear its not pasteurization though, that’s something different and bad.

That French, Yurrupeen socialism.

Dying by the shits is the way God intended.

It's nice that heating milk kills bacteria and viruses; but doing it too much can damage taste and nutrition. That's why I've been experimenting with ways to minimize the temperature and time needed to sanitize milk without otherwise damaging it. The deep state will never get me to drink pasturized milk!

This is survival of the poorly educated, poorly resourced, poorly connected communities.

Or this is the "find out" moment for a MAGA housewife who spent the last year cheering on RFK Junior and yellilng about the "woke agenda" of pasteurization.

The point is, we don't know. But since RAW milk is both more expensive AND more inconvenient to obtain, I'm going to go with my theory over a poor mother.

The baby hadn't been born yet. The would-be mother drank unpasteurized "raw" milk.

That's not a case of being poor or poorly resourced. It's a lot harder to source unpasteurized milk than it is to find milk that is safe to drink. You have to really go out of your way to buy that!

Actually it's not a failure of the poorest of societies. Most the people that are these raw milk drinkers are usually people that are middle class to well off. The poorer end of the spectrum normally just purchase whatever regular milk is in the store cuz that's usually what WIC or mom and baby or whatever else is paying for.

Same, but source contol is a real method that works for this kind of thing when done well.

Europe does source control with eggs. By very strictly monitoring sources they can prevent outbreaks and don't need to soak eggs in a chlorine solution like we do here.

This is probably why people apply a similar logic to pasteurization. Pasteurization is a heat process for milk and therefore far less of a problem than egg chlorination baths (which notably puts organohalides into the drainwater which may or may not degrade before going elsewhere.)

What shouldn't be allowed is not fucking doing any kind of process to reduce infections and letting people get sick. Especially because healthcare is privatized here.

I can’t fathom a reason why pasteurization shouldn’t be required.

some fancy old fashioned dairy products which I cannot name need some of the microbes in raw milk to be made.

It should be a fucking hobbyist product, and sold at specialised stores, not in fucking "tescos" or whatever the yankee equivalent is.

meh..can always have more kids....

“The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said of her other four surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.

Well, ideally we could implement some sort of requirements for procreation.

Unfortunately any such restrictions quickly becomes eugenics. It seems like we could find a little space between some racial purity bullshit and "Dem doctors up in that hospital are killin' lil Cooter Jr with all dem fucking needles, injectin' him full of the 5g microchips and the autism!"

But, if you just dial the resolution back: it's not their kids - their stupid is killing the whole species as well as the biosphere. Ergo, nature is healing..

Kinda yeah. These people want folks like us oppressed or dead for the crime of existing, no empathy for them

Thanks jenny mccarthy!

I remember some guy from work telling me that raw milk is drinkable by the lactose intolerant.

That's when I knew to steer clear of talking to that guy about very much...and this was about 15 years ago.