Raw Milk vs. Peanuts

Never question how byzantine the legal code might be.... In Texas, it's legal to SELL a 'bong', but illegal to possess it...

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

I fail to see the connection between the sale of peanuts and raw milk. It's an apples to oranges thing. Do you really want to compare raw milk to peanuts? If you do that, you'd have to consider expanding your list of dangerous products to include just about everything sold in a grocery store. You'd probably have to ban just about everything else. Bees cause tons of severe allergic reactions. I'd guess that we have get rid of honey. I mean we can't keep bees anymore and honey is downright dangerous for kids under the age of one.

I cannot imagine how anybody who sells raw milk can get insurance. Liability issues have to be tremendous.

I like raw milk. Tastes wonderful. The government tests pasteurized milk and herds. How do you do that with raw milk? How many raw milk producers will submit to this? How do you get good quality control?

While talking about apples and orange comparisons, why in the world did you, OP, compare the raw milk debate to schizophrenia? I'm sure those who live with mental health disorders and their families appreciate such comments.

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Moms don't look at things like normal people.
-----DD

I guess that I am that OP.

The reason that, at least here in Ohio, the Dept of Ag says that raw milk is too dangerous. They act as if everything else is safe.

Some farmers that sell raw milk routinely have the exact same tests that are done for any Grade A Dairy. Some of them strive to have a bacteria count LOWER than what is allowed in pasteurized milk.

If you do not like the term schizophrenic.........I have a son with that diagnosis. If you do not understand how that term can be used for more situations than a mental illness, then you may want to expand your horizons. Yes, I take that as an insult that you imply that I am insensitive to my own son!!!!.............and you know me????.......

If it helps, you can read the second definition of scizophrenia:
Psychiatry . Also called dementia praecox. a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.
2. a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.

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"When you are having dinner with someone and they are nice to you, but rude to the waiter, then this is not a nice person.".....Dave Barry

Do you know that the kind of TB cows get is not the same as humans get? And that it's not transferrable? Yet, TB in cows was one of the first pushes to pasteurize milk because humans with TB were handling the milk. Read "Devil in the Milk".

Every dang one of them had better! When my cow had full blown mastitis - her Somatic Cell Count (white blood cell count) was 34,000. Over 100,000 SCC is allowed. Plate count was -1 (that's how clean the eqiupment is) When I couldn't get the SCC count down - we had her milk tested further and found pseudomonas bacteria - incurable. Can you imagine a herd with a count of 100,000 and what it could be carrying? And yet, they can be deemed perfectly safe since the milk is pasteurized. I wonder what process takes all that dead bacteria OUT of the milk? Oh - it doesn't. You're still drinking it - but it's dead so don't worry.

Opps, I was wrong......


http://www.agriview.com/articles/200...ws/dairy02.txt
[COLOR="black"][COLOR="black"]Rankin led off by discussing the familiar “SCC,” or “somatic cell count.” Somatic cells are simply white blood cells. The number of somatic cells rises in response to the presence of bacteria such as Staph. aureus, one cause of mastitis.

He noted that milk containing a SCC of as high as 750,000 per milliliter is legal to sell in the U.S.

However, some milk processors penalize farmers by deducting from their pay price for milk at 750,000 SCC or even at some levels below that. Rankin noted that one processor, for example deducts 90 cents per hundredweight for milk at 700,000 SCC. That processor also deducts 40 cents for milk with a 600,000 SCC.

Yummy!!!

I have bare arms when I wear Tshirts. :banana02:

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i see what the op is saying...why the big up in arms against raw milk when tobacco, alcohol and foods that are well known to cause severe allgegies arnt regulated...
why is raw milk SOOOOO evil compared to the other things that it alone out of the group mentioned is illegal to sell for human consumption...

not once did i read the op stating peanuts should be banned as some seem to suggest in thie thread but instead the opposite, that since the controls over the likes of potential deadly allergens are fairly lax, why not loosen up the rules on raw milk...
add a warning label that the milk is not pasturized, and let people make their own desicions...

if
"may contain peanuts" is enough to cover the butts for peanut allergys...
"not pasturized" should be more than enough too!

BUT as others have pointed out...
its all in the money...
and the raw milk movment isnt currently large enough or bringing in enough money to fight the strict legislation like tobacco and alcohol execs can.

i did want to make a note that not all people have allergies becuase they were sheltered oversanitized kids...

im allergic to bees and latex, but not because my parents bubblewrapped me as a kid...
ive been stung more times than i care to count (yay for er visits lol) and its still not reduced the allergy...and the latex one..well now alot of products are latex free so that helps avoid it, but im still allergic to a number of foods that have the latex realted proteins (kiwi for example)
sorry just a random side note lol.

I'd suggest instead that you read Jerad Diamond's text "Guns, Germs, and Steel", a history of evolutionary forces that shaped the development of human civilizations.

One of the primary themes in the book is the transmission of animal diseases to humans. Tuberculosis from cows, measles from pigs, flu from ducks, Salmonella from chickens. Since my own mother was a farm girl that contracted tuberculosis herself, and am accutely aware of it's dangers.

Also, as a professional food microbiologist, I have visited firms processing milk into dairy products, and I can get down on my knees to show how grateful I am that the milk they use has be pasturized before they can process it!

And now with all the biosecurity that is demanded on the dairy farms. Even a vet can not go from farm to farm without changing clothes. They have really stepped up the cleanliness of farms. The farms I go to are constantly washing floors keeping this so clean most are clearer now then most peoples houses.
The milk is never ever handled, goes from cow directly into the tankers. Never to even see the light of day or exposed to the air. Yes the huge dairy farms of today are way more clean then any barns were ever in the past.

The issue is not safety! The issue is: we should have a right to make our own food choices!!!!

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A friend of mine worked for several years as a DHIA tester, and now will not drink any milk from a store.......it was not the manure on the floors......it was the manure and urine that occasionally got sucked up by the occasional milker falling off the cow.

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"When you are having dinner with someone and they are nice to you, but rude to the waiter, then this is not a nice person.".....Dave Barry

I have neither used nor heard of a milker which could suck up anything after it was no longer connected to a cow's udder! They are NOT like a shop vacuum cleaner!

Martin

Exactly! I am responsible to determine what is safe for me and mine to eat or not. I can decide if I want to risk pasturized milk or not -if homegrown is most important or it I want to indulge in a 1400-fat-grams steak. It should be MY choice - not someone 3000 miles from my food sources with an agenda to pay back their friends that got them elected to office.

And you're sure she got it from cow's milk? What form did she have?

From realmilk.com
Critical analysis would conclude that the transmission of bovine tuberculosis from milk to a human would only occur under a set of extremely uncommon circumstances:

•If the infection originated in the cow's milk, the cow would need to have active tuberculosis in the udder (i.e., tuberculous mastitis—an extraordinarily rare form of the disease and not to be confused with common mastitis), or tuberculous ulcers on her teats. Both conditions would be apparent to a vigilant farmer.
•A farmer with tuberculosis could contaminate milk during handling, but the farmer would need to have active disease and would likely be noticeably sick.
•It is theoretically possible for an uninfected farmer to physically contaminate milk with secretions from an infected cow, but those secretions would only contain the bacteria if that cow had active lung or throat disease.
•It is theoretically possible for milk to be contaminated in the dairy parlor from airborne particles originating from a cow with active tuberculosis, from either the cow being milked or from one that had distributed infected secretions in the parlor in the past.
•And theoretically it is possible for tubercle bacteria from a cow with intestinal tuberculosis shedding into manure to be the source of fecal contamination in milk.
All these circumstances are extremely unlikely, and to my knowledge not one of these theoretical cases has ever been documented. And finally, in all of these cases, the humans who ingested the infected or contaminated milk would develop tuberculosis in the mouth or neck lymph nodes, or in the intestine, not in the lungs.

and

It is quite common for public health officials when issuing reports or news releases to state with emphasis that it is well documented that Mycobacterium bovis can be found in milk from infected cows; however, objective review of the research literature contradicts this allegation. Even in countries where bovine tuberculosis is uncontrolled, where infected dairy herds are common, and infections in a few humans are well known, researchers have repeatedly failed to find any bovine tuberculosis organisms in the fresh milk.

In 2010 the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System took reports of over 5,000 people in the US that year that were killed or permanently disabled within one day of receiving a vaccination.
That’s about 13 a day. Sure, some of that data is coincidental but clearly my point is there are two sides to every decision.

There is risk to vaccinate or not. A risk to consume pasteurized milk or not. In my state the government has decided they are the ones who will make that decision for me.

For some reason I’m free to smoke 10 packs a day, but I can’t buy or sell raw milk. I think there is more than my best interest driving those laws.

My ancient Surge vacuum pump and belly milker can maintain suction for a short time if only one inflation falls off.

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"When you are having dinner with someone and they are nice to you, but rude to the waiter, then this is not a nice person.".....Dave Barry

About 25 years ago, I was at a meeting that included mostly physicians. One of the topics had to do with vaccinations. The question was....."There will always be side-effects from vaccinations. We are close to the point where we will have more people dying from side-effects from the vaccinations than people dying from the disease that we are protecting them from. Should we stop giving the vaccinations at that point in time?"

There was no concensus reached at that meeting.

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"When you are having dinner with someone and they are nice to you, but rude to the waiter, then this is not a nice person.".....Dave Barry

If I may 'pick your brain,' as a food microbiologist.......could you comment on some claims that I have heard???.....

1. Pasteurization killls the bacteria, but does not remove it, so the dead bacteria is still in the pasteurized milk.

2. As the bacteria is killed, the cell membrane may break and can release very minute amounts of toxins.

3. Pasteurized milk is not routinely tested for these toxins after it is pasteurized.

4. With some people, these dead bactieria and toxins can trigger a release of histamines in the consumer's body. This can result in a (usually very mild) iflammatory response. And this is a possible esxplanation of why some people who usually drink raw milk complain of "not feeling well" when they drink pasteurized milk? (Their body is not used to dealing with this. And their symptoms typically consist of a mild upset stomach, increased 'mucus' production). Is this a possibility?

Thanks for your input.

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"When you are having dinner with someone and they are nice to you, but rude to the waiter, then this is not a nice person.".....Dave Barry

You're never, ever going to get the sale of raw milk legalized by using the "health" argument. Never.

You have to make it a voter issue, and that means getting people riled up about having their FREEDOM OF CHOICE being restricted. A couple high-profile legal cases about freedom of choice, or religion, or whatever other freedom can be used, get people good and angry at the legislators, and calling their political reps telling them that they're sick of being told how to live and that they're not going to take it any more, and you'll see the law changed.

Which is, of course, the problem. People don't get riled up about their rights anymore unless it means that they might have grounds to sue someone and make some money -- then they get riled up REALLY good, whether there is a basis for it, or not.

So long as American Idol is on at the expected time, and people can still buy their coke and cheetos.... well, not much will change.

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Ignorance is the true enemy.

I've seen the village, and I don't want it raising my children.

www.newcenturyhomestead.com

Don't forget though before you take that path why pasteurization of milk was introduced in the first place. Granted much has changed in sanitation all around since then but pasteurization of milk happened for a very good reason

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Solstice Sun Farm- Nubian goats, heritage poultry, soaps, and upcycled crafts