You're right, but there are a couple of key points you are missing:

1. (And this is the most important) we literally have a solution to it not being safe.

2. When things are unsafe, we (generally) make sure that people are properly educated about the risks. The people pushing raw milk are doing the exact opposite.

3. When something is unsafe, we try to figure out how to make it safe or find an alternative (see 1)

Yes, but it’s voluntarily and unnecessarily unsafe. It’s like scuba diving without a timer. You can do that, but it’s a dumb idea when the alternative is right there and widely available.

On the contrary, I would put raw milk pretty near the top of the list. Definitely in the top 50%. Especially if you scale it by actual harm done, as most dangerous things don't cause that much harm as people are cautious of them and handle them carefully.

From the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/dangers-r...

Symptoms of foodborne illness usually include: Vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain Flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, and body ache

While most healthy people will recover from an illness caused by harmful germs in raw milk – or in foods made with raw milk – within a short time, some can develop symptoms that are chronic, severe, or even life-threatening. If you or someone you know becomes ill after consuming raw milk or products made from raw milk – or if you are pregnant and think you may have consumed contaminated raw milk or cheese – see a healthcare professional immediately.

The Dangers of Listeria and Pregnancy Pregnant women run a serious risk of becoming ill from the germ Listeria, which is often found in raw milk and can cause miscarriage, or illness, or death of the newborn baby. If you are pregnant, drinking raw milk — or eating foods made from raw milk — can harm your baby even if you don’t feel sick. Raw Milk and Serious Illness Symptoms and Advice

> despite drinking it daily for the last 20-some years

That should be "because" not "despite". Your body needs to acclimate to the microorganisms/contaminants in your foods. It's quite likely if you gave that same raw milk to someone who lives very cleanly, it would make them quite sick.

This is quite common when people from developed areas travel to much less developed areas.

FWIW, I'm totally OK with that. You have the personal knowledge to make an informed decision and can take direct steps to ensure your own safety. I see that as a whole different category than actively seeking out unpasteurized milk for routine consumption.

By analogy, my neighbors raise chickens, and they occasionally eat them. I wouldn't think twice about that, or about eating a dinner they shared with me. But darned if I could imagine regularly tracking down raw chicken in a wet market instead of buying it from an FDA-inspected place.

Thank you for the disclosure and the anecdotal account but no sane person would expect an unbiased take on a product from the person that produces that product. Also, it doesn't get much fresher than owning the cow or the dairy.

I had an uncle that drove without a seatbelt for 20 years, saying almost exactly the same thing. He did end up dying of lung cancer so maybe you're on to something.

Yeah it's the microorganisms that cause food poisoning. There's not some magic unalienable property of pasteurized milk that makes it safe, it's just much less likely to contain microorganisms.

So if you're controlling for risk in other places I think anyone would be fine with that.

But the impact of 1 bad batch of milk getting mixed into a supply for an entire region, is a lot worse than your small scale. The risks probably aren't as well controlled at other farms as well.

Definitely think a difference in scale is a difference in kind here.

For those blissfully ignorant:

- "Robert Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is a proponent of raw milk consumption, disclosing in 2023 that it is the only milk he drinks."

https://www.statnews.com/2024/11/24/bird-flu-h5n1-raw-milk-l...

> For now they warn against and prohibit the interstate sale of raw milk [0]. That may not last.

Nor should it. The government is not my mom, it does not have the right to dictate what I (or anyone else) can and cannot put into my body. By all means, regulate it and come down hard on anyone who doesn't meet the regulations. But an outright ban is stupid and always has been.

Prior to pasteurization, people died or became ill on a regular basis: that’s one reason why Louis Pasteur is a household name two centuries after his birth. Even as a relatively niche product it’s still responsible for a significant percentage of the dairy-related deaths and severe illnesses.

The confound is related to what you mentioned: historically few people were shipping milk very far. If you’re getting it shortly after milking your family’s cows, you don’t have the same kind of trust commitment that most modern consumers are making and you don’t have the profit motive conflicting with food safety, either.

I think a lot of the flavor comes from two other factors: fat level (i.e. you can get higher fat than "whole" milk quite easily, although at some point it gets marketed as "cream", which significantly alters the taste) and the cow's diet: you can easily taste the difference between milk marketed as "grassfed" and the cheap stuff in a blind tasting. (Same is true for eggs, I suspect, though I've never tried that particular experiment myself.)

From my limited understanding of the subject - directly from a local "organic grass fed" dairy farmer - the pathogens you are worried about have little to do with length of time it sits out although longer is of course worse.

I bought unhomongenized milk from him, but he would not even consume his own "home grown" raw milk or feed it to his family the day it was obtained from his cows. He ran everything through a pasteurization process prior to consumption.

I do wonder how many folks actually are preferring the unhomogenized flavor vs. the "raw milk" flavor and simply don't understand the difference? Having had both a long time ago, I really don't think I could have told you the difference in taste.

It's crazy to me such a mundane subject as become a political statement. I do wonder how much further society has to fall down this rabbit hole before it recovers - or if it ever does.

I have pasteurized milk straight from a cow in different ways and it is different than raw milk. I prefer the flavored of the pasteurized, but all of them are much better than regular whole milk from the store. Store milk is just more bland in every way, and not just because it's less fatty.

The flavor of milk changes with what the cow eats, so if cows are on pasture then the flavor will change over the year as the grasses change and if they are on hay for part of the year that obviously changes the flavor as well.

"Generally fine" _really_ doesn't matter in the context of farms that produce milk by the hundreds of thousands of gallons; for society in general to not break out with foodborne disease every two weeks milk safety has to be controlled to an extremely careful standard of hygiene. And J Random Farmer can't suddenly stop pasteurizing raw milk unless everything else is held to such a standard.