Raw milk straight from a cow is generally fine, and I'm told much more delicious (and maybe more healthy? I really don't know about the science on that one). It's when it's had a chance to sit around that the risks increase (which inevitably happens in a commercialised process from the cow to your fridge). I've had pressure-treated unpasteurised milk and I prefer the taste of that over pasteurised.

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.