Should we? Shouldn’t we? Like the whiting said to the snail, will we or won’t we have raw milk flowing from our shop shelves is anyone’s guess. It all boils down to who will bell the cat. The benefits of raw milk versus the health problems that unpasteurized milk could bring in its wake.
Time was when there were blue skies, wide open spaces, farms and barns with sweet smelling hay and fresh, frothy, warm milk – straight from being milked in the barn to the table. Today you hardly see blue skies smiling down on you, not in most urban environments – and the milk is all pasteurized – well most of it anyway.
The proponents of raw milk will tell you that allergies and asthma are modern day conditions that have become rampant after we have started pasteurizing our milk. On the other hand, the pro-pasteurizing group will tell you that if you don’t pasteurize, you are in danger of contracting a whole lot of diseases that could be transmitted from harmful bacteria growing unchecked in milk. Let’s face it, that’s why Louis Pasteur did what he did and recommended this method which today bears his name.
There have been studies and there are research results to show us the benefits of both as well as the dangers of both. So which is the path to follow? Maybe where we are going wrong is to look at them as black and white, not seeing the shades of gray in between. Maybe what we need to determine is not whether we need to have only raw milk or only pasteurized milk but where it is all right to have one and not the other, as well as who would be least susceptible to the problems of one or the other.
The problem perhaps lies in the fact that most of the milk that we get at the store is mass-produced. Read a great big dose of hormones and antibiotics in the milk. Also, huge numbers when it comes to cattle crowded into small spaces and therefore the risk of contamination and infection spreading very quickly. The need for pasteurization is absolutely necessary. Even probably if it means that you’re losing out on some of the essential goodness of cow’s milk when it is heated to these temperatures. It is just that the flip side could be a bit too dangerous to contemplate.
When it comes to a farm environment however, this changes. You have huge grazing land, fresh air and you know when your cows are healthy or ill. The milk is usually organic, hormone free and very often even antibiotic-free. Then, it’s raw milk time with no fear. If you have the luxury of getting hold of milk like this, go ahead and switch to raw milk. You’ll get your milk proteins the way Nature intended, you’ll get a lot of the vitamins that are otherwise reduced and you get a lot of the good bacteria so necessary for the healthy functioning of your gut.
So if you have access to healthy raw milk, that is the way to go. If you’re walking into a store and picking your milk off the shelves, take heed. Milk is a medium that facilitates the quick and easy growth of a whole lot of harmful bacteria. So while some of the essential nutrients are lost when milk is pasteurized, so are a lot of the harmful bacteria.
It’s a toss up – it all depends on the milk you have access to. That should determine whether you get all the goodness of raw milk or whether you get milk without the potential for serious health problems. So before you do a lot of reading on raw milk or pasteurized milk-bashing, it helps to realize that both have their place in this world. Till such time as we can ensure that milk supply can have the manageability of a small farm atmosphere, we have to perhaps live with the idea of pasteurized milk on a daily basis. After all, if there were no large-scale milk manufacturing, milk would be much higher priced than it is today.
