Got {Raw} Milk

Great interview and intro to Raw Milk - Dr. Mercola interviewing raw milk producer and expert Mark McAfee - go to Youtube for full series.

One fascinating fact McAfee shared was the bizarre birth of pasteurization:

To meet the soaring demand for spirits, distilleries soon sprang up in most
major cities. In one of the most bizarre twists of entrepreneurial insight, some
brilliant soul thought it would be fun (and profitable) to confine cows adjacent
to the distillery and feed them with the hot, reeking swill left over from the
spirit-making process.

As you might guess, the effects of distillery dairy
milk were abominable, and for many of those drinking it, amounted to a virtual
death sentence. Confined to filthy, manure-filled pens, the unfortunate cows
gave a pale, bluish milk so poor in quality, it couldn't even be used for making
butter or cheese. Add sick workers with dirty hands, diseased animals and any
number of contaminants in unsanitary milk pails and you had a recipe for
disaster.
Lacking its usual ability to protect itself, and with a basic
understanding of germs or microbes decades away, the easily contaminated
"pseudo-milk" was fed to babies by their unwitting mothers. In New York City
during 1870 alone, infant mortality rocketed to around 20% and stayed there for
many more years

Check it out on http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/milk_history.html

Raw milk, according to McAffee, requires a great deal more sanitation and attention to creating a healthy environment for the cow. Milk intended for pasteurization is not necessarily safe to drink raw because the cows are often not raised in a very sanitary situation and the assumption is that the resulting contamination will be handled during the pasteurization process.

So once again, we see a common theme - good, healthy food is labor intensive so it's easier to just set up massive dairies, boil out the contaminants and mass distribute. Unfortunately only 6 states allow the sale of raw milk and those found violating the rules are often the subject of heavy handed 'sting' operations. And while the health benefits of raw milk are significant, the government is siding with 'big dairy' and fear mongering abounds.



More information can be found at: http://www.rawmilk.com/ and www.realmilk.com