Discussion

pingou: "The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits."Well, perhaps it has taste benefits?

giraffe_lady: There's almost no discernible difference between unhomogenized pasteurized milk and raw milk, both tasted directly and in the final cheese. As a working chef* I had to be taught to detect the difference, and now that I'm not doing it regularly I doubt I even could.* at the time at a michelin star restaurant, not to brag but because the finesse of my palate is directly relevant and likely to be called into question.

stronglikedan: > a michelin star restaurant, not to bragwhy would anyone brag about working at a one star restaurant?

giantrobot: Do yourself a giant favor and read up on what it takes to get a single Michelin star. It's not a fucking Yelp review.

carabiner: That would get in the way of Arstechnica's hyper liberal bias. I eat raw cheese because it tastes good. It's common in France, like in reblochon and Brie de meaux. There aren't mass deaths in France because of this.

mitkebes: "Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years, according to Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer specializing in food poisoning outbreaks who has kept a record of the company’s outbreaks. Those outbreaks have been caused by a range of pathogenic bacteria known to be risks in unpasteurized dairy products, including E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria. A 2024 Salmonella outbreak connected to Raw Farm’s raw milk was linked to at least 171 illnesses."If true, it sounds like this is just par for the course.

nekusar: Not sure how to compare raw milk cheese made in the USA, versus raw milk cheese in EU region.I wont drink raw milk cause there's all sorts of bad shit.But raw milk cheese? Seems safe.

comrade1234: I make cheese (ricotta and paneer) from raw milk all of the time at home. Raw milk is easy to buy here in Switzerland.I get a noticeably better result with raw milk than pasteurized, and terrible terrible results from ultra-pasteurized milk. By 'better' I mean quantity per liter but also the size of the curds.The thing that I find amusing is that I think people in the USA actually just chug raw milk like it's regular milk. Don't do that! You're supposed to heat to 60C minimum. When you make cheese you heat to higher - around 85C, when the milk surface turns foamy.A lot of cheese here is from raw milk. I'd even say most but I don't know that for sure. But even though you aren't pasteurizing the milk (high temp under pressure for short time) you are killing the bacteria on the first step.

cmckn: Is this sarcasm?

alex43578: People’s blindness to the benefits of things like pasteurization, washing their hands, and vaccines is crazy to me. What’s the next trend? Don’t refrigerate meat because “big-fridge” is out to get ya?

AlexandrB: I don't know if there's a catchy name for it, but if you spend a lifetime in an environment where many serious diseases have been eradicated or nearly eradicated by vaccines it's easy to start to believe that the vaccines do nothing. This is true of so many other things as well - people take norms that make their life possible/livable for granted until they're gone.I don't really see a solution here. It just seems like human nature.

Atotalnoob: 1 Michelin star is like _only_ in the top 0.1% of restaurants instead of the top 0.001%.It’s still impressive, difficult, and time consuming.Highly recommend you check out any starred restaurants nearby where you live. They tend to be expensive, but they are worth the high sticker price

kakacik: I don't think you caught the sarcasm of parent

roryirvine: Isn't most good cheese unpasteurised? Comte, Roquefort, Gruyere, Epoisses, Parmesan, even many (most?) small-producer Cheddars.

giraffe_lady: Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.

roryirvine: Oh, yeah, agreed. That dairy sounds like a death-trap!

jmclnx: One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".Companies will never pay to do anything unless not doing it will open them up to a law suit. So, raw milk does have some risks just based upon the the fact it costs to pasteurize milk.

vjulian: Presumably, you’re American? In many parts of the world we regularly consume cheese made with raw milk. For many cheeses, raw milk is preferable.

ctoa: European cheese producers have their own costly methods of managing raw milk cheese safety. They have much more surveillance of the entire process, like rapid testing of milk for STEC (the microbe involved in this outbreak) and adding bioprotective cultures during milk production. In France there is an extensive monitoring/alert system. They aren't just YOLO-ing it.

philipkglass: A local small grocery chain started stocking raw milk (with many warnings) and I decided to risk consuming it to see for myself. I couldn't tell the difference between it and ordinary full fat milk. I wondered if it was a fraud (commercial milk falsely advertised as Local Forbidden Delicacy Milk), but maybe there's not much difference. Or maybe I am not a subtle taster. I also can't taste the superiority of an $80 bottle of wine when it's pitted against an $18 bottle.

barrkel: I can taste the difference between a $100 wine and $400 wine, but it's maybe 20% better, if it's possible to flatten extra layers of flavour into a linear scale. It's easier to appreciate for different levels of quality from the same producer. My example is drawn from Casanova di Neri Tenuta Nuova vs Cerretalto. They're basically the same style, the Cerretalto just has extra.Across different grapes and regions and it's like apples and oranges. Sometimes I want a savory Burgundy, sometimes I want a Coke. If you don't know what wine from a terroir tastes like, and hankering after that, don't spend extra on it.I'd generalize that to cheese. Can't beat a good aged Comte (a raw milk cheese), but it's not everyday cheese.

juancn: I love how the makers can "just disagree".I'm Argentinian and if ANMAT (our FDA) recalls something, it's gone, no involvement from the manufacturer really needed.They could revoke your license to make and sell food wholesale.

jhawk28: There is no taste difference between raw and pasteurized milk. The taste comes from the container. If you have both in glass, there is no discernible difference. My father is a dairy farmer and bet his professor (many years ago) that he could taste the difference. The professor setup a blind taste test where he gave my father pasteurized and raw milk in glass cups. There was no difference."Nutritional value" is a very ambiguous. It's only in what you measured. Raw milk advocates are going to value things like bacteria and if proteins were changed. Pasteurization by definition is going to kill the bacteria and change the protein structure. The main benefit for pasteurization is that it makes milk a commodity. You can have unsanitary farms with high bacteria counts that don't make people sick. This is both good and bad. Good because it means more milk available with less disease. Bad because our bodies are complex and some bacteria is healthy.My recommendation is that if someone wants to consume raw milk, they should have a personal relationship with the dairy.

legitster: I find this hard to believe because there is a massive difference in tastes just between two dairies. You can also get low-pasteurization milk from the same dairy and the taste difference is also remarkable.

autoexec: You can get two different flavors, but still not be able to tell which was pasteurized. You could try to guess that the one you liked best was raw and be wrong.

harshreality: Ricotta and paneer appear to be high-heat cheeses, where pasteurization is implicit in the first step even if the milk wasn't pasteurized to begin with.Cheddar, the kind of cheese allegedly at issue in this outbreak, appears to be a low-heat cheese, so you wouldn't start by heating the milk to pasteurization temps. If the milk isn't already pasteurized, the resulting cheese might be contaminated.European soft cheese makers allegedly follow protocols to ensure that there's not substantial bacterial contamination in the beginning; they carefully handle the milk through the beginning of the cheesemaking process, after which the culture and salt and acidification stall any further bacterial growth; then aging cuts down any bacterial population to safe levels, and it's never reached a level where it could produce dangerous levels of toxins.Competent American raw-cheese makers would do the same thing, but in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics, unscrupulous businesses will cut corners for profit. High contamination levels of the initial raw milk, or substantial cross-contamination after aging, is probably what led to this and the company's previous cheese contamination problems.

eudamoniac: I used to dabble in raw milk and I can confirm the taste is the same, surprisingly.

amluto: > in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanaticsYou might be on to something. In the US, raw milk cheeses are not at all unusual. It's not even especially hard to buy raw milk, although (at least where I am) you generally need to go to a fancier grocery store or a farmer's market to find it.But what is weird is that the farm in question literally calls itself "Raw Farm". There are many cheesemakers, both mass-market and high-end, that make both raw-milk and pasteurized-milk cheeses, but they don't generally go out of their way to brand their cheese as one or the other -- if you care, you can read the ingredient list. These companies' product is the cheese, not the rawness of the cheese -- if it tastes good, customers will buy more!But Raw Farm seems to be a farm that makes a specific point of being, well, raw, and that's strange. Maybe it's a better idea to buy one's raw milk cheeses from an ordinary dairy :)

josefritzishere: It's a pretty bold move to say "Naw, we'd rather poison people with feces than do a recall right now." Perhaps it's a good moment to consult your attorney.

legitster: > Pasteurization is a simple process of briefly heating milk and other products to a temperature that can kill disease-causing germs. The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits.This is a bit disingenuous of the reporter to include this. The appeal of raw milk is that it tastes better. Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.Personally, I'll stick with pasteurized milk. But if people knowingly want to take risks I don't see why we can't just slap a warning label on these products.

autoexec: > Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.Some raw milk producers and nut jobs claim that raw milk will cure or treat things like allergies, asthma, lactose intolerance, and arthritis. Those kinds of false claims along with their unproven claims on the nutritional difference are exactly what the FDA is supposed to address.Flavor is ephemeral. Whether or not something contains a vitamin or cures asthma is not.

comrade1234: Fermented meat is a thing. I know the thought of it is disgusting but corned beef is fermented meat. The best is when the bacteria eat at the connective and the meat gets a slightly foam texture. I make it about once a year.

torlok: Apples and oranges. Derailing an argument with tangential topics will never cease to piss me off.

andrewflnr: I just thought they were raising an interesting fact. It's not like "lol antivaxxers" was much of an "argument" to derail anyway.

alex43578: I'll have to revise my original comment to say: "don't refrigerate, ferment, can, cure, dry, brine, pickle..."

deepvibrations: Good customer and pro-dairy "Health" Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may help his friends out here.He himself is very pro-dairy, (thanks to lobby groups i imagine... Several dietary advisers appointed during his tenure have ties to the meat and dairy industry.

scottyah: Or he's just a traditionalist as he's stated many times, and for a Western European cow (and all derivative products like milk, cheese, beef) are up there with wheat. Bread and butter is a common phrase.Or there is some big conspiracy and he's trying to get rich at the detriment to his own health, or he's trying to get rich and his entire persona and diet is fake?

fhn: what does traditionalist mean? He's antivax. He should pasteurize either. I hope he doesn't take flu shots or even go to the hospital because that is just unnatural. Who need medicine when he can just eat tomato leaves.