Wow, thanks for the info.
Sounds to me like home cheese making should be illegal.
Seriously though, what do you guys think about kids drinking raw milk? We have a gallon coming to a drop off point from an Amish farmer.
The wife now no longer wants to drink it because of the CDC's warnings about consuming raw milk and cheeses made from raw milk.
Cheeses made from raw milk is safe and actually much better for you. They have to be aged at least 60 days by most state's regulations. At that point the pH and all the other things I don't understand makes the cheese where the baddies can't grow.
Raw milk is getting a bad rap for some political reason. Don't know what or who but somebody's pocket is getting lined.
From Wikipedia:
"Pasteurization was first used in the United States in the 1890s after the discovery of germ theory to control the hazards of highly contagious bacterial diseases including bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis that was thought to be easily transmitted to humans through the drinking of raw milk.[1] Initially after the scientific discovery of bacteria, no product testing was available to determine if a farmer's milk was safe or infected, so all milk was treated as potentially contagious. After the first test was developed, some farmers actively worked to prevent their infected animals from being killed and removed from food production, or would falsify the test results so that their animals would appear to be free of infection.[2]
When it was first used, pasteurization was thought to make raw milk from any source safer to consume. More recently, farm sanitation has greatly improved and effective testing has been developed for bovine tuberculosis and other diseases, making other approaches to ensuring safety of milk more feasible; however pasteurization continues to be widely used to prevent infected milk from entering the food supply."
Back to Tubercle:
Pasteurization kills all organism, good and bad. In raw milk, from what I have read, the good guys keep the bad guys at bay but after pasteurization its open to who ever gets there first. One example I read was to leave a container of raw milk and one of pasteurized on the counter over night. The raw is still safe to drink but the pasteurized is not. Actually leaving out raw milk over night is how you get the cream to separate. I guess it all comes down to handling practices. Raw anything; hamburger, fish chicken, all can be deadly if not handled and stored properly.