Raw Milk (the post): What it is, what it does, how to buy, how to start
An explainer, FAQs, a list of recommended farms, a grocery guide, fitting it into macros, a skin guide, more
I want to say I got into raw milk in the paleolithic era, sometime late in 2021, in the winter of 2022. After reading about it for a story I was reporting, I combed the edge of socials and found other books and became obsessed. RM was then fairly underground and illicit, but the picture people were painting of it sketched out timeless, hinted-at benefits. After I felt like I knew enough, I found a farm I liked that delivered close to me in Brooklyn, and when I went to pick it up on line it was just me and one other guy.
My phone’s first reference to RM in early winter ‘22, a text to a friend:
I began to introduce RM into my diet without incident, which was wild since I had been off dairy for years. I want to say it was five years since I drank a glass of milk… I’d average two slices of pizza a month; no cheese or even Greek yogurt in the fridge. At best, I’d house a small Sealtest chocolate milk on trips home to visit my parents in Ottawa. I tried RM that winter blind, out of novelty, journalistic curiosity, and a frustration with other diet protocols that were not helping me advance in recovering from major surgery.
But it was bigger than that. I landed on RM because of an aesthetic. Anyone can eat kinda healthy—anyone can work out. But it doesn’t always feel like something. RM, then, did. It felt like a wave… it was weird, mysterious, illegal… dark energy… but also full of light. In my world, in BK, in America, very few people were drinking milk… much less standing in line for it. But yet, here I was… unlike other dark energy foods—ortolan, the bird so illegal that Frenchmen eat it with towels over their heads, and coconut Lacroix—RM is not evil. It is just maybe misunderstood. Or a secret. A mistake, or a victim of bureaucratic prejudice. Who could say? What I knew then was that it emanated real light. That winter I couldn’t shut up about it. RM was all I would discuss when I was out… not so much it as a staple but as an idea. In retrospect, RM held the same obsession I felt when I began intermittent fasting, in 2011, a bit after Martin Berkhan invented it, or when I went vegan, very young, in the 1990s, when alternative milks were not yet in the grocery store fridge. Here was an answer to the question of eating… and more than that. And it didn’t hurt that Shanahan and the other sick fucks across the spectrum who were bullish about RM gave off the same energy of these other diets’ early days.
Anyways, I pulled the trigger. I’ve been on it and it’s worked. But in the two years since I started, RM has earned lots of attention and only scant awareness. It is still a half-illicit softly-discussed thing… nobody knows anything about it. While it’s accepted, even pursued… and is hinted at in big places, it is still mostly an aesthetic. I get photos of my friends’ RM buys that they find on the road or on vacations. There’s an RM-flavored ice cream at Morgenstern’s (it is disgusting), and Glossier’s Emily Weiss gets hers from my farm, Erewhon sells it… people no longer leave the room when I touch on it in conversation… some of them even bring it up themselves. I’ve run into neighbors in line. It feels like when normal people were discovering butter coffee, or the summer when Daiya cheese was invented… change is in the air.
The obsession makes sense. This stuff is suppposedly very healthy and it’s samizdat. So exciting. As an idea… well, mainstream media tends to come out against it. And so it’s a mystery: while nothing about it is new, and it exists apart from the double-blind study idea of being healthy.. somehow it is novel. It feels like the final part of the “vibe shift,” except it’s not from 2022, or can be described by so degrading a term… instead, it is a thing out of time.
But on a practical level, unless you’re a psycho about it, crucial information about RM itself is missing. The attention is there but the awareness is not. Its nutritional specifics are shrouded and hard to come by for normal people. Mainstream reporting tends to be either biased in another direction or is missing detail—stories are naive, and assume no one out there who is intelligent drinks it. And the wealth of positive (accurate!) information about it tends to be gated to illicit or social media channels, or is so pro-RM that you might wonder who’s getting paid there. Beyond that, it’s even harder to find granular info about how to make the jump and include RM in your diet if you might be so inclined.
Raw Milk explainer
So with that in mind I’ve put together a robust introductory explainer about RM here. What follows is context for someone who is curious about trying it out, or who just wants to know what the deal is. As well, I’ve included as a step by step plan for incorporating it—slowly and responsibly—into your diet, if you’re into doing that, which will be paywall content.
Table of contents:
What RM is
Why can’t I buy RM easily?
History of RM/pasteurization
Pasteurization and industrialization
Risks of forgoing pasteurization
Benefits of RM (health)
Benefits of RM (spiritual/other)
Lactose tolerance????
What it does
Ensuring safety
How to start (paywall)
What to buy (paywall)
Farms (paywall)
Stores in NYC/LA/USA (paywall)
How much to buy a week (paywall)
To freeze or not? (paywall)
How not to get fat drinking RM (paywall)
RM for good skin (paywall)
The A2 debate (paywall)
Different grocery options from farms (paywall)
What not to buy (paywall)
Low-pasteurization milk? (paywall)
A note about sourcing: many studies cited have been shared on pro-RM channels. Work from these groups—the Weston A. Price Foundation, and pro RM websites—is acceptable to me. I read it with a grain of salt as I do a NY Times/Atlantic story about the subject. Until the entire NYT health desk forbids its masthead to consume seed oils and to bench its own body weight, the truth will lie somewhere in the middle.
What is it?
RM is milk that has not been pasteurized. That is it. Milk like it comes out from the cow. We need to distinguish here between industrially produced milk that is not yet pasteurized, and milk made for people that is not pasteurized. For the rest of this story and explainer when I refer to RM or raw milk it is for the kind that is made for people, unpasteurized, clean, cold and in a bottle. But it is technically both. Pasteurization is a safety measure where milk (sometimes beer or OJ) is boiled at around 145 or so degrees (F) to kill bad bacteria and make it generally safer.
The argument for pasteurization is that the process is a necessary public health measure that keeps milk safe by killing off its bad bacteria. The anti-pasteurization argument is that it doesn’t actually make milk foolproof safe, and that unpasteurized milk can be safe, providing it is produced in a respectable manner—clean cows, grass, no manure everywhere, clean equipment—and that pasteurization strips milk of a lot of its nutritional benefits and much of its taste. RM is a niche product, most people buy and drink pasteurized milk, most dairy producers produce pasteurized milk. It’s easier to buy (and make) pasteurized milk in America, and there is lots more of it.
So can I buy RM?
Yeah, depending where you live. It’s not impossible to buy raw. Laws vary state to state: In some states you can only buy RM on a farm, in some you can buy it anywhere, in some, you cannot buy it at all. In Canada, for example, RM is mostly illegal, but you can buy it through a herdshare (don’t worry about what herdshares are). In Europe, it’s roughly legal. I can’t think of another grocery like that. There are also different laws for cheese—lots of raw cheeses in many grocery stores—due to the aging process in some of these cheeses. In Canada, for example, you can get raw parm if it has been aged for long enough.
I’d like to spell out the history quickly to understand how we got here. The granular RM info will follow this section.
History of milk and pasteurization
The short history lesson is everyone drank milk raw forever until a couple of hundred years ago, when milk production, along with everything else, began to industrialize. That’s the first era, pre-industrial. It was swag.
The second era is early industrialized society. Milk, after 1812, began to be produced next to whiskey distilleries (US stopped importing whiskey after that war and began making it itself), and the cows on those farms ate spent/refuse grain from next door… this was very unsanitary. This watered-down or unclean milk—sometimes called swill milk—was worse than bad. It was one of the most dangerous consumer goods ever produced—no doubt. Maybe the worst. Such tainted milk led to infant deaths—8,000 a year in the 1850s. The resulting public health scare, warranted, took the halo off the product and forced change. This second era is was probably the worst and most dangerous milk ever was, and was so bad we remember it still.
Decades later, this problem was solved in two ways—through safe RM, and pasteurization. The first way—a Medical Milk Commission that, with volunteer farmers and doctors, certified raw milk as safe—was founded by a doctor, Henry Colt, in the late 1800s… a similar body (with monthly testing) exists nowadays to ensure safety of raw milk. The other method, pasteurization, evolved to become popular and drift milk… into an industrially-produced good. Pasteurized ‘milk depots’ with subsidized and very cheap milk began to predominate New York in the early 1900s—first city to require pasteurization—and were bankrolled by Nathan Straus, who founded Macy’s. (Both Colt and Straus saw one of their kids die from contaminated milk.) By the 1920s infant death rates fell greatly, which was due to these advancements as well as better safety measure across the board, like chlorinated water, no horse manure everywhere in cities, etc.
I’d call that time period and the decades that followed the third era, a raw milk/pasteurization detente, which lasted until the 1940s. In the third era you could get milk either pasteurized, or raw on delivery (from a milk man like in the movies) pretty easily. Things changed in the fourth era, when raw dairy began to get perceived, again, as… dangerous and deadly. The story goes that in 1944 a number of major, national magazine articles—“Before You Drink A Glass of Milk” by Paul De Kruif, in Ladies Home Journal (discussed briefly in this NYer story) in which this like parrot disease was blamed on RM; “Raw Milk Can Kill You” by Dr. Robert Harris in Coronet—which I haven’t read… reefer madness journalism—made RM seem scary and deadly. This is the spoke in the wheel: RM in the 1940s was nowhere near as dangerous as it was before the MMC—not close—but it was being framed as such. Eventually laws changed, and states began to require pasteurization. By 1987 the FDA mandated all dairy products sold in interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Which meant milk shipped across state lines had to be PM. However it is still legal, in some states, to buy RM. This is because states control instrastate sales. So that’s where we’re at now. The immediate context—RM is slightly more popular than a decade ago, and more states are making it legal—I won’t spend much time on, because it’s not legal yet here in New York for store sales. The broad context in America is that RM is still around in a dairy market that is overwhelmingly pasteurized. Fewer than 5% of Americans report drinking RM, according to an FDA study using 2016 and ‘19 data. This is the fourth era: RM is there, illicit kind of, and legal, sure, but hidden and niche.
Is pasteurization good or bad?
Can’t answer that question in a newsletter, sorry. I won’t argue against pasteurization as an idea really, but will describe it instead as a half competent market solution to a modern nutrition problem that limits contamination and unsanitariness to the animals. Pasteurization is incredibly well-suited for industrialization. Industrialized dairy—be it distillery dairy then or even “organic” dairy now—cuts corners. And so we need pasteurization, because milk, when produced at large quantities, all but requires unsanitary conditions. The pasteurized, industrially processed milk, or the organic milk in The Atlantic story linked above might be straight up inhumane (read the article, I dare you) but for people, it is fairly safe. In many ways it bolsters the old school pro-animal argument behind veganism.
Speaking granularly, it must be mentioned that pasteurization, of course, is not foolproof—people still get sick from contaminated pasteurized milk, like this Yersinia scare in BC in the ‘90s—but it is definitely infinitely safer than what went on in the 1850s. The two arguments against pasteurization is that it has let milk production become as filthy as possible—don’t see this argument very often—and that, on a consumer level, this safety comes at the cost of… the nature of milk itself, specifically its taste and nutrition.
Decent post re: bacteria in PM vs RM:
Where does pasteurized milk stand, health-wise?
Is milk less “healthy” after it’s pasteurized? Yes, sure, probably. In a vacuum, for sure. But in context, and to be honest, pasteurized milk is fine. It is still one of the healthiest (i.e. nutritious and digestible) and most accessible items you can buy at the grocery store. It is pretty cheap, it is everywhere, and it is pretty safe. It’s not bad. There is lots not to like—it can be filmy, thick, it does not taste fresh, and it’s no good if you’re making good cheese or yogurt—but nutritionally it’s decent.
What’s more, in the context of a nailed-down diet—not necessarily one ordered entirely from a farm!—pasteurized milk can even be great. Some dark health influencers (Peaters) prefer it to raw dairy:
Which brings up a question. If RM is so healthy, why do these health nuts drink skim and grocery milk? Well, some of it is posting style. I hit up
about it, and he says it might be called the “horseshoe theory of taste, kinda...,” comparable to when a barista with a Hario says they drink McDonald’s coffee over a third-wave cup of what Max calls “dogshit.” Let’s call it horseshoe posting: a RM person drinking Fairlife, a Michelin chef eating Popeye’s… a fashion person wearing Rustler jeans…As well, the sample population is an odd one: the sick fuck (who I like) Peaters who have their diets so dialed are lactose tolerant enough to withstand even the most industrialized, pasteurized milk (more on this later). And because they make so many good decisions—seed oil free for years; mitochondrially healthy food, probably automatic and thoughtful habits regarding movement, sleep, nutrition, light—they are not in a nutritional “deficit,” and may only get a little extra benefit from RM, compared to another person just starting out.
Also…. also… most of the people this deep into dark nutrition have been low key probably been drinking RM for years before switching to skim. Like how Max said. They’re here already; that is the context.
I’d say most of the time, for most people, pasteurized milk is not bad and RM, if used right… can be worlds better.
Is finding raw milk and incorporating it into my diet worth the extra work? Is it that healthy?
Up to you. I think the benefits were worth the extra effort for me, and if you’re not feeling the best, it might shore up some nutritional gaps, and if you feel pretty good, it might take you to another level. But you don’t have to. Really, I would say the reverse of this question is true. It is not that much work in the grand scheme of things to find out some basic and contextual information about any food, and it always pays off in the long run, even if you don’t go ahead with incorporating a specific food into your diet. (Part of why I started this newsletter…)
I heard it is not safe, or overrated. Should I stay away?
If you want to stay away then you should keep staying away. Food choices are ultimately individual, and this is America, and I’m not going to tell some stranger what to put into their body. I understand how traditional, skeptical reporting on RM might have more weight to it than a post by some Instagram account somewhere, or a pro-RM source like the Price Foundation. I don’t really think that way but I understand it.
I would say the non-psycho argument for trying it is: This isn’t some new thing. They drink RM in Europe and in California. And I don’t know anyone who got healthy reading magazine articles about what foods are safe. Ultimately it comes down to a change in consumer perception: is RM a bridge too far or is it much ado about nothing?
OK, so it’s complicated. But why does every story shit on RM?
Some of this, frankly, is a language problem. All food is dangerous, on a statistical level, but we don’t think about this very often because if we did we’d never eat anything or go out to restaurants. Examples of food outbreaks lately with much more common and less regulated foods: bad chicken, deaths from Boar’s Head meats, many more—don’t read this last link unless you want your day ruined. Ultimately we can’t fisk the safety of everything on our plate or the FDA’s purpose, because if we do we’ll get pretty despondent.
The logical response to this dangerous food system is either to grow your own food—good luck, and DM me—or to consider, theoreitcally, approved/safe/good farm RM about as dangerous as a rare steak. Which is reassuring to me and how I think about it, though looking at this sentence the thought feels a bit incomplete.
On a safety level, I would say, charitably, that the FDA’s criticism of raw milk—which is the point that all health reporting on this topic must address—is overblown. Here it is discussed in a piece by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank:
In its video explanation of the dangers of raw milk, the FDA claims that, “healthy people of any age can get very sick or even die if they drink contaminated raw milk.” This is not news—healthy people of any age can get very sick or even die if they drink or eat any contaminated food. All products carry risks, but that does not necessarily mean that their sale is prohibited. Consumer freedom would be substantially limited if only fully-cooked chicken breasts or well-done steaks were available for sale.
The CDC states that “While it is possible to get foodborne illnesses from many different foods, raw milk is one of the riskiest of all.” Yet newly-released CDC data show that, from 2007 to 2012, there were a total of 81 reported outbreaks associated with unpasteurized milk and that these outbreaks resulted in 979 illnesses, 73 hospitalizations, and 0 deaths. Over a five-year period of relatively wide consumption, raw milk did not kill a single person, even though it is estimated that in California alone 100,000 people drink raw milk weekly.
The California argument feels like what matters.
If you want to get very pessimistic about the RM discussion, the explanation might be that the professional, credentialed structure of the food safety industry—an FDA that legislates safety for overworked people, researchers who determine this through studies, and journalists who interpret this work—exists mostly to ensure a behind-closed-doors level of food safety that ensures continuing industrialized production above all things. And that it probably works.
As for health/food journalism. Well, writing about nutrition and RM is complicated, and there are only a few science reporters and editors who are expert enough to really understand studies and research by nutritionists and doctors. You have to be an insane expert about this stuff to write authoritatively on RM—even the Weston Price foundation’s language about RM can be couched on their website, and no one is more pro-RM than them. I wrote my raw milk story for GQ—which was kind of, rightly, critical—while drinking lots of RM… ultimately, it is easier to get a food onto a reporter’s plate than past an editor. And that any narrative argument for against a food—including anything written here—will be more black and white and less nuanced than any one person’s relationship to it.
Benefits of raw milk (science/vitamins)
Here we go baby. RM’s downsides and benefits come from the same place: because it’s not pasteurized, the good stuff isn’t killed off along with the bad stuff, either… RM has more nutrients and vitamins than PM… and, holistically, more enzymes that make these nutrients more bioavailable… i.e. more digestible.
On a… vitamin level, the benefits are… frankly pretty astounding. They almost do not seem real. (This is one reason why RM rarely gets written about in a chill way: its benefits, if written down in plain English, come off as either a scam or too much.) RM has a full vitamin profile: all of them. This is good.
(The pro-RM argument is that pasteurization destroys vitamin levels—the above study shows Vit. C at a 20% lower rate in PM; another study says vitamin reduction is minimal but deserves study.)
RM also has a good nutrient profile, with every nutrient a person needs in there. The argument (from pro RM folks) is that pasteurization removes bioavailability of calcium and phosphorus, copper and iron levels, destroys beta-lactoglobulin, a whey protein that helps in the absorption of vits. A and D, destroys probiotics, like lactobacillus (in yogurt), and enzymes like lactase and lactoperoxidase, which is said to help oral health.
About bioavailability: this is a buzzword (watch it pop off this year) for a nutrient’s digestibility and availability. Some foods are more nutritionally bioavailable than others, which means their sciencey nutrients and so on get into your blood better than, say, that same nutrient in another food, or in an isolated supplement. RM’s existing enzymes and good bacteria do this, the argument goes. (Reporting that is critical of RM tends to cite studies negating or playing down these factors.) My quick take on bioavailability is that it is probably very true that certain (real) foods are more bioavailable than supplements.
Non-scientific benefits of raw milk
I think we lose something if we discuss food only in terms of nutrition or vitamins. I like RM and drink it because it tastes much better than PM. That is the best part. It is healthy, which is great, but it is also just really tasty. It tastes great man. It is healthy and it does not taste like ass. Not boiling the enzymes off makes RM… more digestible too. It is again hard to express without overstatement how great this stuff is. Here are the non-scientific benefits:
Once your body gets used to it, RM goes down easy, like water. There is no lactosey film… it tastes better than any pasteurized milk I have found, even chocolate Sealtest from an Eastern Ontario gas station. RM is very sweet, like melted ice cream. It’s not phlegmy… magically, which surprises people who have not had it. It is both thinner and richer. It is also colder than regular milk. (Think Coke in a can compared to a plastic bottle.) Ultimately it is a reality-bending food. As thin as water, as hydrating as gatorade, as sweet as melted ice cream, as cold as McDonald’s Coke. It doesn’t make sense.
Aesthetically it is also… different. As in it tastes different at different times during the year. Depending how nutritious/green the grass the milk cows were eating was. Summer milk is richer and sweeter because the grass is more ripe, in the winter RM is lighter and thinner. Kind of like wine, I hear…
Digestibility, lactose tolerance and ‘pasteurization intolerance’
I can’t explain why it’s thinner or sweeter or colder on a granular level except to point to dummy Chad lifter math that says, well, you also lose stuff you can’t measure when you boil off the nutrients.
That said—the lactase enzyme and its role is important to single out here.
Lactase gets boiled off during pasteurization and is the enzyme that makes dairy digestible for most people—not only white people. Anecdotally: think of parmesan and pecorino, which aren’t pasteurized, and are more digestible than grocery milk or grocery mozz. They have lactase. A dark nutrition talking point: people aren’t actually lactose intolerant but pasteurization intolerant… when they drink PM or eat mall cheese they are deprived of lactase, which is what helps naturally break down milk in the digestive tract and allows people to produce the lactase enzyme themselves. This is… I would say… mostly pretty right. Lactose intolerance is a continuum… while there are definitely studies that the enzyme burn-off in pasteurization is overblown, the anecdotal parmesan evidence is, while not double blind or exactly strict… broad, intuitive, and with a ton of data points.
(One prominent and oft-cited study that showed lactose intolerance is set in stone is the Stanford study, which was a small sample of 16 people and took place over eight days. Not good enough, for me at least, for such an authoritative statement about lactose tolerance.)
The workable, generous conclusion here is… if you don’t drink or eat dairy right now because of digestive issues, you might not be lactose intolerant but you may be pasteurization intolerant—the symptoms are kind of the same. Or, if we remove language from the equation, you are half-sensitive (or very sensitive) to a food you never eat. And so if you want to start drinking raw milk, you very well might be able to. I don’t know, I did it.
Other weird mystical RM properties (anecdotal)
I don’t think that specific health applications are the reason to eat food in general—that seems backwards, and leads to philosophical problems down the line, i.e. Liver “King” (he has no lineage) eating a ton of liver because eating some liver is healthy. But the wilder RM studies have demonstrated adding RM to your diet helps protect populations against pulmonary disease, infections and fevers, asthma, and bad skin, plus the Shanahan note in her book about skull shape. (Note: I’m not a PhD and can’t pretend to be very critical regarding study design here. I’ll spend a year researching this stuff, though, if the newsletter money gets right.)
Anecdotally, the testimonials about what RM “does” are even more wild and unrestrained compared to the studies, and are, honestly, half or more believable. RM’s real health benefits can only be “believed” if you also believe Kevin Gates changed a car battery with his bare hands. (Which he honestly might have?) As in: in this stuff is magic. It starts with cows who eat grass and it ends with a complete vitamin and nutrient and even (maybe?) disease-fighting profile, and it tastes insane. The end. It is the reason why some religions feature post-prandial prayer. I don’t want to get religious here, so I’ll leave it at that—it is only one food, and one part of any person’s diet… but may frankly be the key to it all. Anecdotally RM did this for me:
raised my body temperature raise up by about 0.5 degrees over 6 months (this is good)
destroyed lots of lingering muscle soreness (maybe the potassium; 500mg per glass)
gave me better skin and hair (deranged, forgive me, but true…)
healed wounds literally and immediately (cut my finger to the bone, bled like crazy and it was clotted/fixed three hours later. I don’t even know why I’m writing this here, I don’t mean to be hippie dippie/destroy my. authority, this but it happened, it is like a Baba Sali story or why people in like Croatia are stronger than Americans.)
this is probably the milk cure that they used in the olden days and which is addressed at length early in Marcel Proust’s À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (second book).
OK but is it actually like really healthy?
Again have to mention even with all the lore overriding fact here, the standards the Raw Milk Institute hew to are very much scientific and granular and detail oriented for farmers.
This said, yeah, magic is great but it’s not an explanation. So I’ll say there are… sober reasons why RM might be “very healthy.”One has to do with nutrition, one with effort.
The nutritional/satiety argument: RM is a calorically and nutritionally dense food, and is filling, and is very digestible. It is easy, once acclimatized, to drink a lot, and be full off it, and eat even a little bit less. Once you do, you tend to have less room for junk, and you will also have lots of nutrients and vitamins in your body. (Anecdotally, I lost my sweet tooth soon after starting RM—there is a lot of lactose in there, which is a sugar.) The boring nutritional explanation (which means it is true) is RM promotes satiety and it is rich in vitamins, and that if it is safe there is no downside. I will also say here there are other magic foods—and they are mostly boring things like eggs.
The effort argument: incorporating RM into your diet takes thoughtfulness and work, and keeping your diet from going haywire with daily melted ice cream also takes effort, and if you nail this one big health factor down, then the other big ones (exercise, movement, sun and light, sleep)—which don’t require legal maneuvering—will be easier to automate. And once everything is a habit, health happens.
But let me be clear here. A specific food can be “healthy,” but that one food is not enough for a person to be healthy. Very stupid point, but it’s true. It’s people that are healthy or unhealthy. You can’t just overdose on one “magic” food and fix your problems. At best you can create health as a habit. And RM is really great for that.
Ensuring safety—what to look for in RM:
Two ways to ensure safety: avoid RM altogether or only drink safe RM and stay vigilant about its safety. I would not drink milk meant for pasteurization before it was pasteurized if you paid me; that is technically raw milk but I would straight up never drink it. I stick to RM produced for human consumption. It is as simple as that. If you prefer to stick to PM, that is fine—this is America, do what you want. To me, the 100,000 a day in California number is good enough for me, but it isn’t for everyone.
This said, if you want to get down with RM, research your farm, lay off RM when shit is hectic if you’d like, start slow. Farms’ websites will often have detailed reading material about how their cows are treated, and the Raw Milk Institute is a helpful safety resource for what to ask and look for. (Grass, clean equipment, testing, and so on.) If your farm or producer isn’t transparent about their process, find another one. Straight up.
With that said, I want to place this info above the paywall: Ask the farm if its cows only eat grass.
This is very important. Raw dairy from cows that are fed diets heavily consisting of grain, or soy, or other meals like this, is said to not be protected from pathogenic infection. Cows that eat seed or grains require pasteurization for their milk to be safe for humans. The corollary to this is that raw milk is only safe for human beings if it comes from cows that eat grass. If you want raw milk, it needs to be grass fed.
Wrapping up: There are two different kinds of raw milk
This is the fault line. This grass-fed thing is the difference. This is why there is a debate. This is why the news stories are negative. This is why raw milk is scary. Most pro-raw milk information sources that are in the weeds and which don’t speak to a mass consumer base don’t make the grass-fed requirement for RM explicit and up front on every post. Instead it’s implied. When you are a regular RM drinker, you either have a relationship with a farm or a shop, and you know where it comes from and have done the research itself. Or maybe are seeing the cows up close. You are getting pasture-raised RM. Grass fed and organic is a talking point in other food markets but in the RM space it is not. It is a requirement.
But the grass fed dichotomy is behind the raw milk controversy and debate—I think. Pasteurization proponents assume, kind of rightly, that cows are fed grain and kept in industrial pens… and that their conditions are unsanitary, and that this milk requires pasteurization. I say rightly because, well, they are right about what those conditions require. And most dairy and meat production is run this way! Period. The business calculation is that since pasteurization is so… impressive, cows’ living conditions don’t need to be that clean. This is why things are how they are. This is how it is in most places.
But it is not this way for RM meant for people, and on those farms. That is the disconnect. It is a very big difference. RM that is safe for people requires a lot from a farm—clean ass cows eating organic grass, with space and respect, regularly cleaned equipment, smaller batches, testing. This can, for some people, feel like a fairy tale. But, I don’t know how to say this: farms do this. And the ones that do are essentially in a completely different business than commercial dairy producers.
And so RM, which is a much smaller part of the dairy economy and which is completely based around grass fed, organic and often regenerative farms, is different from milk at the grocery store. It is milk in name only. It is diametrically opposed to pasteurized milk, philosophically, and a bit different nutritionally. People have been drinking RM for thousands of years, and you can buy it today in grocery stores in California. It goes down like water and it tastes like melted ice cream and if you don’t drink milk now, then in the future you can drink RM if you want.
OK, I’m ready to incorporate RM into my diet
Time to join the club, baby. Continue reading below for the practical info on how to incorporate RM into your diet and see if it’s right for you.
After the paywall:
Step by step plan of how to add RM to your diet even if you’re lactose intolerance (severely doable, pretty easy)
Good farms to order from for NYC residents, where to buy in LA, a couple spots in Austin/PA
How to order in other places in America
How to make raw dairy fit your macros so you don’t gain or lose weight (if that is important to you)/How much to buy a week
Best derivatives and upgrades (are kefir, raw cream, colostrum… cheese… etc “better” than RM?)
The 411 on low-pasteurization milk
A2 vs. regular
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