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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

Raw milk straight from a cow is generally fine, and I'm told much more delicious (and maybe more healthy? I really don't know about the science on that one). It's when it's had a chance to sit around that the risks increase (which inevitably happens in a commercialised process from the cow to your fridge). I've had pressure-treated unpasteurised milk and I prefer the taste of that over pasteurised.

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From my limited understanding of the subject - directly from a local "organic grass fed" dairy farmer - the pathogens you are worried about have little to do with length of time it sits out although longer is of course worse.

I bought unhomongenized milk from him, but he would not even consume his own "home grown" raw milk or feed it to his family the day it was obtained from his cows. He ran everything through a pasteurization process prior to consumption.

I do wonder how many folks actually are preferring the unhomogenized flavor vs. the "raw milk" flavor and simply don't understand the difference? Having had both a long time ago, I really don't think I could have told you the difference in taste.

It's crazy to me such a mundane subject as become a political statement. I do wonder how much further society has to fall down this rabbit hole before it recovers - or if it ever does.

It also isn't a matter of hygiene or cows being organically fed. Microorganisms like Salmonella can be present in Milk and a lot of factors influence their presence, amount and procreation rate and some of these are more or less pure chance.

A healthy human might not get too many problems, but children or a weakened immune system can have far reaching consequences that includes death. Raw milk/cream certainly is different than the usual supermarket version, but for food safety the laws are just damn sensible. So sensible that most countries implemented them without question.

I think a lot of the flavor comes from two other factors: fat level (i.e. you can get higher fat than "whole" milk quite easily, although at some point it gets marketed as "cream", which significantly alters the taste) and the cow's diet: you can easily taste the difference between milk marketed as "grassfed" and the cheap stuff in a blind tasting. (Same is true for eggs, I suspect, though I've never tried that particular experiment myself.)

Having it be unhomogenized is at least as big a factor. Side by side it's very hard to tell unhomogenized pasteurized milk apart from raw milk that came from the same dairy. Something about having the fat globules loose in there makes it taste richer, and gives it a different texture.

You can buy unhomogenized milk pretty easily at health food stores etc. People generally don't prefer it though because shaking it is annoying, it curdles more easily in cooked applications, and spoils faster for some reason. But for people with a culinary preference for the "raw" texture it's an option. But most people wanting raw milk want it for political/ideological reasons not gustatory ones. An insane sentence I could not have imagined needing to write 20 years ago.

> Something about having the fat globules loose in there makes it taste richer, and gives it a different texture.

You can also just mix skim milk and cream right before drinking. Tastes richer for a given fat content.

(We started doing this when we had people who wanted skim, 1%, 2%, and whole all sharing a fridge. Though later we ended up with people only wanting whole and the small taste improvement wasn't worth the hassle of mixing anymore.)

"Generally fine" _really_ doesn't matter in the context of farms that produce milk by the hundreds of thousands of gallons; for society in general to not break out with foodborne disease every two weeks milk safety has to be controlled to an extremely careful standard of hygiene. And J Random Farmer can't suddenly stop pasteurizing raw milk unless everything else is held to such a standard.

I have pasteurized milk straight from a cow in different ways and it is different than raw milk. I prefer the flavored of the pasteurized, but all of them are much better than regular whole milk from the store. Store milk is just more bland in every way, and not just because it's less fatty.

The flavor of milk changes with what the cow eats, so if cows are on pasture then the flavor will change over the year as the grasses change and if they are on hay for part of the year that obviously changes the flavor as well.

Quite possibly the worst glass of milk I've ever consumed was in Mexican Hat, Utah, where the cows had apparently gotten into an onion patch. This went unmentioned until I asked why the milk tasted so strange.

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