Raw milk is delicious, my ancestors have been drinking it for millennia.
That said, I’m for people being idiots. I’m just done paying for it. If you’re chugging raw milk during a bird flu epidemic and your family gets sick because of it, basic insurance and the public should only pick up the cost after you’ve declared bankruptcy.
People who claim a taste difference between raw and pasteurised, I'd very much like to see someone taste the difference on the same cow's milk blind, before and after pasteurisation. I just don't think it affects the taste much, and certainly not as much as fat %.
And for people who claim health benefits, I would like to see a double blind study demonstrating those benefits.
Pasteurization does affect taste though. Around me there are two different dairies, one does regular pasteurization and one does vat pasteurization and I can tell the difference. There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross. I've never put unpasteurized head to head against equally fresh pasteurized though, and given what I now know I'm not going to.
In Mexico I suspect that almost all milk is ultra pasteurized since it's not refrigerated in stores and has wicked-long expiration dates. It's also some of the best-tasting milk I've had so I think that flavour has more to do with some of the other milk processes (like skimming) and the livelihood of the cows rather than with how it's pasteurized.
[1] In practice this is just milk with the lactase enzyme added at some point during production.
There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross.
Of course the above is subjective. Others have stated they prefer it. To each their own, but I will continue to maintain it makes milk taste gross.
That’s pasteurized. At a higher temp than the supermarket stuff, even.
But hey, I only get to enjoy this if the measles here in Texas don't get me first.
Otherwise I would at least demand it be fermented into kefir so the food microbes can muscle out the bad.
Sickness caused by bacteria doesn't happen as soon as one bad bacteria (bacterium?) enters your body, a certain critical mass is usually required. This is very similar to the concept of "viral load" where a certain amount of viral genetic material needs to be exchanged before the viral infection can take hold.
The "beneficial bacteria" on your skin and in your gut make it harder for bad bacteria to take root in many different ways, one of them simply being they provide competition, "crowding out the bad guys".
Another way is that many, many, many types of antibiotics were originally discovered as metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi (examples include penicillin, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline).
And for completeness sake, milk kefir contains many Lactobacillus species that are also a natural part of the mammal microbiome (which makes sense when you think about it; Lactobacillus are named for consuming lactose, an ingredient of mammal milk).
Before refrigeration most milk was made into butter, cheese and other products. Unless your ancestors actually herded the animals themselves they probably didn’t drink much raw milk.