I've been reading a great deal in the newspapers around here, about raw milk, and mystified as to why it's a controversy.
Apparently "natural food" junkies think raw milk is the best thing since sliced bread, but one is confused.
I was always under the impression that milk was pasteurized for a reason, and a very good reason at that.
Up until sometime the earlier half of the last century, tuberculosis ranked as the leading cause of death. Probably no one around here is old enough, including myself, to have even seen a case of tuberculosis, but there was a time when it was ubiquitous, all over the place, and damaged and killed millions.
"Natural food" junkies insist that pasteurization ruins some of the natural ingredients in milk, but it appears this has not been proven.
"Natural food" junkies insist that pasteurization adds alien substances to the milk, but on the other hand many "natural food" junkies have no aversion to adding alien substances to their bodies, given their consumption of chemicals, licit and illicit; everything from marijuana to mood-altering pharmaceuticals; from alcohol to birth-control pills--alien substances which interfere with the natural workings of the body.
As milk, and milk products, are a major component of this diet, one is intrigued.
Of course, when I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, I had raw milk much of the time, usually goat's milk, but that was within minutes of its coming from the source, and being sorted out.
And people who have milk cows generally use raw milk in their own homes.
The difference being, the source of the milk is close at hand, and if there's a problem, one can immediately detect whence it came. Such cannot be said for raw milk sold in "natural food" stores, which could come from anywhere.
After all, even some primitives have admitted on Skins's island that much of the inventory sold at "farmers' markets" up in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, comes from.....Florida.
I think this is a non-issue; I think that the sale of raw milk should be banned, much in the same way other things with the smallpox virus are banned.