“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens.

I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them.

Later that day, I learned otherwise.

“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.

  • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Let the MAGATS die!!! Stop trying to save the MAGATS! Natural Selection is at work don’t interfere!

  • LordMayor@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    “You must be Mark,” I said, warning him I wasn’t one for hugging.

    “I’m a hugger,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime.”

    The writer sums up this guys character in just three sentences.

  • xyro@morbier.foo
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    7 hours ago

    I’m not sure what’s done differently, but in France you can find raw milk and not get sick, and we make a shit ton of cheese with raw milk without problems (3/4 of the production). It is not advised for childrens or peoples with health risk though

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      Idk about france but in the US it’s just grifters doing it, no attention to quality control. You can see the guy literally says that IF they catch some bad milk, they turn it into cheese. It’s straight up criminal, that man should be thrown in prison for what he’s doing.

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        3 hours ago

        That’s sad, raw milk does carry risk if not done properly and following high quality norms. Agreed this should be criminal

    • knife@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      it isn’t different. raw milk has just become politicized in the us because of rfk.

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    8 hours ago

    There’s a saying that I’m probably misquoting, to the effect of “it is very difficult for a person to believe something is wrong when their livelihood depends on it being right”. He sells about $160,000 a day in various raw milk products; he will never believe that he’s wrong.

  • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Part of me wants to let the consumers just get sick and let nature sort it out. It just sucks that it’s children being harmed with no say in the matter

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 hours ago

      Caveat Emptor, sure.

      But so much of this is based on maliciously propagated misinformation. It’s the same shit asbestos, lead paint, and cigarette companies were doing in bygone days. Going into national media, lying their asses off, and then kicking the blame down to their customers when they get caught.

      • Krusty@quokk.au
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        8 hours ago

        What I love is all the shit that influencers peddle that will harm you and your offspring, permanently.

        It’s not bad enough you’re vegan… But now iodized salt is apparently ‘glass’ (I guess because it contains trace amounts of silica aka sand.) yet you don’t think sea salt is going to also contain some sand? Although some just think they don’t need any salt at all. Which is even more profoundly idiotic.

        So where the hell are you getting iodine? Not from eggs (the yolk) and not free sea food (excepting seaweed?) and who eats sea weed daily? And apparently some dairy industries are moving away from using iodine for milking(to sanitize the teets.) another great source of iodine teetering on the edge of the abyss.

        Then you start putting this all together… And it sure makes a lot of sense why these people are mentally and physically ill.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 hours ago

      Exactly how I feel about vaccines, except then people who are immunocompromised are additionally placed at risk.

      Here’s what we should do: every adult who wants raw milk should be given a gun with one round in the chamber. Let them make it quick.

      • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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        I mean with vaccines it’s about herd immunity. No vaccine is 100%, but if close to 100% of people get vaccinated the disease can die out. If it’s only half of us vaccinated we’re all still at risk.

  • Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io
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    9 hours ago

    Nobody said it’s a mountain you can’t climb. What pathologists and others have been saying is that we’ve climbed this mountain before, and people got sick, some died, so let’s decide rationally to not “climb this mountain” a.k.a. not do this raw milk thing anymore.

  • foodandart@lemmy.zip
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    9 hours ago

    The thing that pisses me off the most in all of this is the fact that it’s not the pasteurization that changes how milk is processed in the gut the most, it’s homogenization.

    Dude could make his milk 100% as safe and industrial milk if he just pasteurized it and left the long-chain milkfats and solids alone.

    It’s when the milk is homogenized, after the cream is separated that the fat chains are shattered and the gut absorbs the fats, instead of passing them through.

    You won’t get the shits from whole raw milk and as you get older and you can consume cream and butter and it doesn’t cause digestive problems.

    I lived on a farm and we traded eggs for milk from a neighbor that had two Jersey cows, We’d get a gallon glass jug of milk from her and it would sit in the fridge and the cream would separate… dad would skim it off and it would be used for coffee and baking and the remainder was for us to drink and whooooo… Jersey cows have the highest milkfat content of all the breeds… It was creamy, rich and filling.

    Would go to school with nothing but a glass of milk in the morning and was fine - all through my junior and senior years… If there was a question that the milk got a bit of something in it, (usualy the cow would flick it’s tail while getting milked, or hair would get in the pail…) she’d let us know so we’d just coddle the milk for 15 to 30 seconds at 165 degrees farenheits…

    The rest of it, that cooking depletes nutrient quality, it’s baloney. It’s the homogenization that causes more degradation of the milk quality than anything. It’s all bullshit marketing since the mid-60’s anyhow, FFS, in the 1950’s “skim milk” was considered unfit for human consumption because it had been stripped of most of the milkfats and solids. (which, honestly, the solids are gross to those who’ve not encountered them…)

    This farmer’s a jackass. Coddle the milk, dipshit, if it’s making people sick because you’ve got too many cows to maintain a clean milking environment. Feh!

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      This farmer’s a jackass. Coddle the milk, dipshit, if it’s making people sick because you’ve got too many cows to maintain a clean milking environment. Feh!

      I came to a similar conclusion from a completely different angle. If the industry standard is for homogenization and pasteurization, then those provide a nice barrier to contaminated milk hitting shelves. With that in place, a dairy can operate with some dirt/filth in play and easily ship some unclean product. Remove that barrier, but don’t change practices at the dairy, and we get the problem we have now.

      Europe gets away with shipping raw product, probably because the standards at the diary are higher since there’s nothing downstream to clean up any mistakes.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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      It’s when the milk is homogenized, after the cream is separated that the fat chains are shattered and the gut absorbs the fats, instead of passing them through. You won’t get the shits from whole raw milk and as you get older and you can consume cream and butter and it doesn’t cause digestive problems.

      I think this is an old misunderstanding about homogenized milk. The fat chains aren’t “shattered”, the globules of fat are just dispersed into smaller droplets that become surrounded by casein so they don’t reform.

      This leads to faster and easier digestion because you have increased the surface area of the fats and the proteins from the solids. Now that doesn’t mean the fats in unhomogenized milk arent digested, it just takes longer. If the fats from unhomogenized milk would "pass through without eventually being absorbed, then things like butter wouldn’t be as bad for you as it is.

      The rest of it, that cooking depletes nutrient quality, it’s baloney. It’s the homogenization that causes more degradation of the milk quality than anything.

      Again, this is a long debated but incorrect understanding of homogenized milk. Homogenization is a simple mechanical process that does not diminish the nutritional value of milk. What it does do is speed up the digestion of milk, which may be why you felt fuller for longer when drinking unhomogenized milk when you were younger. It’s actually easier and quicker to digest, and the smaller fat particles actually make it easier for vitamin d to attach to it. The homogenization process also makes the proteins form softer curds in the stomach making it easier to digest.

      1950’s “skim milk” was considered unfit for human consumption because it had been stripped of most of the milkfats and solids. (which, honestly, the solids are gross to those who’ve not encountered them…)

      Skim milk isn’t created through the homogenization process, it’s done through a separate process called centrifugal separation.

      I spent some time on my uncle’s dairy farm up in ohio. A lot of what you are talking about was a pretty common understanding from some of the old hands about homogenization when I was younger.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    10 hours ago

    This has echoes of melamine in baby formula with the same profit motive. I wonder if he’ll see the same punishment.

    • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world
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      I look around at the world today, and I think we’ve made it too safe. We need more Darwinian selective pressure. I think anyone over 18 can have raw milk and raw milk products, clearly labelled. Govern it like alcohol and let selection take its course.

        • cecilkorik@piefed.ca
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          Then educate them in a way they’re going to actually learn from. Punishment is not always an effective teaching method. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but basically all the problems in the world boil down to these two choices: Control people so they are forced to make the decision you want, or educate them so they understand why they need to be making the decision you want. I think for obvious reason the latter should always be preferred, and it is something we can always try harder to do, and we need to keep trying even when it is hard, and even when the outcome isn’t ideal.

          • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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            Fuck that, this guy is a criminal, he knows exactly what he’s doing, lying to people so they buy rancid milk from him. This isn’t an education problem, this is letting a criminal run rampant problem.

            People aren’t wrong if they want raw milk, the victims here are being defrauded and poisoned.

            • cecilkorik@piefed.ca
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              I can’t judge that from here, but I’m not referring to educating the guy in question, I’m referring to educating the parents and the children about the risks they are taking with raw milk, and the benefits they may or may not actually receive. I get where you’re coming from and I agree, but I was specifically responding to the implication by the comment I was replying to that presumably is asserting something to the effect of: “if we don’t ban raw milk sales, people will still give to their (innocent) children” and I think that’s a valid concern. Because of people like this. He is ruining it for everyone.

              • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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                4 hours ago

                Yes this guy is ruining it for everyone, but i guess the answer is to make sure people who sell raw milk aren’t selling bad raw milk. Maybe the customers just like the taste of it, who cares?

                Even if it’s like alcohol, banning alcohol didn’t help anything, but making sure sellers follow safety regulations helps a lot.