A Pasteurization Explanation

This video, part of the Cooking Up A Story series, gives an excellent explanation of the different forms of pasteurization, particularly the kind used by Clear Spring Creamery, where I just wrapped up my internship.

The speaker, an organic farmer at Lady-Lane Farm, describes a form of pasteurization known as "vat pasteurization" that more small-scale, organic dairies are beginning to use.

In vat pasteurization, the milk is heated at the lowest legal temperature for thirty minutes, which preserves the flavor and the fresh taste of the milk... and according to this guy, some of the enzymatic activity that pro-raw milk folks tout as the biggest benefit of drinking the non-pasteurized stuff.


Given how many times I would be asked every week at market about our pasteurization process, this video would have been great to watch a few months ago. C'est la vie!

Raw Milk...And Allergies?

Okay, I recognize that anyone who regularly reads this blog is probably getting sick of hearing about raw milk, but I heard something on NPR last month that I wanted to share.

A team of researchers was looking at allergies in children, and they found that being exposed to dirty environments actually lessens a child's likelihood of developing allergies.

According to the "hygiene hypothesis," by keeping children in too-clean environments, their immune systems never learn to cope with foreign substances, and as a result never develop good defenses against them, which can lead to allergies.

Meanwhile, the so-called "farm effect" shows that children raised on farms have lower incidences of allergies.

The study looked at Amish children, who are not only exposed to the dirt and dust of farm life, but also - surprise! - drink raw milk.

A common theme I've heard is that raw milk products are an immune system booster. But now I wonder if it's not so much that raw milk actually boosts immune systems, so much as improving them by introducing them to allergens, pathogens, and so forth that they can then learn to fight off.

Of course, the leader of the study cautions against feeding children raw milk products because of the associated liabilities... er, I mean health risks. But regardless, there is some food for thought in this report.

What I find most interesting isn't even the study itself, so much as the fact that there are actually conventional medical professionals out there who are starting to look at the health benefits of raw milk. In my (admittedly somewhat spotty) research, I have been searching for studies like this, and believe me when I say that it is very difficult to find anyone who is studying raw milk out there. But that is a topic for another day.

Raw Milk: Healthy or Hopeless?

As some of my intrepid readers will recall, a few weeks ago I went to visit a raw milk dairy in Pennsylvania, The Family Cow. It was quite interesting, to say the least, and I was impressed enough with their safety procedures that I purchased a half gallon of milk to try on my own.

One of the bits of the tour that most struck me was how fervently Roderick, the fifth generation farmer who gave me the tour, believes in the curative powers of raw milk. Indeed, this is something that has grabbed my attention whenever I have come across raw milk drinkers - they believe in the healthfulness, and indeed, in the "superfood" stature of raw milk, with a fervor bordering on religious faith.

But me, I am a skeptic in almost all things, and I was determined to find out what, if any, scientific basis these health claims have.

To that end, I picked up a little pamphlet at The Family Cow on the benefits of, as it proclaims, "Fresh Unprocessed RAW MILK - A Nutrient-Rich Whole Food," in the hopes that it would give me a bit of insight.

Based on the research of a dentist named Weston A. Price in the 1930's, the brochure's central thesis is as follows: "Mammalian raw milk is a complex, bioactive substance of time-tested ancestral origin, where all parts work together to create a nourishing and protective food." The chief argument here is that raw milk contains enzymes and micro-organisms that are destroyed during pasteurization, making milk more difficult to digest and removing all the health benefits they provide.

At first glance, the brochure has all the earmarks of a legitimate publication. It has prominent quotations from doctors and professors on the cover, and cites studies and books, including pictures from Dr. Price's 1939 tome Nutrition and Degeneration, which is essentially the Bible of the raw milk movement. "1939?" you might be thinking. "Isn't that kind of a long time ago?" Indeed it is. And as I look more closely at the quotations on the front cover, I see that they date from 1928 and 1929, respectively. The points are not stacking up in favor of the raw milk folks.

But let's move on to what health benefits, exactly, raw milk is supposed to provide. The brochure provides an exhaustive list, which leaves no stone unturned. Raw milk, it says, treats high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart failure, infection, urinary tract infections, prostate gland swelling, psoriasis, toxic thyroid disease, gastric ulcers, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, pulmonary tuberculosis, edema, stiff joints, muscular dystrophy, and worms, and prevents dental decay. In fact, in one case of raw milk therapy that they cite, raw milk was successful in treating a "large group of patients for which no specific disease could be found."

And let's not forget the various anecdotal evidence I have heard from drinkers of raw milk, including my tour guide at The Family Cow, who claimed that drinking raw milk prevented colds, staved off allergies, boosts general immunity, and in the case of one farm worker who receives dialysis, even helps with kidney problems.

All that, eh? At this point, I begin thinking rather uncharitably of snake oil salesmen.

I'm not trying to argue that raw milk has no benefits whatsoever, but I am inclined to continue to view these health claims with further skepticism until  I can delve into some research a tad bit more recent than 1939.

In Which I Drink Raw Milk

As some of you may have gathered from previous posts, I'm pretty fascinated with the saga of raw milk. Who would think that a mundane substance like milk could be so polarizing?

I was feeling rather investigative last week, so I went up to visit The Family Cow, one of the biggest raw milk-producing dairies in Pennsylvania, if not the entire East Coast. I was shown around for a couple hours, had my innumerable questions answered with unending patience, and when I left, it was with half a gallon of raw milk clutched in my sweaty palm.*

I was curious, I must admit. I'd never had raw milk before, and health claims aside, I wanted to see if there was any justification for the assertion that raw milk just tastes better than its pasteurized counterpart.

The taste test was conducted in my tiny kitchen. In a very professional manner, I poured two jelly jars full of milk: The Family Cow's raw whole milk in one, Clear Spring Creamery's un-raw whole milk in the other.

The two milks both looked the same. They both had cream at the top of the cartons (being unhomogenized, that tends to happen), and both had the yellow tint of grass-fed dairy products. No major differences there.

In the taste department, however, I definitely preferred Clear Spring Creamery's product. Maybe I'm just biased, since I work there and all, but when I tried the raw milk, I detected a faint "barnyard" taste.** According to Mark, this might be due to the cows' diet - he said that some cows can have a taste to their milk that he described as "silage." If that is the case, then milk purchased later in the year might be missing that taste.

The question of raw versus pasteurized aside, some of the reasons a small, raw milk, grass-fed dairy would be better tasting than Piggly Wiggly's are pretty obvious. First, the milk is fresh - likely from the last week - instead of weeks if not months old. Second, the milk is from grass-fed cows, which gives the milk much more flavor, and can in fact have flavors specific to what the cows eat. Third, many small, organic dairies go for heritage breeds like Jersey cows, which have richer milk due to the higher butterfat content. Fourth, the milk is unhomogenized, which affects not only its taste but its digestibility. And last, you're dealing with the milk of a small herd of - depending on the farm - 50 to 300 cows, as opposed to the milk of thousands of cows being mixed together, which is what conventional dairies do.

To be fair, I was definitely comparing two pretty delicious products as it was. It might be an interesting future experiment to do a blind taste test between raw milk, pasteurized milk from a small organic dairy like Clear Spring Creamery, mass-produced organic milk from a grocery store (like Horizon), and a conventional grocery store brand milk. If I were to compare regular milk from a grocery store with raw milk from a (relatively) small dairy like The Family Cow, I have no doubt which I would prefer.




*I was feeling pretty confident about The Family Cow's cleanliness, given that I'd just been over practically every inch of their operation and asked plenty of detailed (and perhaps somewhat impertinent) questions.
**This reminded me of my friend Bin's assertion that colostrum***, when he tasted it, was like drinking "hot hay".
***Colostrum is the rich milk that cows produce for the first several days after calving, and which is considered vital for a calf's immune system and overall health.

The Great Raw Milk Debate

I've been asked a few times now several variations of the following questions: Do you get to drink raw milk on the farm? And can you get me some?

The answers are no and no. But the topic has come up often enough that I think it's worth discussing.

Raw milk is a topic that can be pretty polarizing. People feel strongly about it from both sides - from the public officials who cite it as one of the leading causes of dairy-related illness to the moms who drive for two hours to purchase it where it's legal. Since the FDA banned inter-state raw milk sales nearly thirty years ago, illegal raw milk sales have skyrocketed. Now, many raw milk lovers have to get their dairy fix using methods that more resemble a drug deal than anything, from joining secret milk clubs to buying their milk labeled as pet food.

The sale of raw milk is illegal in Washington, D.C. and in the state of Maryland, where the dairy is located. Hence, no raw milk for us. We milk straight into the pasteurizer, where the milk is pasteurized at the lowest possible setting, which some people believe makes a better-tasting milk than ultra-pasteurization, where milk is heated for just a couple seconds at extremely high heat.*

According to Clare, one of the biggest differences between our milk and store-bought variety is actually the fact that we don't homogenize our milk. Homogenizing milk is the process of breaking up the fat molecules so they stay suspended in the milk. If you let unhomogenized milk sit long enough, the fat drifts up to the top, creating a layer of cream with the milk underneath. (Check out the picture.) Clare believes that homogenizing not only makes milk harder to digest - she's had lactose-sensitive customers who can drink the farm's milk with no ill effects - but also ruins the taste.

Here's my two cents about the raw milk debate: cows are dirty, dirty, dirty creatures, and they have an unfortunate tendency to get manure all over themselves. When we milk, we dip the udders in disinfectant and clean them off before putting on the machines; we also use a filter to catch any pieces of dirt or hair or what have you that sneak in.

But mistakes happen. Just this week, one particular cow with a sick sense of humor took a huge dump on me right as I was getting ready to put the machine on her. It's entirely plausible that in a situation like that, manure could make its way into the milk supply... and it only takes a little bit to make people sick, if that little bit has some E. Coli hanging out inside. Hence, I am inclined to view some judicious pasteurization as a good thing.

Additionally, while many pro-raw milk folks tout the various health benefits that raw milk supposedly provides - benefits they say are destroyed by pasteurization - Marion Nestle goes to great lengths in her book What To Eat to explain that the jury is still out on those claims. According to Nestle, the body of scientific knowledge for raw milk benefits is somewhat shaky, with studies going both ways on the issue.

Which brings us to the question of taste. Having never tasted raw milk, I can't comment on how Clear Spring Creamery's milk compares. But I can say definitively that this farm's milk gives your average grocery store milk a good spanking every day of the week, and is the best milk I have ever - EVER - tasted. Frankly, I really don't see how raw milk could taste any better.

That being said, I feel that anyone seriously dedicated to drinking raw milk should go to great pains to research their suppliers. That means going to the farm, asking questions, getting a tour, meeting the cows, and so on. Raw milk buyers need to hold their suppliers to the highest possible standards if they want their dairy to be E. Coli-free.





*A quick pasteurizing tutorial: Pasteurization, named for Louis Pasteur who came up with the modern process in 1862, is the process of heating a food at a certain temperature for a definite length of time and then cooling it.