Cami Moo 🐄

The dairy farmer in 1920 didn't call his milk "raw." He called it milk. It came out of the cow in the morning, went into a churn, went onto the back of a cart, and arrived at your door in a glass bottle before breakfast. Total journey: under twenty-four hours, usually under twelve. Total processing: gravity, a muslin cloth, and a rinse. The word "raw" only attached itself to milk after pasteurisation became universal in the 1940s. Before that, you didn't need the word, because there was nothing to distinguish. All milk was milk. Pasteurisation was introduced for a specific reason. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bovine tuberculosis was rampant in dairy herds. Milk from an infected cow could give a child TB of the bones or lymph nodes. The solution available at the time, in an era before herd testing, was to boil the problem away at the point of consumption. It worked. It also killed the enzymes, denatured some of the proteins, and killed the beneficial lactic acid bacteria that had been doing useful work in the human gut for ten thousand years. By the 1950s, bovine TB had been effectively eradicated from British and American dairy herds through testing and slaughter programmes. The original justification for pasteurisation had, for the most part, gone. The pasteurisation stayed. Commercial inertia. Supply chain logistics. The milk needed to travel further than ever before, to supermarkets that needed longer shelf lives, and the heat treatment gave them that shelf life regardless of whether the public health case still held. We have the technology to test herds. We have the technology to chill milk instantly and transport it quickly. We have two hundred years of data on what humans who drink farm-fresh milk actually look like. They look, in general, like the Masai and the Swiss alpine dairy farmers and the rural Americans of the 1920s. Robust, long-lived, and mostly without the chronic disease profile of everyone currently drinking something that has been heated to seventy-two degrees on the way to a plastic carton at Sainsbury's. The word "raw" is a label invented to make you frightened of a thing your great-grandmother drank every day without incident.

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Simpler times