Ep 174 What’s the deal with raw milk: Part 1

00:00:00
Speaker 1: One frequently hears the remark, look at me, I am hale and a hearty at threescore and ten, and have always been fond of milk and taken it just as it comes dirt bacteria. And all such persons forget three very important things. The first is that the fruits of victory are not to be judged by the survivors alone. We must have a role of the killed and wounded. Two, the sanitarian so often hears the argument, look at me, it has not hurt me that it is beginning to tax his patients. If the health officer wants to close and infected well, the grandfather points, with patriarchal pride to his hail old years and hearty health as proof that the water can do no harm. I once heard a mother of four children all that remained of ten, say, well, you cannot expect to raise them all, but we do expect to raise them all nowadays, especially if they can be nurtured upon fresh, clean and safe milk. The second important thing which old folks seem to forget is that conditions have greatly changed since they were young. Then the milk was wagon hauled to town and used the same day while fresh. Now it comes through many hands and is often about forty eight hours old when it reaches the household. Finally, in the old days, many a milk born outbreak occurred. Many an infant met an untimely death through impure milk, but the dangers were not known and therefore not realized. The affliction was attributed to sewer gas, to miasms from the soil, or to some mysterious agency, if not the will of divine providence. The milk has not changed so much since the good old times, but our knowledge has.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: I mean that says it all. Aaron episodes done is done. That's it just need two episodes on this.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: Or did we But no, Like that is what is so amazing about that. I mean, there are so many things that you could pick apart from that quote, but the fact that it is from nineteen twelve.

00:02:53
Speaker 2: I can't believe that it's so old.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: Nineteen twelve. Yeah, So that was from MJ. Rosenow in his book The Milk Question. Wow, and it's like the same things that we're going to be saying in this episode in next episode. Gosh, but it's amazing, Yeah, And I think that like that, there are so many parts like you will you cannot expect to raise them all, like how much things have changed, I know, right since that time. But anyway, Yeah, Hi, I'm Aaron.

00:03:24
Speaker 2: Welsh and I'm Erin Oman Updyke and this is this podcast will kill you. Welcome to Milk.

00:03:31
Speaker 1: Milk, Milk mil Yeah.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: Today we're talking about milk. We're talking today about pasteurization, yes, and raw milk.

00:03:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. You know, as we were sort of putting together ideas for this season, which we're trying to organize around this theme of combating myths and disinformation, raw milk kept coming up. It really did, and I feel like it's everywhere these days. Made us wonder like, well, what what's the deal? Like, why what's going on with with raw milk? Why? What well did you do with this? Hands down the best Seinfeld impersonation I have ever heard. Thank you me or you?

00:04:13
Speaker 2: Were you coming to you?

00:04:17
Speaker 1: Both of us? Oh my gosh. Yeah, but no, like, seriously, what is what's going on with raw milk? Why is why are people talking about it? Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? We'll get into all of that, but but because you know, we started to do these this research and we were like, Okay, raw milk, We'll do that as an episode. Sure, there is so much there.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: It's so much deeper than we even realized.

00:04:44
Speaker 1: Everyone, we should learn this lesson. It's the same thing we do.

00:04:48
Speaker 2: We kind of learned it because this time we're splitting it into two episodes.

00:04:52
Speaker 1: Eric, we are, Yeah, so this episode this week, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take us through sort of the history of milk, like what milk was like before pastorization, what who invented pasteurization and who did we don't know? I mean no, I'm kidding, and like that what impact that had, and then tracing the roots of the modern day sort of raw milk movement to that past, sort of trying to draw the line through history. Why are people talking about raw milk today? And what is driving this? Like what are some of the drivers of this renewed interest in raw milk.

00:05:31
Speaker 2: I cannot wait to learn everything that you're gonna teach me this week, Karen, and then next week I will pick it up with like where do we stand in terms of milk and the risks of milk borne disease today? What does that risk landscape actually look like? In raw milk versus pastorised milk versus ultra high temperature pastorise milk. What does the legal landscape like look like? Can you even get raw milk? How do people even get that in the US versus is in other countries? Is it just the FDA? It's not? Also, are there any differences between raw milk and pastroised milk?

00:06:10
Speaker 1: Are there?

00:06:11
Speaker 2: I can't wait to tell you about it.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Nicity getting good at the teasers here, thank you?

00:06:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, we trying, there is.

00:06:18
Speaker 1: There's a lot to get through this week, and so we should we should probably.

00:06:21
Speaker 2: Start with quarantin any time.

00:06:23
Speaker 1: Quarantiny time. What are we drinking this week?

00:06:25
Speaker 2: We're drinking milk in it.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: We did have a discussion like should we do milk based drink? Should we not to milk?

00:06:33
Speaker 2: White milk?

00:06:34
Speaker 1: Should we? I mean, ultimately, the bottom line is that there are so many amazing milk dairy free substitutes out there these days, and.

00:06:40
Speaker 2: Now milk milk I think I'm just kidding Milk.

00:06:49
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of oat, that's probably my preferred.

00:06:54
Speaker 2: I'm not a fan of oat milk or any of the other milk products. If I'm being honest, but it's fine.

00:07:05
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: Okay, well, sorry, I'm just telling you my feelings.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Thank you for being vulnerable.

00:07:14
Speaker 2: You're welcome. What is in milk in it? Erin?

00:07:19
Speaker 1: It is based off of a drink that some folks out there might know as the Pink Squirrel. I certainly did not know that this drink existed before googling milk based cocktail recipes.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I'm losing it today.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. And in milk in it aka you know, based on the pink squirrel. Squirrel, pink squirrel. Yeah, crem day no yo, yep, white cremda, cacao heavy cream or whatever dairy free substitute you'd like to use. Okay, and some freshly grated nutmeg.

00:07:51
Speaker 2: Oh sounds sounds I don't know. It sounds similar to things we've done before.

00:07:56
Speaker 1: Erin Yeah, I mean sounds like the Grasshopper, which actually is It's like min minti and creme deick account and cream.

00:08:04
Speaker 2: Okay, listen, it's gonna be delicious. You can find the full recipe for that quarantine, as well as the non alcoholic plus Ebrita version. It won't just be milk on our website, this Podcastwekill You dot com, and on all of our social media channels. Are you following us?

00:08:18
Speaker 1: There? You could follow us?

00:08:20
Speaker 2: Follow us there?

00:08:21
Speaker 1: You should follow us there?

00:08:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.

00:08:23
Speaker 1: If you are following it. I mean, I don't even know what we're doing. Website stuff is next? I know what's back on track? We can do this. Website's full of cool stuff. There's transcripts. There's links to bookshop dot org, affiliate account, our Goodreads list, links to music by Bloodmobile, links to merch links to Patreon, links to deals, links to a first hand account form, links to sources for all of our episodes. Check them out. There's a lot of sources for this episode. Please read on. There's so much.

00:08:55
Speaker 2: Thank you for checking out our website, this podcastwikill you dot com. If you haven't already, take a moment press pause on playing this and you can rate and review and subscribe wherever you're listening. We would really love and appreciate that it helps the show a lot. If you are watching us on YouTube, hello there, make sure that you're subscribed to the exactly right channel down below so that you don't miss an episode.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: What was it smash that subsmae subscribe button.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: That's what my kid watches Minecraft videos, and that's what they always say. They'll be like, oh wait now, so that you can subscribe. I'm like, okay, all.

00:09:34
Speaker 1: Right, well, anyways we can move on.

00:09:38
Speaker 2: Please, Aaron, tell me about milk and pasteurization.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: I can't wait. Let's take a quick break and get into it. Milk has long been a part of many humans diets, not just cow milk, but also goat, horse, camel, and so on. Humans started consuming milk probably around eight to ten thousand years ago, and at some point, maybe around eight or nine thousand years ago, a genetic mutation popped up in a subset of these humans that allowed them to keep digesting milk, specifically lactose in milk as adults lactose tolerance. Lactose intolerance. You've heard about this before, and if you want even more details on the biology and the evolutionary history of this, check out our episode from all the way back in twenty twenty.

00:10:39
Speaker 2: Wow, I know throw back.

00:10:42
Speaker 1: Also featuring one of my favorite first hand accounts.

00:10:45
Speaker 2: Probably one of the best friends hand accounts of all time. Thank you so much, Katie.

00:10:48
Speaker 1: Truly, yeah truly, But the key thing to know about lactose tolerance, the ability to digest most dairy products the ability to digest lactose, is that around one third of the global population has this mutation, and that it is not evenly distributed across the globe. Regions with the highest rates of lactose tolerance include northern Europe, parts of North America, Australia, and certain parts of Africa. But what this means is that heading into the nineteenth century, milk was a diet staple in certain parts of the world where it was in high and constant demand, and it remained a staple even when people began moving from the country to the city, which posed a challenge to milk production and access. Right before the Industrial Revolution, which is the period that we're now entering in the story, milk didn't travel long distances, kind of like in our first hand account, right, you could mostly just get it from a local farm, which, of course, I feel like I need to say, did not mean that the milk was completely safe or free of pathogens or just did not spoil at all. It was just perfect pure milk.

00:11:54
Speaker 2: Right, Like no, it just was like, no, that's where you got it, that's.

00:11:57
Speaker 1: Where you got it. Yeah, But with the growth of cities, these problems of spoilage and freshness intensified, right of course, in his seventeen seventy one novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, which by the way, has a three point four on Goodreads. And I don't know why I find that so funny, but it makes me because it's like my late eighteen hundreds, or sorry, late the late seventeen hundreds.

00:12:23
Speaker 2: Oh is that like a high rating though?

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Or I don't know, but it's just I think the concept of writing a book from two hundred and fifty years ago and being I loved it. I don't know, I liked it.

00:12:36
Speaker 2: It was fine, two stars, and it's just like an account of his expedition too.

00:12:42
Speaker 1: Oh no, sorry, I'll keep talking. Oh it's a novel, okay. And from this novel there's a there's a passage where the author to buy a Smallett paints a lovely picture of the journey that a pail of milk might take from cow to Oh this all right, quote carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul refuse discharged from doors and windows, spittle snot and tobacco quids from foot passengers from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joy's sake, the spewings of the infant, and finally the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that rends this precious mixture under the respectable denomination of the milkmaid. Ooh, not not the nicest of images. No, I don't.

00:13:38
Speaker 2: I don't want that milk, especially not for milkmaids.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: No, I know, poor thing. Yeah, I know they're working hard, I mean, but people didn't really have much of a choice. Right. As cities grew, the dairy industry had to come up with solutions to meet the constant demand for milk, and in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, this was maybe to keep small dairy herds housed either in open areas of cities or like just outside the city, like seventy cows or so. And then as the city populations grew, these small herds grew to like two thousand a head. Whoa yep, And then you're not going to find more area, like you have to some figure out how you're going to house all these it's just increasingly cramped quarters right, right.

00:14:25
Speaker 2: Like too many cows in a small space. Yeap, exactly, Okay.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: And when these larger herds were still not sufficient to produce enough milk for a city, milk began to be transported via rail. Keep in mind, refrigeration was not yet a thing.

00:14:40
Speaker 2: I was just going to ask, when did refrigeration become a thing.

00:14:42
Speaker 1: That I don't know, I can't believe. I don't have this in here, but I don't know.

00:14:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it wasn't a thing.

00:14:48
Speaker 1: It wasn't a thing. Yeah, And so milk spoilage was a real concern, especially for the producers who introduced some nasty ways of dealing with it, right, because like you're going to send a whole shipment of milk, you people to actually buy it instead of having to throw it all away because it's spoiled, right, right, So maybe you add some formaldehyde. Maybe you do, Maybe you do that. That actually did happen.

00:15:09
Speaker 2: That's a great plan. That is sarcasm, Yeah, just in case, in case that doesn't come through.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, milk formaldehyde and milk adulteration period was really a big problem.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:15:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, So anyway to bring it all together. By the mid eighteen hundreds, we've got no refrigeration, milk being transported long distances, harmful milk processing practices like embalming it with formaldehyde, cows housed in crowded and filthy conditions, humans basically living the same way in cities, and a lack of knowledge about how infectious disease spreads.

00:15:49
Speaker 2: Okay, really great setup for people to get super sick.

00:15:53
Speaker 1: Yep, sarcasm again, I have written a recipe for disaster, but it truly was a disaster, and I can demonstrate that with some numbers. So, most European cities around this time had infant mortality rates of one hundred and fifty to three hundred per one thousand live births.

00:16:16
Speaker 2: Oh dear.

00:16:17
Speaker 1: In New York City in eighteen eighty, infant mortality reached four hundred deaths per one thousand live births.

00:16:23
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

00:16:25
Speaker 1: Compare that to today the US it's around five point six per one thousand live births.

00:16:31
Speaker 2: Wow, it's just it's so world's different. Yeah, world's different. Yeah.

00:16:37
Speaker 1: Infant mortality, like you heard in our Firstean account, was a way of life. These high infant mortality rates were not solely attributable to milk. Of course, you know, there was a lot of things going on. If you listened to our last couple of episodes on childhood vaccines and the schedule, you'll know. Yeah, but milk did play a huge role, and it was a lot huger of a role than I realized.

00:17:03
Speaker 2: Actually.

00:17:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, So for example, in Toronto in the early nineteen hundreds, spoiled milk was responsible for half of the thirty thousand deaths in children. What yeah, wow, huge, Like I think I've also seen estimates from one third to a half of infant mortality.

00:17:22
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.

00:17:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, but like what what does what does spoiled mean? Right? How was milk causing so much illness and death?

00:17:33
Speaker 2: Wow?

00:17:34
Speaker 1: Pathogens it's bottom line. Yeah, but cow's milk carbon pathogens. And so when that milk was not safely treated to prevent the growth of pathogens, people who drank this milk could get very, very sick. The sugars, fats, and protein in milk provides a substrate. It provides food for this pathog for these pathogens to grow. Right. You think about like a glass of water. And it's why I mean of course is a huge, a huge root of transmission for many different pathogens. But milk the pathogens can grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, where.

00:18:10
Speaker 2: It's just milk is like a beautiful growing medium.

00:18:13
Speaker 1: Yes, it's like what you would want to culture bacteria exact.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: So it's not just like the ones that get put there, you know, from the milking process or from the storage process or from the handling process. It's like once they're there, they will just exponentially continue to grow because they love all the nutrients and milk as much as our bodies do.

00:18:33
Speaker 1: Exactly.

00:18:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, And among the most vulnerable to these pathogens of course, infants.

00:18:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe why we're.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: Infants drinking so much milk.

00:18:46
Speaker 2: I'm guessing we didn't have formula.

00:18:48
Speaker 1: Well, we did have some early formulas. But it comes back again to the Industrial Revolution. So women increasingly had to work in factories to help provide for their families, which meant that they would be gone for long, long stretches of time. It couldn't bring their babies with them, and they couldn't breastfeed their infants, and so as a result, breastfeeding declined around fifty to seventy percent during this time.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: Oh, Wow.

00:19:12
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, huge decline, and babies were instead fed or like cow's milk alone or cow's milk supplemented with early formula, or they were supplemented with cow's milk. But this cow's milk had not undergone any treatment for disease prevention, right, right, right, right. So there was a nineteen o five epidemiological study of infant mortality between breastfed and cow's milk fed infant and they found dramatic differences in babies that were zero to three months old. Infant mortality was one point nine percent in breastfed babies and ninety two percent in cow's mokefil babies.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: I mean that makes sense too, just in terms of like nutritional differences in cow's milk versus human breast milk in a baby that young.

00:20:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, at one year old. Just to carry this further, six point two percent of breastfed babies died compared to thirty six percent of cow's milk only.

00:20:10
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: Huge, I mean these are huge differences. Yeah, babies fed cow's milk were fifteen times more likely to die than breastfed babies alone.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:20:18
Speaker 1: And again you know this was pre modern day formula, right, This is a very different time, right.

00:20:26
Speaker 2: They didn't have other options, They didn't know as much about the nutritional differences, but it was like this is all we've got. It's one or the other.

00:20:34
Speaker 1: Yea. And of course this was used to shame working women, oh, of course, or women who had no other option than to feed their baby cow's milk, like it was. It's always used to shame, yeah, anyway. But these differences in in mortality were not due solely to nutrition. Mostly they were due to pathogens.

00:20:52
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: A number of different outbreaks were tied to milk, typhoid fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, septics or throat and of course tuberculosis.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Tuberculosis also diphtheria what I know, I know, but yes, okay, tpia awful.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, So tuberculosis was a huge killer during this period and it was greatly greatly feared. In the late eighteen eighties in the northeastern US, tuberculosis infected twenty percent of all cattle. WHOA, yeah, and I'm assuming they didn't mention this specifically. I'm assuming this is bovine tuberculosis, yeah, probably, which can still cause infections in humans. Yes, absolutely, And I know that you'll talk more about that probably next week. A little bit different, okay, okay, But anyway, from the same time period late eighteen eighties, fifteen percent of all cans of milk were contaminated with the tuberculosis bacteria. No, thank you, Okay, but believe it or not, like those are some those are some decent numbers like those are okay, not bad, right, I mean? Yeah, well, yeah, I know. I know because in eighteen ninety three, around fifty percent of the milk that was supplied to the city and county hospitals of San Francisco contained active tuberculosis bacteria. Why because it was it was rampant in the cattle.

00:22:18
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, gracious.

00:22:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep. Yeah. In nineteen hundred, I'm going to keep going, teny percent of all cases of tuberculosis in humans were attributable to infection from bovine tuberculosis. Who I mean in nineteen hundred tuberculosis. Everyone had tuberculosis, right, it was everywhere I do. It's a huge number of cases.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, Spoiled.

00:22:40
Speaker 1: Milk in general. This is just to give you some you know, to harken back to what we were talking about it as milk being a food for bacteria. Also, spoiled milk was found to have five hundred million bacteria per cubic centimeter inc.

00:22:59
Speaker 2: I don't know if I drink milk again.

00:23:03
Speaker 1: I mean, you can always oat milk, era can I guess? But like, how was this happening?

00:23:11
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:23:12
Speaker 1: Let me paint you a picture please? Okay? So remember how I said that herds were kept in cities and really crowded and filthy conditions. So these herds often went hand in hand with distilleries, like whiskey distilleries. All distilleries, right, the leftover mash from making whiskey would be fed to the cows, right, So it was just like a okay, here's like a you know, a cycle.

00:23:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: The resulting milk from cows that were fed this, you know, the old grain was called swill or slop. Love that, yeah, swill milk. And so a lot of distilleries actually housed cows on site, like Johnson's Grain Distillers of Manhattan, which had up to two thousand cows.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: In Manhattan, Manhattan.

00:23:59
Speaker 1: Isn't that wild to think about it?

00:24:01
Speaker 2: I can't imagine it.

00:24:02
Speaker 1: I know, I know the life of these cows and the milk that they produced is best illustrated by this quote from a nineteen eighty paper by Frederick Sten. You ready for this, I'm ready quote. The cattle stood in a huge building in rows of seven to ten head to head, in stalls three feet wide. The cow consumed thirty two gallons of slop and three pounds of hay. In such surroundings, the cow was rarely washed. Its excrement clung to its tail and hindquarters. It was reported that the people of Berlin consumed three hundred pounds of cow dung in their milk daily. Ulcer I know ulcers developed in the mouths of the cows. Their tails often fell off. Tuberculosis of the glands, lungs, and intestines followed. The stall became a spool. One Brooklyn distillery indicated that out of one eight hundred eleven cows, two hundred and thirty died in ten weeks.

00:25:09
Speaker 2: No mm hmm oh.

00:25:11
Speaker 1: No milk obtained was pale blue, often turbid, and melodorous. Speculating dairymen conceal their wickedness not so much as by diluting the milk with water, as by adulterating the swill milk with plaster of Paris, charcoal, starch, sugar, flour, and egg making bad matters worse.

00:25:32
Speaker 2: Dear, I feel like I remember you talking about this in another episode.

00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, the poison scad episode. Yeah.

00:25:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we talked about it something else too, arsenic. Maybe because you talked a lot about just like the contamination of things in that episode. I don't know.

00:25:49
Speaker 1: I don't know it was something else, but yeah, yeah.

00:25:52
Speaker 2: And this just to remind myself, this is like, yeah, mid to late eighteen hundreds.

00:25:57
Speaker 1: This is I would say, late eighteen hundreds, late eighte hundreds.

00:26:00
Speaker 2: Okay, gross, So glad I don't live then.

00:26:06
Speaker 1: Most city milk came from distillery cows. Like that is, if you lived in the city. What's what I just described. That's that's where your milk is coming from. This was not sustainable, basically killing off their customers. Something had to be done to improve milk safety. Fortunately the solution already existed, did it? It did? Louis Pasture. You know, we've talked about him a million times before on this podcast. His role in developing germ theory, his Rabi's vaccine, his work on tuberculosis. Needless to say, we all know this dude's name, we do, I hope we know it. Yeah, but we haven't, at least as far as I can remember, ever talked about the process that bears his name.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: I don't think so pasturization. I don't think we have maybe in lactus and hearts, but if that minimally, yeah, I.

00:26:56
Speaker 1: Really don't remember think we did. Yeah, Okay, So broadly speaking, what is pasteurization. It's a process, right, It involves heating up a product such as milk to a certain temperature for a certain amount of time to destroy pathogenic microorganisms for many different like you know, subtypes of pasteurization. Yeah, I know. You'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit.

00:27:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

00:27:19
Speaker 1: It does not kill all of the microbes. It's not sterilization, which is why pasteurized milk can still eventually spoil. But it does kill off a great number of them, making the milk safer and lasts longer, while also preserving nutritional qualities and taste. That's that.

00:27:37
Speaker 2: That's pretty simple, Aaron, pretty simple pasteurization, though it works on the knowledge that pathogenic microbes cause foods such as milk to spoil.

00:27:47
Speaker 1: In the mid eighteen hundreds, this knowledge wasn't really widely known or accepted. So people had observed microbial life since at least Van Lavenhook and his microscope, but the jury was still out on what role the microbes played. Most scientists thought that the microbes seen in spoiled milk or fermented wine were a byproduct of spoilage or fermentation, not the cause of it, Okay, But Louis Pasture wasn't so sure, did not intend for that to rhyme. But in eighteen fifty four, Pasture began studying fermentation, specifically in beer and wine to try to understand what the microbes that he observed were doing. And he demonstrated that grape juice would not ferment into wine if you prevented environmental yeast from depositing on grapes.

00:28:36
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah.

00:28:37
Speaker 1: And he also demonstrated that broth would only turn cloudy and thus teeming with microbial life, as you could see under the scope, if you exposed it to air. Ok So, he showed that these two products, these two the result of this was microbes, right like, they caused it. They caused fermentation, they caused spoilage.

00:28:58
Speaker 2: Those didn't happen without those present. Yes, okay.

00:29:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they also weren't the product of that, right, exactly right, And so he and this was also I think integral in the in germ theory itself, right, basically connecting exposure to pathogens and disease.

00:29:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:29:18
Speaker 1: And so with this knowledge, he connected the dots between microbes and food products like wine and eventual spoilage. And this was a huge deal for the wine industry and the beer industry for sure, because he saw that, you know, if there was a way to kill off those putrefying microbes, you could preserve the wine. So science had known for decades this part I did not know, and the general public for likely much much longer that heat treating food would help to keep it from spoiling. Like people knew to heat up milk.

00:29:47
Speaker 2: People did that. They heated the heated their water, heated their whatever.

00:29:52
Speaker 1: And even like heat canning for vinegar and stuff, okay had been around. Yeah, there was a text from seventeen oh two that recommended boiled milk for infants.

00:30:02
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.

00:30:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also it was just like it was daily It was known much much longer like in daily life for you know, in common knowledge for centuries. But Louis Pasture was the first to really formalize the practice and explained why it worked, like what was the heating actually doing to these microbes? So he did it first with wine in eighteen sixty eight in a public demonstration. He loved public demonstrations, where he shipped a cargo of pasteurized wine around the world without a single bottle spoiling, which was unheard of. And he later applied it to beer. But it doesn't seem like he ever tried it with milk. Okay, that's so interesting. He just didn't do it.

00:31:00
Speaker 2: We I mean, so many things like that we eat and drink today are pastureized, but like so many thing, the thing that I think most people think of is milk and milka. Yeah, so that's so interesting.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: It wasn't Pasture who applied it to milk, ok Yeah. Yeah. That instead fell to a number of doctors, researchers and passionate civilians around the world. And it started kind of slowly, right, just a few people trying it out, but it grew more and more popular over the eighteen seventies, and so that in eighteen eighty two, the first commercial pasteurization process was developed in Germany for milk for milk, and from there the practice spread to Sweden and Denmark, with pediatricians recommending home treating your milk, as well as commercial producers incorporating it into their processing. But perhaps the most outspoken and well known advocates for pasteurized milk were Lena and Nathan Strauss. Nathan, does this name sound familiar to you?

00:31:58
Speaker 2: Are they related to Lee Vice Strauss of the Jeans or of the Strauss Dairy. I'm guessing no, neither.

00:32:07
Speaker 1: They're they're the Macy's Strausses.

00:32:10
Speaker 2: I don't know the store, the department store. They're also Strausses. Yeah, I didn't know that.

00:32:16
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, I have some fun trivia. Well maybe not fun, I have some trivia free. So Nathan, along with his brother Isidor, were the co owners of Macy's apartment store. Isidor and his wife died in nineteen twelve on the Titanic. Oh huh. You know the movie the old couple lying in bed.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: Uh huh?

00:32:38
Speaker 1: That's them.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: Oh that's so sad.

00:32:41
Speaker 1: Isn't that really sad? That was always like the most I mean that, I sob at that movie.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:32:47
Speaker 1: But anyway, so that's my trivia. Back to Nathan and Lena Strauss, the other Strauss couple. Uh. I think there was a third brother, but I'm not going to talk about him. In the eighteen nineties, the Strausses became very vocal supporters of pastoration because they had lost two of their children to milk born to berculosis, and they learned about pastoralization. They learned about it extensively from a very prominent American pediatrician named Abraham Jacoby and who was also a huge proponent of pasteurized milk. And so they were like, we need to tell everyone about this, We need to do something about this. And so they were like, let's spread the word. They would visit different cities and they set up milk stations in New York City where pasteurized milk was distributed and they only charged those who could afford to pay at the low price of a penny a pint, and everyone else would just get it for free. They also established a pastorization unit in eighteen ninety seven on Randall's Island at the city's Free Hospital for Children, where the mortality rate was forty four percent forty four oh yeah. After pasteurized milk was introduced, it dropped within a year. To twenty percent.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, erin Yeah, and.

00:34:02
Speaker 1: It continued to decline in subsequent years.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:34:06
Speaker 1: By nineteen hundred, they had distributed half a million bottles of pasteurized milk, and by nineteen oh six they had opened seventeen philanthropic milk stations in the city.

00:34:16
Speaker 2: Wow, philanthropic milk station.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: I know, not a phrase I have ever said before. Yeah, but it's great. Yeah.

00:34:24
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:34:25
Speaker 1: And they were intent on launching similar programs and passing pastorization policy across the nation. But with this, with this goal, they were at least initially in the minority. Huh yeah, early nineteen hundreds. So while other countries much more readily adopted pastorization beginning in the eighteen eighties, including Pastor's home country of France, the US was much more reluctant, as was the UK, which only required pastorization starting in nineteen twenty two. I think even then it was really slow to catch on. We're just like, no, I'm not going to do this to my milk. In nineteen oh eight, Chicago became the first US city to require pastorization unless a farm. Nineteen oh eight. Yeah, but there was a there was an asterisk there which was unless the farm could prove that it was tuberculosis free and then that farm could sell what they called certified milk. And after Chicago, other cities followed, so you know, New York passed an ordinance requiring full pastorization in nineteen ten, and then Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Boston, San Francisco introduced laws in like nineteen fourteen nineteen fifteen. These pastorization laws began in the cities and gradually made their way into more rural areas with the passage of many laws prompted by various cattle epidemics or outbreaks and humans tied to raw milk. So it was just sort of like a kind it was. It was a strange thing because it was a lot of people dragging their feet. There were a few very prominent, outspoken supporters of pastorization, but and there and a few very prominent attractors, but for the most part, people were like, I don't really know how to think about it. Is the technology is so new, and this has a lot of parallels with other food technologies that have been introduced, like food irradiation GMOs, which is we should do an episode on but like this sort of thing, the slow, like, Oh, I don't know, it's a little early to say. This person says this. There's a fascinating article that I read for this about New York Times coverage of these three different technologies pastorization, food, irradiation, and GMOs and sort of the rhetoric used like over time as these technologies become more accepted. Fascinating stuff. Anyway, interesting.

00:36:46
Speaker 2: History echoes. It's almost like we can learn from it.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: What about that? Wow? Anyway? Okay, So in just to give you a sense of timing for pastorization in the US, so by nineteen twenty six, one hundred percent of the milk in cities with over half a million people was pasteurized, but only forty five percent of milk was pasteurized in American cities with fewer than twenty five thousand people. Okay, so it was like still a very urban rural divide. Did you know that my grandma grew up on a dairy farm in northern Michigan.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: I don't know if I did know that.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Aaron and I was talking to my mom and I was like, Mom, would she have would Ama have drink raw milk or like pasteurized milk?

00:37:29
Speaker 3: Did they?

00:37:30
Speaker 1: My mom was like I don't know, it was a huge she visited, My mom visited there like much much later, but I don't know when they would have started dotation pasteurization.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, how interesting, I know, I know anyway.

00:37:45
Speaker 1: But pasteurization when it was introduced, even if it was like a little bit staggered, it was clear what a huge impact that it made. And it's hard today to quantify that. But we do have a few different figures that we can look at. Because there were other things going on at the time, right that contributed to the decline in infant mortality.

00:38:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, vaccines, vaccines.

00:38:10
Speaker 1: General sila, sanitation especially, Yeah. But in New York City, for example, the Commissioner of Health attributed the drop in infant mortality from twelve per one thousand births in eighteen ninety three to three point eight in nineteen sixteen to the compulsory pastorization of milk. A huge drop.

00:38:30
Speaker 2: They said that just from the milk, that's from pastoralization. Wow.

00:38:35
Speaker 1: Undoubtedly other medical and public health improvements played a role, but there's no denying that pastorization was saving the lives of some of the most vulnerable members of society. And despite this, pastorization continued to be a contentious issue, especially in the US, and continues to be why why why? Okay, that's a great question.

00:38:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have so many thoughts and questions about this. Aired please tell me, I know.

00:39:02
Speaker 1: Okay, So historically at the time, so let's say, let's frame this into nineteen tens to nineteen thirties or so, there were four basic arguments against pastorization in the early twentieth century. The first three were more dairy industry based. Number one, expense. Pasturization required additional equipment which might be prohibitedly expensive for small farms, putting them out of business and letting the big farms take over. And they claimed that this cost would also trickle down to the consumer, who may be priced out of buying milk.

00:39:35
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, that's so interesting in the context of today, but anyways, continue.

00:39:42
Speaker 1: There was also a if they want to drink raw milk, let them like' just let them have that kind of sentiment, like, what are you requiring these laws?

00:39:51
Speaker 2: Are you to tell me what I can and can't drink?

00:39:54
Speaker 1: Yeah? Then number two necessity. Many people claimed that pastures didn't ultimately solve the issue of a dirty farm, that all it was doing was allowing the farmer to sell dirty milk under a false promise. And they argued that enforcing pastorization would just make farms even more disease ridden, and that since it was such a new science, you couldn't even be sure that pastorization was doing what it was supposed to be doing. I mean, new science is a stretch because it was you know, eighteen sixty eight was when it was like really used. Okay, sure, yeah. Number three taste, pastorization was said to ruin the taste of milk, to take the life out of milk unquote, and farmers worried that people would stop buying milk because of this changed taste. It's alleged change taste, okay. The fourth argument against pastorization is kind of an extension of this, and it came from the medical community. Actually nutrients, So some doctors believed that pastorization destroyed the nutrients in milk and would ultimately harm the infants consuming it. I think it's important to place this in context, right. So, the pasteurization debate was happening as researchers were finally beginning to piece together the components of nutrition, like proteins, fats, amino acids, vitamins and so on, and so there was extra sensitivity there. People were like, what happens.

00:41:16
Speaker 2: Who whoa, whoa. Now we know there's a lot in this milk. It's not just milk. It's a bunch of stuff in there. And what happens if you heat it up? Do you mess up all the stuff?

00:41:27
Speaker 1: Yes? Okay, yeah, Like scurvy was one special fear especially. It was like, people are gonna get scurvy with pasteurized milk.

00:41:35
Speaker 2: By the way, milk is a terrible source of vitamin C exactly, but they didn't know that at the time.

00:41:40
Speaker 1: Okay, they didn't know that, or maybe they did because they knew about scurvy, they knew about vitamin C.

00:41:44
Speaker 2: So, I mean, there is vitamin C in milk exactly, but it is a very small amount and it is quickly oxidized just from exposure to air, and so it is not stable. Sorry, I could go on, because I went too deep of a dive on like the profiles of milk versus rock. Yeah, don't get your vitamin C from milk, raw or pasteurized.

00:42:06
Speaker 1: I mean, you won't be able to like you, you will.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: Get skirty, you will get scirfy no matter if your milk is pastized or not.

00:42:15
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was a big sticking point for Okay, interesting and you know, also on top of this, some doctors just doubted the milk disease connection entirely, which was really frustrating to proponents of pasteurization, who pointed out, Number one, disease outbreaks are linked to specific milk, like that came from that batch of milk, right. Two outbreaks are explosive, which point towards a common exposure. Number three, populations that drink more milk tend to have more milk related disease. And number four, within households, milk drinkers have more milk related disease. The evidence was there, right.

00:42:53
Speaker 2: Like they were like, it's always been there, it's.

00:42:55
Speaker 1: Here, it's here, you go on a platter with pastor milk. But the other arguments could also be refuted, right, Producing certified raw milk was which was like, okay, you're your pharm is tuberculus is free, blah blah blah. It was actually more expensive than pasteurization given the frequent inspections that had to happen.

00:43:18
Speaker 2: Right.

00:43:18
Speaker 1: It also didn't really prevent tuberculosis. Because you could if you go through you know, if you're inspecting only every three months, right, you're you could be selling tuberculas what anyway? Yeah, taste, I can't speak to that, but when weighing potentially deadly diseases on one hand and taste on the other, I think it's reasonable to sacrifice a little bit of taste for safe food. I mean, my feeling.

00:43:40
Speaker 2: Can I also can I sorry because guess is jumping ahead to what I'm going to talk about next week, But like, you also have to take into consideration what types of farms are you talking about? Are you still talking about grody farms in the middle of New York City with two thousand cows standing on top of their own poop? Okay, if you pasteurize that milk, yeah, it's probably still going to taste bad.

00:44:02
Speaker 1: Well. But that's the thing too, is that that is what I think the proponents of raw milk we're saying is that they were like, oh, you're just making this dirty milk. No, there were still quality, cleanliness.

00:44:16
Speaker 2: Right standards that were going into place.

00:44:19
Speaker 1: Clean milk was being pasteurized. Yeah, Like that was the bottom line. You couldn't you could not pasteurize dirty milk.

00:44:25
Speaker 2: You can't keep doing what they were doing. It was like other things have to change, and hey, guess what. Even your supposed clean, certified farm is still getting people sick, so you still have to pasteurize it.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: And there were still safety standards across the board. Right, whether your farm was selling certified milk or pasteurized milk, you still had to meet the same safety standards.

00:44:46
Speaker 2: Right, yep, still too okay.

00:44:49
Speaker 1: At the end of his book The Milk Question, Rosa Now we heard from in our first hand account summarized what he viewed as the answer to the milk problem.

00:44:59
Speaker 2: Quote.

00:44:59
Speaker 1: To keep milk clean, we need inspection. To render milk safe, we need pasturization. Inspection goes to the root of the problem. Through an efficient system of inspection, the milk supply should be cleaner, better, fresher, and safer. Inspection, however, has limitations. These limitations may be guarded against by pasturization. A milk supply, therefore, that is both supervised and pasteurized is the only satisfactory solution of the problem. Love it end quote yeah, I mean yeah, done. And yet and yet this debate continued long after pasteurization laws were widespread across the US. I mean, those four arguments for raw milk and against pasturization are essentially the same exact talking points of raw milk proponents today. Yeah, just a little bit. There are a few extra ones thrown in there. I know you'll talk about it. Yeah, raw milk has never disappeared. In fact, it's grown in supporters over the years. So like, what gives why is this such a sticky idea in the face of all of this evidence that pasteurized milk is safe and healthy. Who are the people pushing raw milk? Is what is happening there?

00:46:19
Speaker 2: And why?

00:46:20
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well, okay, first of all, they're not a monolith, right, Like, there were and continue to be many different drivers for why people buy raw milk or attack pasteurization laws. So, for instance, many pro raw milk folks argue that raw milk sales help small farms and local economies. Price of a gallon of raw milk is typically two to three times that of a gallon of pasteurized milk.

00:46:40
Speaker 2: I feel like that's an underestimate based on things I've seen.

00:46:44
Speaker 1: It is, and it also uses that it uses that tried and true psychological link where you think that because something costsmart, it must hire better, and they say that the direct farm to consumer sales helps the farm cut back on processing costs.

00:46:59
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean I believe that.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have not read through any economic analyzes comparing raw to pasteurized milk. I don't doubt that there's some basis too, yes, especially considering how popular of an argument it is. But I have to wonder, and I guess you'll talk about it next week what the legal and financial repercussions are if you sell a batch of raw milk that makes people sick or.

00:47:21
Speaker 2: Die then you Yeah, yeah, I don't have an answer to that next week either, Aaron, just you know.

00:47:27
Speaker 1: And I think that, like raw milk does sort of signify an overall desire to have better health, So like what does that mean in the society, right, like micro tuning every part of your life?

00:47:42
Speaker 2: Uh huh right.

00:47:43
Speaker 1: But I'm not really going to get into that aspect of it. What I want to talk about for the rest of this episode is not economic claims, not sort of the general sense of dissatisfaction and all of that, but rather the ideological arguments that people make for raw milk, what underpins them, and the dangers in this rhetoric. Before doing this episode, I thought of raw milk in the US as like this fringe idea, like a fad carried over from the hippies of the nineteen seventies, like kind of a misguided, crunchy granola type of alternative health interest. Like that was my perception of the vibe of raw milk. I had no idea just how much raw milk is used today by the far right and white supremacists as a dog whistle. I didn't know. Maybe that means that I just am not online enough, or I don't know, I'm not paying enough attention. I don't know, but I think it's so fascinating because it kind of is shares so many parallels with anti vaccine sentiment, and it kind of reveals that the spectrum, or what we think of or what I was thinking of as a political spectrum, is really a circle. And I don't know what that means, but anyway, yeah, so yeah, But as I started to research for this episode, I found traces of this link between raw milk and fascism going all the way back to the early twentieth century eugenics and Nazis. And so how did this trend in the US go from eugenics to its crunchy granola era to now it's the links to the far right and white supremacy. Yeah, it's a great question. Let's see if we can connect some of these dots. So from the very beginning of the twentieth century, there was considerable pushback against pasteurization, as we just talked about, and one of the key medical objections was that pasteurised milk was viewed as less nutritious than pasteurized milk and Aaron, I know that you'll talk more about this next week. But yes, there are some nutritional differences between the two, but they are very minor and would be addressed with other foods. Very minor, yes, yeah, yeah, But these differences were exaggerated by some vocal anti pasteurizers throughout the decades of the nineteen hundreds. While most pro pasturizers felt that a minor, nearly undetectable loss of nutrients was an acceptable trade off for not dying of a deadly disease, others, like Halliday Sutherland, were more concerned with what that nutrient loss meant for future fertility. In a nineteen thirty eight correspondence to the British Medical journal, He wrote, quote, the shadow of depopulation and national decline is looming in the near future. Milk is a staple food, and before pasteurization is adopted as a national policy, I suggest that it would be wise to test the effects of pastorization on the fertility vitamins led us experiment on animals before experimenting on the nation.

00:50:45
Speaker 2: Oh dear, okay quote at least he said animals. I guess, Yeah, I guess.

00:50:53
Speaker 1: And people had done experiments and there was no detectable difference. But he misreported the results of those. Of course, Yes, but this view didn't come out of nowhere. The implication that pasteurization would accelerate depopulation was tied to the general belief held by eugenesis that whole, unprocessed, unpreserved foods were fundamental to the fertility and overall health of the desirable subset of a population.

00:51:20
Speaker 2: Just the desirable subset, of course.

00:51:22
Speaker 1: Right, Like, yeah, the implications between the lines kind of a thing. Yeah, Some anti pasteurizers loosened to their stance to allow exceptions like oh, yeah, okay, we can pasteurize maybe for those who are impoverished, or we can pasteurize for in cities specifically, which is, of course, you know where you're going to see the highest population of impoverished individuals. But this eugenic perspective wasn't limited to human consumers of milk, but it also extended to the bovine producers themselves. Certain breeds were hailed as producing the best tasting milk, which is also echo today. You can see that. And it's no wonder that this rhetoric of superiority and inferiority carried into the debate about pasturization. Like you are what you drink, right.

00:52:12
Speaker 2: That's sort of the thoughts, like my I'm better than you because I'm drinking raw milk. Gosh, yeah, I mean that is one hundred percent the TikTok vibes today, so yep uh.

00:52:24
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty one, British physician Lionel Picton wrote quote, much of modern food is processed, preserved, refined, sterilized dead. Contrast the insipid, pasteurized fluid of today to the milk of our forefathers.

00:52:41
Speaker 2: End quoth, sorry, I can't, I'm getting so annoyed erin I'm sorry, but especially because I should just keep my mouse so much more. I know, I'm going to talk. I'm going to talk about the things that are annoying me about this rhetoric a lot next week. But it's just it is so incredibly misguided to put the types of rhetoric that they are saying on pasteurization itself. Yeah, like, see what you want about the US food system, we're kind of broken. Pasturization is not the broken part. Pasturization is the part that's saving babies lives. I'm sorry, I'm getting too No.

00:53:21
Speaker 1: That is the bottom line, that period.

00:53:23
Speaker 2: That is it. They're just picking. Why pick pastor Why pasturization? Why is that the thing that they picked.

00:53:30
Speaker 1: Well, let's let's keep going. Okay, we maybe we'll get some clarity. I don't know. I can't promise that, but we could try this way of talking about food, this call for natural, unprocessed foods, subsistence farming, making food great again. It was also how Nazi officials discussed food and nutrition. Okay, they pushed for a diet consisting of food grown on national soil, foods that they had evolved eating. Frans Werese, professor of medicine and leader in the life reform movement, said in nineteen thirty nine, quote, diet must be in the position not only to preserve the continued existence of the nation and race, but also to make them more fertile and fit.

00:54:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:54:16
Speaker 1: And the group that was instructed to lead the charge housewives through a return to a traditional lifestyle, Oh my god, share, I'm sorry.

00:54:29
Speaker 2: Oh okay.

00:54:31
Speaker 1: And this, this focus on healthy eating, on unprocessed natural foods, was not counter to their goals of genocide and ethnic cleansing. It was part of it, right. They viewed diet and nutrition through whole natural foods as essential to the ultimate goal of increasing the fertility and health of what they viewed as a desirable race. The call for whole natural foods, subsistence farming, and a return to traditional lifestyles, it kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it if you've been reading the news.

00:55:04
Speaker 2: Too familiar, Aaron, too familiar.

00:55:06
Speaker 1: I mean, that is the rhetoric that the far right uses today. Just a few days ago, on March ninth, twenty twenty five, we're recording this. On March twelfth, Trump called for a return to subsistence farming as a solution to rising egg prices. RFK Junior, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has called repeatedly for the elimination of ultra processed foods and GMOs and a return to whole, unprocessed natural foods. He's also a big raw milk fan, and, of course, in addition to being anti vax tradwives are all over TikTok spouting the supposed benefits of raw milk. White supremacists use milk imagery as a dog whistle for racial purity. The neo Nazi, antisemitic white supremacist who coined the term alt right, used a milk emoji in his Twitter profile and wrote, I'm very tolerant. Lactose tolerant. Starting to come together right. He and other neo Nazis use their lactase persistence to claim genetic superiority. My goodness, because if you're just so so depressed, I know, I hate everything.

00:56:23
Speaker 2: Like that's just so incredibly ridiculous.

00:56:26
Speaker 1: I know, but you can't, Like you can't. There's no logic to it. Yeah, it's just argue. Yeah, a bunch of weirdos. I'm sorry I.

00:56:34
Speaker 2: Shouldn't say that, but like we could say that I'm better than you because I can continue to digest lactose.

00:56:43
Speaker 1: I drink another mammal's milk into adult It's.

00:56:46
Speaker 2: A weird thing to do, to drink a milk. It's a weird thing that we do. It is it is, Oh my gosh, we're the weirdos. If you can do it. Not normal.

00:56:59
Speaker 1: But that's that's the thing. So just to in case people don't remember from earlier on in the episode or don't know this, that this mutation, the lactase persistence occurs at higher frequencies in people with Northern European descent, And so this is them directly calling that out and saying, oh, I'm genetically superior because it's seventy.

00:57:16
Speaker 2: Percent of the global population cannot digest lactose into adulthood.

00:57:20
Speaker 1: But that's that's their point that they Yeah, I know, I know, so I know, okay, but this is not This is why milk is not a random thing, right, like.

00:57:31
Speaker 2: They intentionally chosen because of that, it's a way to distinguish yourself as.

00:57:37
Speaker 1: Not a coincidence and better and this in fact, this type of dietary racism dates back to the nineteenth century. In the late eighteen hundreds, another period of time where perceived threats to traditional masculinity were high, and fears of immigration loomed large. The medical researcher J. Leonard Corning wrote that Western meat and dairy products were direct responsible for the quote unquote intellectual vigor and superior moral courage of the English that allowed them to quote extend their empire throughout the world.

00:58:10
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, uh huh.

00:58:14
Speaker 1: He described non Westerners as quote unquote effeminate rice eaters. Sounds a lot like the soy boy insults that the all right hurls at people today, right, like, wow, it's the parallels are so clear.

00:58:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's yes, wow, Okay, yeah, both of.

00:58:32
Speaker 1: These, both of these things incorporate attacks on diet and masculinity and race and race. Yeah. An agricultural history of New York from the nineteen thirties kept with this theme. Quote okay. A casual look at the races of people seems to show that those using much milk are the strongest physically and mentally and the most enduring of all the people in the world. Of all races, the Aryans seem to have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest users of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high development of this division of human beings end quote and gross.

00:59:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I don't think I had any idea, Aaron, that it was a so like that it went so far back, yeah, and that that milk and raw milk has always been so tied into this like white racial superiority situation, Like that's I did not I know, I.

00:59:36
Speaker 1: Know, I I just kept falling down the rabbit hole. Yeah, and like what what do you mean? And then just like everything how history is not quite repeating but yeah, like kind of yeah, kind of yeah, yep, yeah, So no, present day white supremacists using milk as a symbol for racial purity not a coincidence. But where does the raw milk aspect? It's like, why are ra right? How did raw milk go from being a crunchy granola alternative health item to an alt right symbol. It followed the same path as the anti vaccine movement. Again, the spectrum is a circle. The commonality between these two groups all right and alternative health I guess I'm not really sure. The labels is rejection of the traditional expertise and government regulation, at least on the surface for them. For many of these people raw milk and quote unquote vaccine choice represents deregulation. It represents a rejection of government oversight. It represents a return to a traditional lifestyle. It's not really about raw milk at all. It's about redefining expertise, about instilling mistrust in scientists and their research. Nor is it about deregulation and less government oversight. That's just a facade, right, Like this becomes clear when you consider that many of these people in the Alt rights seem to be just fine with government regulation when it comes to women's bodies and trans people's bodies. Well holds off my raw milk.

01:01:15
Speaker 2: Also, like farms that produce raw milk also have to be like very strictly regulated and inspected, and there's all kinds of rules and regulations that go into that also, So that doesn't track.

01:01:26
Speaker 1: It doesn't track. And you know, I think that one thing that I want to make very clear is that I am not saying that everyone who loves raw milk or is even curious about raw milk subscribes to these al right or racist beliefs at all. That's not what I'm saying. Just like you said, Aaron, there are many different reasons that people might be interested in raw milk, in part because our food industry is broken, But deregulation is only going to make it more broken in the sense that like the companies, the big companies then will have fewer guardrails to actually prevent them from hurting people. Right.

01:02:01
Speaker 2: Well, and like we talked about last week, like I was on TikTok looking at raw milk info to kind of understand, like, what are people even talking about when it comes to raw milk today, like for real on social media. And I don't think that the vast majority. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are sort of in the know wink wink about the kind of where this came from or what this signifies. But I think there's a lot of people who are just like, is it going to be better for me? Is it going to be is it a better nutrient profile? Is it going to be a healthier choice for me? Like and and it's really hard to sort through this miss and disinformation because the aesthetics are beautiful.

01:02:44
Speaker 1: They are I mean, yeah, you're right, no, it's it is understandable to go. But what about this I've been hearing right about this lightly and not knowing why we have raw milk, why we have pasteurized bilk, when most of the stuff that you're hearing on social media is about the purported benefits of raw mil right, right, Like that is it, it's our algorithms, and it's it's all of this, yeah, right, But yeah, I do want to make a very clear distinction that there is a big difference between that, you know, some of these ideological drivers and some of the reasons that people might be like, I'm interested in raw milk. I want to learn more about it. I had no idea about all of these connections, right, how and how deep it went. And so my my main point here with this, with this episode, or with this part of the episode, is just to try to understand some of the drivers of this movement, especially in the past few years, and a large part of that seems to be the alt right, or at least they're using it as this symbolic way, right as this opportunity many people stand to profit off of deregulation, and raw milk is just one minor facet of this, and it's it's I think it's fascinating. I think it's important to examine it's use as a political symbol. Right, raw milk carries with it a lot of baggage, and that baggage is rarely acknowledged. Like, you know, the calls that RFK Junior makes for natural, unprocessed foods. It's hard to disagree with that, Like it's the real harm in letting someone drink raw milk if they want to. But that is the point, right, Like, that is the point of these claims. The lack of any nuance or any real substance in these demands, in these health claims, that leaves no room for argument, right, because what is what does natural mean?

01:04:37
Speaker 2: Right?

01:04:37
Speaker 1: What does unprocessed mean? What does it actually mean to have unprocessed foods? How are you going to do that? How are you going to make those affordable and accessible? What's the plan there? What's the concept of a plan there? Does pasteurize milk count as a processed food? Silence on these fronts, right? Silence? And I'm in no way saying that ultra processed foods are great for you and that food regulation and accessibility needs no changes whatsoever. But there's a huge difference between the processing that happens with Cheetos or jelly beans to make food taste better like last longer, be cheaper to make, etc. And the processing that helps with pasturization, which is solely to prevent disease, right like pasteurization prevents disease.

01:05:20
Speaker 2: Whoop the end.

01:05:22
Speaker 1: But again, these distinctions are not made because it's not about food. It's not about raw milk at all. It's not about vaccines even, it's about redefining expertise who makes these judgments. Historically it has been actual experts, scientists with extensive training who use mountains of data to make decisions. These experts are being replaced with hand picked individuals who have little to know background in that subject, but are willing to carry out an agenda, no matter how harmful that agenda may be to the general public. To me, the danger represented by raw milk is not restricted to ecoli or listeria, but what it means for science and expertise in this country and the harm that raw milk can cause is similarly far reaching. Just like the anti vaccine movement, raw milk prays on those who want to make the best choices for themselves and their families. They are being sold false promises that raw milk is a miracle food, that it is entirely safe to drink, and that as long as you know you're farmer, you're good. Your milk is safe. But that's not the whole truth, or even the truth at all. And people have lost their lives or suffered long term consequences as a result of being fed these lies. And so I think that's maybe where I'll leave it for this episode. But I am really looking forward to next week, Aaron, when you get to talk about all of the nitty gritty of raw milk. Is there actually a harm? Are there nutritional differences? Yeah?

01:07:00
Speaker 2: I'm going to really really too deep of a deep dive on it, honestly, And I'm really really excited about it to like kind of go nitty gritty on what's up with milk? Like what is milk?

01:07:11
Speaker 1: What is up with milk? Oh my gosh.

01:07:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, next week though, next week. For now, for now, sources, sources, please tell me where I can learn more. Is there a book that I should read?

01:07:22
Speaker 1: I didn't? There are, there are some books. I didn't read a book for this.

01:07:25
Speaker 2: It's shocking. Will you write a book for this? I feel like you could write a book out of what you just said, and I would really like to read.

01:07:31
Speaker 1: It maybe maybe with all the time that I have. Yeah, there's a book actually I read a couple chapters from this by Peter Atkins called Liquid Materialities, A History of Milk Science and the Law. There's so much by Bore one hundred year year review Microbiology and the Safety of Milk Handling. That's from twenty seventeen. Oh one that I actually really appreciated was by Caurier and Wirdness from twenty eighteen, titled A Brief History of Milk Hygiene and its Impact on Infant Mortality from eighteen seventy five to nineteen twenty five and Implications for today.

01:08:11
Speaker 2: Will It's a very thorough title, great paper though.

01:08:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's there're a bunch more out there, like honestly read away, Okay, Yeah.

01:08:21
Speaker 2: I will.

01:08:23
Speaker 1: Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode. In all of our episodes, I was like, what do I talk about.

01:08:31
Speaker 2: Thank you to Tom Brii Fogo, Leona Scolacci and all of our video editing team as well for all of the mixing. We love it.

01:08:38
Speaker 1: Thank you, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you to you listeners for listening. This was I hope you like it. Tell me, tell me yeah, tell us.

01:08:49
Speaker 2: You read for next week, because we're not done.

01:08:52
Speaker 1: We're not done.

01:08:53
Speaker 2: It's gonna be good. It is it is. Yeah.

01:08:55
Speaker 1: And a big thank you to our patrons as well. Your support means so much to us, it really does.

01:09:00
Speaker 2: Thank you. Well. Until next time, wash your hands, you filthy animals.

01:09:11
Speaker 3: Um um um