Anyone know where you can buy real milk (unpasteurised)

J_Wholesale

I remember we used to have to shake a milk bottle, as the cream always rose to the top. But even that was pasteurised. Do they sell raw milk at farmer's markets in Ireland, or are there silly regulations making it illegal?

Sapsorrow

It's illegal here, so no one should really respond to this question. Your best bet is to ask a local farmer you know to hold onto 2 litres for you as often as you need it, they often do it for themselves anyway and if it's a gift it's not illegal.

J_Wholesale

Yep. Seems to be illegal - "In Ireland it has been illegal to sell unpasteurised milk for direct human consumption since July 1997." Amazing that the human race managed to make it to 1997.

Wouldn't want to go breaking the law now by drinking milk. Same source says that "84% of dairy farm families consumed unpasteurised milk." It's clearly fatal, unless you have your own cows. Good thing the government is there to take care of us, with our wild, wanton, milk drinking ways.

Sapsorrow

J_Wholesale wrote: »

Yep. Seems to be illegal - "In Ireland it has been illegal to sell unpasteurised milk for direct human consumption since July 1997." Amazing that the human race managed to make it to 1997.

Wouldn't want to go breaking the law now by drinking milk. Same source says that "84% of dairy farm families consumed unpasteurised milk." It's clearly fatal, unless you have your own cows. Good thing the government is there to take care of us, with our wild, wanton, milk drinking ways.

In fairness though whilst I am very much pro-consumer choice, they had very valid reasons. Something that doesn't pose a very significant threat on the level of the individual can pose serious problems when scaled up to the level of a public health perspective as you're dealing with millions of people. I know first hand from walking past an open milking parlour most days on my walk how dirty and unhygenic the process is, I grew up on a farm and am not a germaphobe but you can't trust all farmers to practice good husbandry or to have healthy uninfected cattle.

EileenG

It's very hard to get unpasteurised milk unless you have an arrangement with a farmer you know. However, unpasteurised cheeses have a lot of the same health benefits. And keep better in the fridge.

KatCookie

khrystyna100 wrote: »

...I know first hand from walking past an open milking parlour most days on my walk how dirty and unhygenic the process is, I grew up on a farm and am not a germaphobe but you can't trust all farmers to practice good husbandry or to have healthy uninfected cattle.

:eek: Please dont tar all farmers with once brush, can I please say that farmers are regulated SO much nowadays, both bacteria levels in milk, animal husbandry and genetics are regulated and monitored to a huge degree (we can see the ancestry of an animal better than we know our own!)
For example, A sample from each tank of milk is taken when it is collected from each farm, the tanker/lorry that collects the milk has inner compartments, before the milk is added to other milk in the processing plant it is tested, and can be traced back to the farmer

The farm might seem a bit mucky on the outside but honestly, all the farmer has to do is keep the pipes that connect the milk tank to the cow clean and there *shouldnt* be any problems. (farmers can monitor their levels of everything in their milk, from bacterica levels, to the smaller mineral content)

And as for unpasteurised milk, In my opinion, yes it does taste nicer, but its a bit creamy in tea unforunately!

Edit: and its not illegal for the farmer to use his own unpasteurised milk, just to sell it!

KatCookie

KatCookie wrote: »

And as for unpasteurised milk, In my opinion, yes it does taste nicer, but its a bit creamy in tea unforunately!

Eh I disagree on the taste, especially when they are eating silage....but just wanted to check with you.
When I was growing up, we never served raw milk to visitors.
Using the logic that they may get sick, as they hadn't built up an immunity to the bugs in it.
Now I realise it is a much different era, with tankers, cell and bacteria count regulations.
But was this the case on your farm too?

Sapsorrow

KatCookie wrote: »

:eek: Please dont tar all farmers with once brush, can I please say that farmers are regulated SO much nowadays, both bacteria levels in milk, animal husbandry and genetics are regulated and monitored to a huge degree (we can see the ancestry of an animal better than we know our own!)
For example, A sample from each tank of milk is taken when it is collected from each farm, the tanker/lorry that collects the milk has inner compartments, before the milk is added to other milk in the processing plant it is tested, and can be traced back to the farmer

The farm might seem a bit mucky on the outside but honestly, all the farmer has to do is keep the pipes that connect the milk tank to the cow clean and there *shouldnt* be any problems. (farmers can monitor their levels of everything in their milk, from bacterica levels, to the smaller mineral content)

And as for unpasteurised milk, In my opinion, yes it does taste nicer, but its a bit creamy in tea unforunately!

Edit: and its not illegal for the farmer to use his own unpasteurised milk, just to sell it!

There is no way my response could have been constrewed as painting farmers with the one brush, I have the upmost respect for the farming profession and love interacting with the local farmers in my area and often visit them on their farms and get raw milk from one of them to make paneer whenever I want it.

But please try and be realistic, cows are mucky creatures, they're generally covered in poo (albeit herbivore poo isn't anything like as nasty as carnivore poo) and muck and I know how the process goes and the hosing is only going to remove a certain amount of the contamination. Just because you can't see any much doesn't mean that the teet or mammary duct isn't swarming with bacteria.

I do microbiology in college a lot and I know how easy it is for contamination to occur under very controlled settings (in a lab where you have air filters and the place is constantly sterilised etc) and how hard it is to remove the source of contamination effectively and to maintain sterility or anything near it in a milking parlour is totally unrealistic.

Now I'm not saying that it's a bad thing like I said I'm not a germaphob in any way, but it has to be expected that the udder is a very significant potential source of contamination and they can only be cleaned so well twice a day on a few hundred cattle.

The farm I walk past is an excellently run farm and I live in a very rural area where lots of the farmers are still dedicated to their professions full time so I know how a good farm works from living here and growing up on one I don't need to educated about the process, regulations, inspections or the like (I also did ag science for my leaving cert ) I'm taking all that into account.

Like I said I'm not criticising farmers in any way I'm just being realistic about the potential for the spread of disease (even when hygeine standards are as high as can realistically be expected) and even if only one life is saved a year as a result of pasteurisation it''s worth it IMO.

EileenG

My cousin was teaching down the country, and she was doing the ten commandments in religion class.
She's give a commandment, then an example of breaking it.
When she got to "Thou shalth not commit adultery" she was relieved when one kid stuck his hand up and said "Please Miss, I know what adultery is."
So she told him to go ahead and tell the class.
He beamed round and said "It's when your daddy puts water into the milk for the dairy, Miss."

KatCookie

I honestly wasnt having a go at you, I just read what you wrote and thought it sounded a bit one sided.
I wasnt advocating the widespread use of unpasteurised milk either, the added vitamins and minerals help the population of ireland to become healthier, and it is necessary to protect the general population.

I think the reason why what you say is a bit hard for me to believe is because I have never heard of people getting food poisoning from unpasturised cows milk..

Just as a note, not all farmers produce milk that becomes the milk you drink on a daily basis. Where I live, most dairy farmers produce milk that becomes yoghurt, cheese etc. Normal milk is produced by farmers with huge herd numbers that produce milk all year round (ie not dried off in Winter months before calving) and those cows are more often in worse condition than others.

Sapsorrow

KatCookie wrote: »

I think the reason why what you say is a bit hard for me to believe is because I have never heard of people getting food poisoning from inpastuerised cows milk..

There's no believing to be done it's a fact. We actually did a lab in college 2 years ago where we did cell culture studies on three samples of milk from three different farms. we did a cell culture on them raw and then pasteurised them and did another culture to compare the baterial types and counts. Unsuprisingly with the raw milk cultures we saw lots of different bacteria growing in our plates, that's not to say they were necessaarily harmful but some pathological types are commonly found (and we did actually find some pathological strains in the raw samples) in milk.

I don't know why you perceive my posts as an attack on farmers and farming practices, it's nothing to do with farmers themselves, it's simple a matter of preventative public health.

Like I said in my precious post, something that might not seem signigificant at the level of the individual (ie your never hearing of someone getting sick from raw milk) does become significant when you apply that significance to the level of the population.

Again even a small handful of people getting ill is enough reason to implement a public health strategy. Sure look at neural tube defects, we have between 85 and 95 births a year affected by them and they were going to implement mandatory fortification of nearly all flour which would have affected jsut about the whole population until they figured out voluntary fortification was working just fine. There's no threshold for illness or death below which public health authorities go are sure only 5 people died last year so there's no need to bother.

KatCookie

KatCookie wrote: »

I honestly wasnt having a go at you, I just read what you wrote and thought it sounded a bit one sided.
I wasnt advocating the widespread use of unpasteurised milk either, the added vitamins and minerals help the population of ireland to become healthier, and it is necessary to protect the general population.

Just to repeat, what you said in your first post seemed a bit unfair to farmers, perhaps it was unintentional?
I dont dispute anything that you have said, it just seemed a bit unfairly negative and I felt that anyone who searched for this topic and came across this thread might get the wrong idea.

(and I am well aware that just because i've never heard of anyone getting sick doesnt mean it doesnt happen,)

itsallaboutheL

KatCookie wrote: »

Normal milk is produced by farmers with huge herd numbers that produce milk all year round (ie not dried off in Winter months before calving) and those cows are more often in worse condition than others.

This isn't quite the case.

KatCookie

Sorry, I meant to either say 'more likely' or 'often'.
not always, but year long milking would take the toll on any animal

itsallaboutheL

KatCookie wrote: »

Sorry, I meant to either say 'more likely' or 'often'.
not always, but year long milking would take the toll on any animal

It's not year long milking, farmers that milk all year round do so in cycles, it's not the same cows 52 weeks of the year, they are still dried off, they just calve at different times.

Also you seem to think that all winter milkers provide manufacturing milk which isn't true either.

Also correct me if i'm wrong but your post reads as though the standards required for manufacturing milk are higher than liquid milk which is infact the opposite.

KatCookie

itsallaboutheL wrote: »

It's not year long milking, farmers that milk all year round do so in cycles, it's not the same cows 52 weeks of the year, they are still dried off, they just calve at different times.

Also you seem to think that all winter milkers provide manufacturing milk which isn't true either.

Also correct me if i'm wrong but your post reads as though the standards required for manufacturing milk are higher than liquid milk which is infact the opposite.

No, what I meant was that winter milkers need to provide milk all year round for supply reasons, (ie a farmer cant just dry off all his cows mid-december as that would leave the creameries with much less milk to put on the shelves)

Its up to farmers with manufacturing milk to decide whether to milk all year round if he/she wants to

And, I did mean to say that standards would be higher for liquid milk, did i make a mistake in a previous post?

--Kaiser--

khrystyna100 wrote: »

I know first hand from walking past an open milking parlour most days on my walk how dirty and unhygenic the process is, I grew up on a farm and am not a germaphobe but you can't trust all farmers to practice good husbandry or to have healthy uninfected cattle.

Well my Dad is a farmer and he spends more time cleaning the parlour and equipment than milking the cows. He receives weekly reports on the cleanliness of his milk and is fined if it doesn't meet the correct standard and I imagine this is the same for all Irish dairy farmers.

Sapsorrow

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

Well my Dad is a farmer and he spends more time cleaning the parlour and equipment than milking the cows. He receives weekly reports on the cleanliness of his milk and is fined if it doesn't meet the correct standard and I imagine this is the same for all Irish dairy farmers.

I wasn't criticising farmers in any way I was simply stating the fact that it's near impossible to keep the area clean with cows coming in covered in muck from the fields. I wasn't saying that this was due to any fault by the farmer but that it is just a reality of the process. My point was that if it was a restaurant in those conditions you sure as hell wouldn't eat there and that was partly why pasteurization is a necessity. The defensiveness is getting ridiculous I wish people would read my posts properly before responding. I'm not responding to any more comments along these lines as all my posts so far on this topic are perfectly self explanatory and make it clear that I'm not having a go at farmers and how they do their jobs.

Joey the lips

I see this thread in the "new posts" so techanically I am a kinda spammer in my comment but its ment in the sincere of ways

A local lad picked up and illness from drinking unpasterusied milk as a child. I cant remember the name of the illness but it makes him very tired. Just be careful about drinking it.

Thanks
Joey

Margarita

http://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/475-principles-of-healthy-diets.html

It says that raw milk is very good for you. Hope you find this link as interesting as I did.

rantyface

It's safe to drink fresh out of a cow and for a few days but after that the germs multiply and it can be dangerous. I heard Govindas in Dublin nearly got shut down for using unpasteurised milk, so maybe ask them where they got it.