Raw dairy

If you talk to me about food for more then 2 minutes you'd probably think I'm a conspiracy theorist. This is because I basically believe the USDA (and the FDA, among others) is out to get us. They are tasked with making sure the food we eat is safe, but what they really do is promote policies with not food safety in mind, but trade, Big Agra and and public opinion. A perfect example of this is rBGH -- a bovine growth hormone that is outlawed in virtually every first world country due to links to various cancers and other health risks (not to mention making cows very sick) but the USDA seems to think it's fine. This could have something to do with Monsanto making the stuff (call me crazy). But that's a conversation for another day. Even when rBGH is not used (such as in organic milk, or one of the thousounds of milk and cheese processors that refuses to use it -- pay attention and you'll see "hormone free" or "rBGH free" on all sorts of dairy products) the dairy is still pasteurized. A movement has been growing, however, that appreciates "raw" milk products. This really just means unpasteurized (a/k/a the way dairy was consumed for thousands of years).

I won't get into the various arguments for or against raw milk, but suffice it to say that pasteurized milk is considered by many to be unhealthy, and it's only getting worse. To facilitate the transport and shelf life of milk, much is now being "ultrapasteurized" -- including the major organic milk brands like Horizon. This means the milk is now heated at even higher temperatures and therefore more dangerous -- depending on your view. The arguments essentially point out that pasteurization was implemented to help keep milk healthy as we started to produce it in great quantities and ship it all over. But if you drink milk locally, from someone who cares for their cows and the milk they produce, pasteurization is unnecessary. And with raw milk you get the health benefits of milk without the lactose intolerance and other health issues. More on that here.

I live in Chicago, and in the state of Illinois (and most U.S. states with California as a notable exception) it is illegal to sell unpasteurized milk (you can sell raw cheese but not raw butter). One way people get around this is by owning part of an animal. The logic goes that the government cannot (or at least doesn't) prevent you from drinking the milk of your own cow or goat however you want -- so people will be a 1,000th of a goat. These are sometimes called "dairy shares" and one such farm by Chicago is the James Family Farm.

Cheese is permitted to be raw -- and you can actually find raw cheeses in a lot of grocery stores in nice neighborhoods now (one or two at least), at Farmers Markets (a company may not be all raw but might have one or two that are), and then there are the cheese you can find in stores all over that don't advertise that they are raw but they are. Here I'm talking about types of blue cheeses which are not infrequently raw. Check the label -- if the milk is pasteurized it will say so.