When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine,"
That's… usually not the case!
In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using.
We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that?
youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 2:30 PM
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Boiling milk before use was just what you did. They had dedicated cookware for it. (Specially shaped to contain boil-overs, which milk is really prone to.)
Household hygiene had SERIOUSLY high stakes back before hot running water & pasteurization.
That's… like… why they taught home economics.— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 2:30 PM
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The replies are amazing
90% "Yeah my family boiled the milk" and 10% "What are you talking about? We never did that."
Today is the day some people find out why the neighbors judged their great-grandma so hard for being a bad housekeeper : /— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 5:44 PM
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I lived for several years in rural cattle country in Central Africa, where milk was a major part of the diet. All the milk was either boiled or fermented to make it safe. Always. No one ever drank raw milk.
— Tim Longman ?????? (@timlongman.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
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Can second this among traditional folks in rural Kenya and Tanzania. Never once heard of or saw anyone drinking “raw” milk. In Ethiopia they have a dish that is essentially raw meat and they boil the milk.
— M Maher (@marvelle.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 3:51 PM
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I saw a thread a while back where raw milkers were talking about heating it up to disinfect it
We’re about to enter a decade of reinventing the wheel from first principles lol— Tree Person ?? (@treeperson.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 2:48 PM
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Using "The Farm Master Pasteurizer" from Sears and Roebuck, possibly…..
— Jane Austen's Political Tweets (@vee40below0.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 3:04 PM
What a Day!
columbusqueen
Mom never boiled our goats’ milk, but she & & I would strain it & then put it in the freezer for several hours to chill down. That seems to have killed any bacteria; at least we never got sick.
WTFGhost
@columbusqueen: Well, if a person is milking one, or a few, cows or goats, you can wash the teats before milking; at that point, the dangers of raw milk are minimized (but not eliminated).
One can develop a situation in which a dangerous bacteria isn’t dangerous, because it’s already integrated into their intestinal flora (or closely enough). That means if you drank raw cow, or goat, milk, you might also get their bacteria mixed in with yours (in tiny enough amounts you don’t get sick).
That changes when dealing with the selling of raw milk, because most people aren’t selling a couple-three quarts left over from their cow’s production – they’re milk producers, who aren’t washing up each cow, because they don’t have time. That’s when mom would want to boil milk for the family, if she was wise. Whether that wisdom came from science, or shared wisdom of her people, I can’t guess.
Random thought: the more people, back in that day, who had what we’d call a “liberal arts” education, would have understood germ theory of disease, and immediately followed the suggestions of Pasteur, or, at least understand the use of boiling the milk. It was the people who only had basic “readin’, writin’, ‘rithmatic” who’d find the concept to be stupid elites making up stories to scare people and sell their new fangled cookware… which I guess says we haven’t really advanced much as a society since then, but I wouldn’t have expected we would.
Anne Laurie
@columbusqueen: As people point out in the replies to Sarah Taber’s thread: Washing your personal milk animal’s teats helps. So does the fact that goat poop (let’s keep this polite) is a *lot* less liquid than cow poop… and goats don’t have long tails to lash their poop around.
SpaceUnit
Let the fuckers drink the raw milk already.
Baud
The funny thing about the raw milk craze is that there was an anti-milk craze a few years ago. That one at least has no adverse health effects.
satby
My uncle told a story about how my father as a young infant almost died from an infection he got when a babysitter forgot to boil/scald the raw milk before putting it in his bottle. That was in the early 1930s.
Even the Menonites with a dairy at the Farmers Market pasteurize the milk they sell.
satby
@Baud: PT Barnum told the truth.
Aussie Sheila
Make Tuberculosis Great Again!
Balconesfault
@SpaceUnit: I’m feeling the same way about Texas making Ivermectin over the counter.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
It’s amazing just how far those bastards want to turn back the clock. One day it’s the 1950’s, the next it’s the 1850’s, and in some respects we’re rolling back all the way to Caligula.
JoyceH
When I was a kid we had the milkman who came around every morning. Had an insulated box on the porch where he’d put the full milk bottles and take away the empty bottles. Does anyone know if that milk was pasteurized? I sure don’t remember Mom boiling the milk.
mrmoshpotato
@SpaceUnit: Would you like some raw milk in your roadkill, raw bear meat, whale’s head cereal, Bobby?
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
That’s cray-cray.
Was there also an anti-cheese craze? Because that would be cray-cray-cray.
mrmoshpotato
@Aussie Sheila:
Diarrhea too, I imagine.
Betty Cracker
@JoyceH: Sounds like a professional dairy operation, which would have almost certainly pasteurized the milk.
I don’t really care if idiots who listen to anti-science quacks want to drink raw milk, but I do worry about them weakening public health laws so it affects the rest of us.
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker:
I worry about them giving it to their kids who don’t know better as well.
satby
@Balconesfault: it’s always been over the counter. You could pick it up at any Rural King or Tractor Supply
Rescuers get it in paste form to treat parasites in animals.
satby
@JoyceH: Almost certainly, milkmen worked for large companies as a rule, not family farms.
After all, back when we were kids people still believed in science.
satby
In those Sarah Taber threads on BS, jackal commenter mousebumples said “no wonder so many very old recipes start with ‘scald the milk’ as a first step”.
JoyceH
@satby: people believed in science because we remembered what pre-science life was like. Seems like every year group in my elementary school had at least one kid in leg braces from polio, and considered one of the lucky ones. And how exciting it was when the polio vaccine was released and they lined us all up in the gym to get vaccinated. Sure don’t remember any parents opting out back then!
satby
@JoyceH: Sure don’t remember any parents opting out back then!
Nope, they were so relieved and grateful!I remember that vividly.
Tony Jay
Speaking of indigestible toxins that people really should have learned to keep far away from human consumption, is President Visible Stench dead yet?
ColoradoGuy
@JoyceH: I remember getting the first Salk vaccines in the mid-Fifties. Long lines at the grade school full of crying kids and parents with grim determination. The motivation for the parents was clear: LIFE magazine (which everyone subscribed to back then) had full-page pictorials of people having to live in “Iron Lungs” as a result of polio. I’m pretty sure I got my first shot within weeks of it becoming available to the public.
Come to think of it, when People magazine replaced LIFE in the early Seventies, the whole nation became dumber, because LIFE was a common experience for nearly all of us, and the photojournalism was world-class. People, by contrast, was trash celebrity junk with no news content whatsoever. About as interesting as TV test pattern. The weekly Time and Newsweek magazines were much duller than LIFE, with Time written in a purposely dull and inconclusive style.
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Dead inside – but that’s basically been since bursting out of his mom’s chest.
(Apologies to Alien and Aliens and Spaceballs)
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
That’s what we should call the anti-science MAHAs. Diarrheas.
Baud
Really Bloomberg? (Via blue sky)
Baud
sab
@JoyceH: We had that too wjen I was very young. That milk was pasteurized.
Aimai
They boil it in Nepal. Ummmm..boiled buffalo milk!
Suzanne
@ColoradoGuy: SuzMom has similar memories of the polio vax. She actually remembers getting it a school, in early elementary school age, without her parents there. They just gave it to everybody on the sugar cube. Then later, she got home, and my grandmother told her and her siblings that she was taking them back to school to get the vaccine. SuzMom told her that she already got the vaccine earlier in the day at school, and my grandmother didn’t listen. (That is a pattern that would endure!) So SuzMom and my uncle got it twice. Later, someone said to my grandmother that she didn’t know why she brought the elementary school-age kids back, when they got it earlier in the day. Anyway, getting the vaccine twice seems to have done them no harm.
Baud
Baud
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: Did Bloomberg hire DougJ in his Pitchbot persona and nobody mentioned it?
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Florida’s quack surgeon general can change health department policy, but he can’t eliminate childhood vaccine mandates without the cooperation of the statehouse. Unfortunately, there’s a wingnut supermajority, but I wrote to my rep (statehouse senate seat is vacant) urging him to oppose this insanity. This is nuts!
BellyCat
Do moms boil their breast milk?!?!
NO! Stupid Libs… //
Baud
Efficiency
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Fingers crossed.
Betty Cracker
Baud
I blame Schumer.
Baud
Baud
Suzanne
On the topic of unseen women’s work…. It’s probably immeasurable. Fields like home health care basically didn’t exist fifty years ago, because women were doing that work for free.
In my own corner of the professional world, interior design wasn’t a recognized discipline for a long time. The people who do that work have standardized and professionalized their training and now that’s moving into licensure.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Case in point: BJ front pager.
Deputinize America
@Baud:
Sounds like piracy to me.
Baud
@Deputinize America:
I’m pleased they don’t yet feel comfortable with the argument that the president can kill people willy-nilly.
Shalimar
Someone needs to warn MAGA that lesbians are taking over CBS.
Bari Weiss Reportedly ‘On the Verge’ of Taking Editorial Control of CBS News
Deputinize America
@Baud:
We’re also going to find out that it was just a fishing boat or local cargo vessel, aren’t we?
Baud
@Deputinize America:
On another topic, you’ll enjoy this.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: DeSantis and Ladapo: “Make Florida Blue Again.”
Deputinize America
@Baud:
LOL – Several weeks ago, I plugged some factual info into ChatGPT to justify a motion, and it hallucinated not only case law but statutes as well. Quotes from thin air showed up, too.
I think AI is only good enough now to use as an editing tool to trim down wordiness and to create basic outlines and questions, but you sure as shit can’t rely on it for authority and you’d best be ready to backcheck it for accuracy.
It isn’t HAL9000 or Commander Data yet.
Gvg
@JoyceH: it was pasteurized, and advertised as a selling point on the bottles too. In fact the point of glass bottles is that they could be sterilized and reused. The pasteurized hot milk could be safely machine poured into belt fed bottles and sealed while still hot germ free.
Baud
@Deputinize America:
100%. I use AI for various things, but I sure as hell wouldn’t rely on it for content.
Scout211
Colorado did that yesterday, too.
Shalimar
@Baud: I don’t use AI and I saw a Youtube video earlier that was a good illustration of why. Narrator asked ChatGPT a question about controlling gravity. ChatGPT answered the question and then started asking questions itself to get more detail as to what the questioner wanted to know. I do not need a computer that acts human.
Baud
@Shalimar:
I don’t use AI for either general knowledge or conversation.
p.a.
No vaccine for your kids? Well, no health insurance coverage for those diseases. State may provide care, state charges market, not Medicare/Medicaid rates. State has the choice NOT to provide.
Choice/consequence.
Doesn’t solve herd immunity issues, but is an incentive to conform to community-responsible behavior.
Kids? Sorry, your parents opt out of the modern world, we’re not going to insulate you from their stupidity anymore.
Another Scott
Yeah, raw milk is bad news and killed lots of people before pasteurization. E.g. Brownstoner.com:
Mmmm. Plaster. It’s what kids crave.
Magic of the marketplace, amirite??!!
Grr…
Too many raw milk advocates seem to buy into the argument that they can find good dairies run by good people and they can see when the product is safe or not. Good people only sell good products and nothing bad ever happens if one buys good products, right? They refuse to accept that bacteria do . not . care how friendly and kind the dairy farmer is and if he goes to the same church and school as your family does. Bacteria will grow wherever and whenever they get the chance, and you, as a consumer, cannot tell because you do not have senses for them until it is too late.
Similarly with unpasteurized fruit juice.
Truthiness will kill you if you do not actually accept science and think about what you stick in your body…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: The “paleo diet” guys believe they’re eating like cavemen, and the raw-food craze that comes back every so often is about avoiding an innovation that predates Homo sapiens.
Mel
@Anne Laurie:
@mrmoshpotato: Add a brucellosis chaser to the TB / diarrhea cocktail, and voila! It’s the “Bobby Body Bomb”…
snoey
@Matt McIrvin: Some recent work indicates that Neanderthals had a high percentage of meat in their diet. Rather than hunting all the time they used the meat preservation system available to them
They ate the maggots.
Go for it paleos.
stinger
@Baud: That’s news to us jackals! /teasing
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: I’m never going to be on board with letting children die for the sins of their parents. That’s Republican policy in its purest form.
Soprano2
@Baud: And yet people will say the Democrats in the Senate aren’t doing anything to thwart FFOTUS.
Trivia Man
@satby: Is that why there were several “hacks” to make sure it was cool enough for baby to drink? Drip a few drops on your inner elbow – sensitive enough to accurately gauge heat i vaguely recall.
Soprano2
@Shalimar: There goes “60 Minutes”. If those reporters have ethics, they’ll all quit if this happens, because they’ll be expected to fluff FFOTUS and his administration.
Soprano2
@Deputinize America: Maybe, but I can guarantee that if they keep doing it that will happen eventually.
Trivia Man
@ColoradoGuy: In debate the only authorized sources were Time, Newsweek, and IS News and World Report IIRC.
Trivia Man
@Aimai: Is yak milk really pink?
Trivia Man
@Gvg: Capri Sun juice cones in aseptic pouches, filled at about 200 degrees.
Barbara
My grandfather’s parents and all but one sibling died from drinking contaminated milk. That’s why he and his brother immigrated from Serbia (then part of Austria). He refused to drink any milk that wasn’t boiled, even after pasteurization became the norm. He was a mean and tough guy but he wasn’t stupid.
Layer8Problem
@Trivia Man: Oh yeah, pink Himalayan yak’s milk is a staple in Megan McArdle’s fridge.
Hm, on further inspection yak milk does turn out to be pink sometimes, right after they calve. Go figure.
scribbler
@Baud: That’s an amazing story, and I really want to know what happens on Tuesday!
Mel
@Matt McIrvin:
@snoey: The nostalgia for what never even existed never ceases to amaze me.
I was raised by really old relatives who grew up on rural farms. They remembered when even with the best available food preservation and harvesting techniques, it was still somewhat of a crapshoot as to whether a person could successfully avoid illness. Worms and other parasitic infections, brucellosis, bacterial gastrointestinal infections, botulism, even secondhand poisoning (“milk sickness”) via the milk of cows who had eaten white snakeroot- just a small sample of the fun experiences in those “natural, unprocessed, clean-eating” days of yore.
My great grandmother was a rural nurse who was born in the late 1800s. “If any doubt, throw it out!” “Wash the teat, cook the meat”, and “Always boil!” were her mantras.
Torrey
@WTFGhost:
With respect, I’ve spent a little time among folks with third-grade educations. It seems to me that there’s a tendency to attribute to lack of education the ideas of idiots who should know better and for whom it is a mark of identity to diss science. People who are very savvy about what they need to know in order to survive and maintain their way of life, but don’t have book-learning generally have an idea of best practices. These folks were no longer boiling milk when I was there–they appreciated pasteurization–but they knew about and respected germ theory. Not that they cared about the “theory” part, but they understood the idea of germs and were careful about their food. If their grandmothers weren’t thinking about boiling milk to kill bacteria, they were certainly doing it because their grandma did it and said that’s what you needed to do and their grandma had stories about that one time the family down the the river all got sick because the mother was sick, and the oldest girl didn’t properly scald the milk. That grandma may not have known the why, but she knew what happened if you didn’t get it right. Experience (including other people’s) is a hell of a teacher.
The anti-science people are generally people who should know better but want the identity marker of “doing their own research” or understanding “the old ways” better than anybody else.
Lyrebird
@Anne Laurie:
Thank you Anne Laurie, you do such needed work and so well!
And yes, if you have one cow or a few goats you can control hygiene better, and also, bacteria need a little time to grow and multiply. In addition to everything WTFGhost said, taking some raw for your child’s breakfast that you just milked right then is way different than bottling and distributing (tick tock, any bacteria have time to grow).
But generally, from North Africa to Eastern Europe and everywhere else with cows, it’s no accident that kefir and yogurt and other cultured milk drinks have been around for like ever.
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: Free rider problem. The free riders eventually endanger everyone else. I favor hard mandates, but I don’t see it being politically viable or implementable anymore. If mandates are, great! But the growing number of nutbags and their political supporters, to me, are ascendant. So we have to endanger everyone else?
If saying “you have to do this” doesn’t work, then what other power does gvt have besides allowing individual repercussions? Remove the kids from the family? Maybe a tax on noncompliance…
Mel
@Torrey: This. Some of the worst offenders are well-educated people who damn well know better.
There were actually meetings convened during the first two waves of Covid at the private school where I used to teach, because so many parents (including physicians, nurses, and dentists) were protesting the mask requirement. Why? About half wanted “exposure for healthy, natural immunity”, and the other half were terrified that their children might experience what the extreme crunchy granola parents dubbed “mask-ne”: a few pimples from the rubbing or moisture of the masked area of the face. Because everyone knows that a temporary pimple is WAY more physically and emotionally damaging than, say, permanent heart, lung and kidney damage or lifelong cognitive damage, or death, right?
That was preceded by the same parents’ belief that nearly every child in the school must be suffering from celiac disease, or as they called it, “being gluten” (I know- wtf?!?). As in, “He can’t help not doing his homework! He’s GLUTEN!!! The biopsies and blood tests say he isn’t, but our neighbor is a health psychic and she says he IS!!”
Which was preceded by the milk phobia that someone mentioned earlier: “It’s not his fault he shoved that much smaller child! He’s aggressive because he’s LACTOSE, and he’s exposed to milk fumes in the cafeteria!!”
These are the same people that host “chicken pox parties” , buy jade vaginal eggs, and believe that women who get breast cancer have supposedly caused their own illness by “vaccining and not eating clean.” And the list goes on.
It’s a special form of insanity, and whether it originates from a lack of information, from a stubborn insistence on believing misinformation, or from an arrogant belief that the person “knows better than” the actual experts and science, it is putting everyone at immense risk.
Another Scott
@Mel: +1
My grandma had a tapeworm. I heard a story from my great aunt (her sister-in-law) that she had to, er, help her with it in an, er, very personal way, once.
:-(
It really wasn’t that long ago that people had to deal with all kinds of things that medicine effectively eliminated for us.
Destroying modern medicine is evil. Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Dave
@BellyCat: Human moms also routinely take showers or baths. Cows don’t.
Ksmiami
@Baud: one fish two fish, red state dead state
Miss Bianca
@Mel: I knew a guy who died of brucellosis after drinking raw milk. It was horrifying. My answer to anyone who tries to tell me how great it is now is to say, “There’s a reason Pasteur invented pasteurization.”
And yeah, I have a friend in Michigan who swears by it, only gets it from one farmer who (having met her) I can believe might personally wash each and every cow’s teats to make sure nothing gets in there, but…still. Only takes one slip-up. Not a chance I’m willing to take.
Mel
@Another Scott: My mother’s mom’s side of the family was pretty sketchy. When I was doing some genealogy research, I uncovered old articles in their small town newspaper about the many misadventures of a particular great-grandfather.
One involved him touting a de-worming remedy by setting up a table at a local harvest festival in the 1920s.. He was charging a penny a box for the “remedy”, but the big moneymaker was his charging people to view the “giant serpent” of a tapeworm that he had recently, um, expelled.
I was visiting my parents over the holidays at the time that I was doing the family research, and had just cut a piece of my Mom’s famous blueberry cake, which she always displayed in her Mom’s antique domed cake holder.
The article described the whole tapeworm viewing in lurid detail. Great Grandpa Jack was doing the whole rural showman schtick, describing the “battle” he and a friend endured to “extract the serpents” before he began using the remedy, and promising that his remedy would “purge even the largest monsters with ease”.
Then, he would collect payment from those who wanted to see “the serpent” , and whip a dark cloth off of the container to reveal an enormous dead tapeworm housed in, yep, a domed glass cake holder, described in detail, and CLEARLY the same one that my piece of cake had been sitting on. You never saw a person spit out food so fast!!!
Paul in KY
@mrmoshpotato: ‘The Flux’ is their preferred terminology.
Ohio Mom
@JoyceH: I also remember the insulated metal box and the milkman swapping out empty milk bottles for full ones; there’s a photo of me at age two or three, sitting on such a box, eating an ice cream bar, outside, next to the door of the bungalow we spent part of the summer at.
It was just the right height to make a comfortable perch. I imagine my mother put me out there so the dripping ice cream wouldn’t make a mess inside.
I have no doubt the milk was pasteurized but it may not have always been homogenized. I have at least one memory of a plug of cream on the top of the milk.
Paul in KY
@BellyCat: Checkmate, Libtards!!!
Kosh III
I grew up on a rural farm with a few dozen milk cattle. I clearly remember seeing a pasteurization machine. BTW fresh milk tastes better.
Glidwrith
@Anne Laurie: When milking a goat, however, they can step into the bucket, complete with everything they walked through.
Ask me how I know.
Captain C
@Baud: Especially given how badly the AI (and therefore opposing counsel) screwed up, it sounds to this non-lawyer that there should be sanctions on the attorney who filed this slop.
Captain C
@p.a.: Assault and abuse charges on the parents if their kids or other people in the community get sick from preventable diseases. Upgraded to murder 2 if there’s a death involved.
eta: Or murder 1, on consideration.
Baud
@Captain C:
Courts have been giving out sanctions for this. I expect that here too.
Betty
Flannery O’Connor wrote a funny short story about this decades ago. The son of a lady with a dairy farm thought he would defy her by drinking raw milk. He later got sick and was sure he was dying. She had a laugh at his expense when she found out what had happened. Not dying, just a fool.
The Other Bob
Paraphrase of some hick somewhere: “Pasteurization ruins milk dog-gone-it. We just boil our milk.”
Mart
I need one of those anti-milk-boil over-pots for when I am in a hurry to make our cream of wheat. Cream of wheat, so damn good.
dww44
@JoyceH: In the mid fifties a boy in the class below mine came down with polio. Maybe our little town got a special early distribution of the Salk vaccine, administered then via a very big needle in the buttock, but we were all lined up at the local Community House in short order to receive the shot. That shot hurt. But no one of our parents’ generation every quibbled about this or any other vaccine, because they believed in the science and the efficacy. And they weren’t all super educated either. Most of them in the rural South were considered educated if they were able to get a high school diploma as 90% of them came off the farm. However,they were believers in progress, thanks to the New Deal and WWII,
Although the boy who came down with polio didn’t end up in an iron lung, he was crippled badly and wore braces and used a cane. He lived a pretty normal life but died in his early 40’s from the aftereffects of the polio.,
Kathleen
@Baud: That does it. Schumer needs to resign immediately. I blame Jeffries.
Kathleen
@Baud: deleted duplicate
WTFGhost
@Torrey: I was not disrespecting those who understood The Way Things Work – I was pointing out the danger of those who scorned germ theory, because it was too far out of their experiences, and they didn’t have the educational chops and intellectual flexibility to take new information, and quickly recognize how it fits into what you already know. A broad education inoculates you against certain forms of stupidity – but just as with a vaccine inoculation, it might not protect you if you’re stupid.
If someone said “you’re telling me teeny tiny animals are in this milk? I’ll tell you what: raw milk is toxic, and boiling deactivates the toxin,” I’d respect them greatly – they’re using what they know to incorporate new knowledge from a (hopefully, trusted) source, even though they find the idea of teeny tiny animals, too small to be seen, to be silly. But they “get” that you have to boil some foods first, so they do.
I’ll guarantee you, there were some people who figured they knew better than some dummy who’d buy a milk boiling pot, but, had they a broad education, be it from book l’arning, or local wisdom, they’d have been able to understand that there was a reason to cook raw milk.
Ramona
@Dave: And our breasts, unlike a cow’s udders, are far from our anuses!
Paul in KY
@Ramona: Good point!