having read the string, you guys all seem to be pretty clued up on the issues at stake here.
one question i have is for aloha. In talking about the food poisoning risks from raw milk products, you use the term WE and cite many potential risks. could you post a link to the research and case histories that back up these statements.
having been head to head with the Environmental Health Department over the raw milk issue, for the last ten years i have got very used to lop sided research comming out of the Min ag&fish. Raw milk is not the only risk from Ecoli or salmonella or especially listeria. Listeria is a ''background" bacteria, and can be isolated from household dust along with everything else in the environment. salmonella is also omnipresent, if you want your child fully protected from these risks bath them in bleach hourly and swab their rooms, don't let them out of their room!!!!! you must keep them sterile.
the counter argument works on the basic Pasteur principal, "if you ingest weak bacteria your immune system can cope with it and learn from it too"
raw milk being 'live' like a yoghurt, contains it's own bio-system, this bio-system competes for living space with other bacteria, as they are engaged in a merry war, when you ingest it the bacterias are exausted and present no problem to your immune system.
If you boil milk and kill eeverything in it you are left with a rich food source for anything passing by, pasteurised milk is like a petri-dish, bacteria loves to grow in it and as the milk is dead, there is nothing to stop or contain the contaminant.
the moment your child touches the earth, let alone starts shoving it into their mouth, they are exposing themselves to massive risk, better to have an active immune system than to avoid the risks.
So in short, avoidance of low level risks, like raw milk cheese or yoghurt, increases overall risks in the general environment.
continued exposure to low level risks strengthens the immune system thus reducing overall environmental risks (playing in the park/garrden).
things like Ecoli are scary, but the Lanark incident what 4 years ago, came down to an unscrupulous butcher selling cheap out of date meat, to an unscrupulous buyer at a granny farm. At the time the edinburgh environmental health department used this as yet another excuse for a witchhunt against unpasteurised cheese.
WHY is the min ag&fsh so enamoured of pasteurisation.
Chemical farming.... in two words. pasteurisation or cooking milk does two things one it 'narrows the flavour spectrum' and two caramelises slightly, making it sweeter.
you can dump any sort of chemical bollocks onto your grass or into your cows, to increase production yields, if you are going to pasteurise it. However if you don't (pasteurise it), it tastes awful. it is very difficult to get raw 'standard production' milk, but if you manage and try a glass, you won't get much further than spitting out the first sip.
As to why the Ministry support industrial over organic farming, well that's a whole topic for i believe another web-site.
Monkey is a bloke
he has a one year old daughter, who so far, has not had food poisoning.
monkey used to run a speciality food shop in edinburgh.