@clacke @ai6yr I'm going to digress into some raw milk musings here as I don't believe it's related but a lot of people are unaware of milk standards in general. I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I hail from farm country, USA:

While I don't believe people should be buying raw milk (I don't trust our dairy or factory farmed beef/chicken), I don't think most people are aware that raw milk isn't the Wild West as far as quality controls. At least as long as you're not buying it from a farm store (on the farm's property) which bypasses pretty much all regulations for meat/eggs/dairy/produce.

(I once had a gallon of milk that had cow shit and grass in the bottom of the jug. Took a swig, barfed it into the sink, held it up and looked at it from underneath ... 🤢)


Anyway;

> Regulations require that bacteria and somatic cell counts of Grade “A” raw milk not exceed 100,000 Standard Plate Count (SPC) and 750,000 Somatic Cell Count (SCC), respectively.

and

> The Pasteurized Milk Ordinance sets the SPC limit for grade A milk at 100,000 cfu/mL and the SCC limit at 750,000 cells/mL. Wisconsin regulations have the same limits.

> Pasteurization is intended to destroy foreseeable levels of these bacteria but it does not destroy heat-stable enterotoxin

So it's essentially the same restrictions on contaminations. If you can trust the testing. (I wouldn't). So the pasteurization is certainly an important safety step even in 2025. There probably were a few decades when milk production was more diverse (more farms, smaller herds) and we had pretty good milking and storage procedures that would have made this less of an issue.

If you were to buy your raw milk from a small farmer with a small herd that is healthy and they're not suffering from massive infections / mastitis on their udders I'm confident you'd be fine.

Taking raw milk from a factory farm? You're doomed