"Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years, according to Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer specializing in food poisoning outbreaks who has kept a record of the company’s outbreaks. Those outbreaks have been caused by a range of pathogenic bacteria known to be risks in unpasteurized dairy products, including E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria. A 2024 Salmonella outbreak connected to Raw Farm’s raw milk was linked to at least 171 illnesses."
If true, it sounds like this is just par for the course.
The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe. Although of course contamination does happen if a significant proportion of your cheese production nationwide is unpasteurized, that's just a numbers game. So yes, it is par for the course, but probably not at this level where the same producer shows up over and over again.
I guess this producer must be extremely confident to be refusing a recall in such a litigious jurisdiction as the USA. Or maybe they've just made the right campaign donations and feel safe enough...
> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.
"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.
The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.
Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.
And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.
I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.
One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".
Companies will never pay to do anything unless not doing it will open them up to a law suit. So, raw milk does have some risks just based upon the the fact it costs to pasteurize milk.
> One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".
I expect this strongly depends on the dairy product in question. For cheese made at the farm, sure. But for plain milk sold in a supermarket, I expect the improvement in logistics far more than makes up for the cost in pasteurization. People don’t UHT-pasteurize their milk for fun — UHT milk is easier to transport and can be shipped and stored in larger lots and rarely spoils on the shelves.
Where I live, you can buy raw milk but only at a substantial premium.
Pasteurization is heating to 70C and cooling it down quickly to kill pathogens. The milk needs to be refrigerated afterwards and used within 2 weeks.
UHT is heating it to 140C for 2s a cooling it to kill pathogens and their spores. It significantly changes flavor, destroys 90% of vitamins and changes some of the proteins structure. Lasts a year afterwards
Gonna make you cough up a reliable citation on that one.
The kombucha folks don't seem to have a problem with vitamins of aseptic purees after processing and generally seem to have converged to aseptic as being superior in terms of nutritional content than any other mechanism including freezing and preservatives. And Vitamin C is notoriously fragile to heat. Generally, Vitamin C is far more fragile than anything in milk (standard pasteurization knocks down Vitamin C by about 50%!).
European cheese producers have their own costly methods of managing raw milk cheese safety. They have much more surveillance of the entire process, like rapid testing of milk for STEC (the microbe involved in this outbreak) and adding bioprotective cultures during milk production. In France there is an extensive monitoring/alert system. They aren't just YOLO-ing it.
Currently the law requires substantially more testing (and lost product) for raw milk sales. It is hard for be to believe that pasteurization is a significant cost such that the choice is based on cost rather than a product goal.
Well if you harm someone by your contaminated product I believe that coming lawsuit could potentially be more expensive than warming the milk to 70 degrees for a minute. Especially in US.
I make cheese (ricotta and paneer) from raw milk all of the time at home. Raw milk is easy to buy here in Switzerland.
I get a noticeably better result with raw milk than pasteurized, and terrible terrible results from ultra-pasteurized milk. By 'better' I mean quantity per liter but also the size of the curds.
The thing that I find amusing is that I think people in the USA actually just chug raw milk like it's regular milk. Don't do that! You're supposed to heat to 60C minimum. When you make cheese you heat to higher - around 85C, when the milk surface turns foamy.
A lot of cheese here is from raw milk. I'd even say most but I don't know that for sure. But even though you aren't pasteurizing the milk (high temp under pressure for short time) you are killing the bacteria on the first step.
You're just pasteurizing the raw milk at home by heating it. But it's interesting that pasteurizing at home right before use still makes better cheese than store bought pasteurized milk. Wonder why. Perhaps raw milk is just superior for reasons besides its lack of pasteurization? In the US at least it's only the very premium milk that can be bought raw.
Ricotta and paneer appear to be high-heat cheeses, where pasteurization is implicit in the first step even if the milk wasn't pasteurized to begin with.
Cheddar, the kind of cheese allegedly at issue in this outbreak, appears to be a low-heat cheese, so you wouldn't start by heating the milk to pasteurization temps. If the milk isn't already pasteurized, the resulting cheese might be contaminated.
European soft cheese makers allegedly follow protocols to ensure that there's not substantial bacterial contamination in the beginning; they carefully handle the milk through the beginning of the cheesemaking process, after which the culture and salt and acidification stall any further bacterial growth; then aging cuts down any bacterial population to safe levels, and it's never reached a level where it could produce dangerous levels of toxins.
Competent American raw-cheese makers would do the same thing, but in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics, unscrupulous businesses will cut corners for profit. High contamination levels of the initial raw milk, or substantial cross-contamination after aging, is probably what led to this and the company's previous cheese contamination problems.
> in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics
You might be on to something. In the US, raw milk cheeses are not at all unusual. It's not even especially hard to buy raw milk, although (at least where I am) you generally need to go to a fancier grocery store or a farmer's market to find it.
But what is weird is that the farm in question literally calls itself "Raw Farm". There are many cheesemakers, both mass-market and high-end, that make both raw-milk and pasteurized-milk cheeses, but they don't generally go out of their way to brand their cheese as one or the other -- if you care, you can read the ingredient list. These companies' product is the cheese, not the rawness of the cheese -- if it tastes good, customers will buy more!
But Raw Farm seems to be a farm that makes a specific point of being, well, raw, and that's strange. Maybe it's a better idea to buy one's raw milk cheeses from an ordinary dairy :)
In the US, if you're actually seeking out raw milk cheese, watch out. If the milk is pasteurized but not legally pasteurized (inspected, licensed, documented) it must be sold as raw milk cheese. Even if you boiled it for an hour first.
Then there's also some raw milk cheese that is heat treated for less than the requirement for pasteurization, but still much hotter than required for the cheese process.
When I make raw milk cheese (small commercial, USA) the milk gets only about 1-3 degrees (Fahrenheit!) above the cows body temperature.
Also our family has been drinking raw milk all our lives, and there are a lot of people who come to our farm and get raw milk to drink.
I'm not aware of anyone ever getting sick from our milk (unless lactose intolerant/allergic of course).
If you are heating your milk to 85C, I'm sorry, but that's not really raw milk cheese anymore. When I make pasteurized cheese the milk is heated to only 63C (albeit for 30 minutes).
The yield is determined by the components (fat, protein, and other solids) in addition to the process the milk has underwent, and the cheese recipe. In our cheese making there's not a noticeable reduction in yield on pasteurized cheese, but we do a lower/slower pasteurization.
Good customer and pro-dairy "Health" Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may help his friends out here.
He himself is very pro-dairy, (thanks to lobby groups i imagine... Several dietary advisers appointed during his tenure have ties to the meat and dairy industry.
Or he's just a traditionalist as he's stated many times, and for a Western European cow (and all derivative products like milk, cheese, beef) are up there with wheat. Bread and butter is a common phrase.
Or there is some big conspiracy and he's trying to get rich at the detriment to his own health, or he's trying to get rich and his entire persona and diet is fake?
Well yes, maybe a bit of both?
Under the current administration, the dairy lobby has moved from being defensive (protecting subsidies) to being offensive - leveraging Secretary Kennedy's love milk/dairy to expand their market share within federal health policy.
These PACs have a lot of money to throw around, so I am naturally a little suspicious. And I'll give him putting steak at the top of the new food pyramid , but having cheese literally at the top?? That's too much...
what does traditionalist mean? He's antivax. He should pasteurize either. I hope he doesn't take flu shots or even go to the hospital because that is just unnatural. Who need medicine when he can just eat tomato leaves.
In this case, it's just being a bit more risk-adverse on new things. He's not trying to prevent all people from getting vaccines, he just doesn't want them mandated until they've passed FDA approval afaik. He's against things like petroleum-based food colorings, preferring colorings that have existed in food and deemed safe over a long time. He's anti-heavily processed foods, and believes that the "food science" that has gone into making some unhealthy foods literally addictive do more bad than good, and that we as a society should spend more time banning and regulating those things for the betterment of our people.
There are absolutely lobbies he'll align with, just don't pretend that if he had different views there wouldn't be others jumping at the chance.
"The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits."
There is no taste difference between raw and pasteurized milk. The taste comes from the container. If you have both in glass, there is no discernible difference. My father is a dairy farmer and bet his professor (many years ago) that he could taste the difference. The professor setup a blind taste test where he gave my father pasteurized and raw milk in glass cups. There was no difference.
"Nutritional value" is a very ambiguous. It's only in what you measured. Raw milk advocates are going to value things like bacteria and if proteins were changed. Pasteurization by definition is going to kill the bacteria and change the protein structure. The main benefit for pasteurization is that it makes milk a commodity. You can have unsanitary farms with high bacteria counts that don't make people sick. This is both good and bad. Good because it means more milk available with less disease. Bad because our bodies are complex and some bacteria is healthy.
My recommendation is that if someone wants to consume raw milk, they should have a personal relationship with the dairy.
It may depend on the milk quality and the dairy. There's definitely a taste difference between our raw milk and our pasteurized milk, and neither one is bottled.
You can even sniff the pasteurizer and smell if it's the raw milk or if it's been pasteurized.
Also when making cheese, the naturally occurring bacteria and enzymes in raw milk make quite a large flavor difference (from a cheesemaker's perspective anyways).
Depends on the pasteurization method. UHT will change the taste 100%, normal pasteurization might not. My grandmother used to pasterize her milk at a slightly higher than needed temperature, to separate the cream, and eat it on the side. Raw milk/pasterized milk with cream have the same taste, when you remove the cream though, it changes.
Honestly that's the best way to consume milk, pasterize it yourself, that will allow you to control the taste and the fat % you tolerate in your milk.
I find this hard to believe because there is a massive difference in tastes just between two dairies. You can also get low-pasteurization milk from the same dairy and the taste difference is also remarkable.
Yes, different feed, cow breeds, etc are all going to influence taste. You also need to identify the path that the low-pasteurization milk goes through to see if it has anything that will adjust the taste. My father's professor was able to control the variables such that it was the same milk, no contaminates, etc.
If neither sample is your usual brand you can get two different flavors, but still not be able to tell which was pasteurized. You could try to guess that the one you liked best was raw and be wrong.
A local small grocery chain started stocking raw milk (with many warnings) and I decided to risk consuming it to see for myself. I couldn't tell the difference between it and ordinary full fat milk. I wondered if it was a fraud (commercial milk falsely advertised as Local Forbidden Delicacy Milk), but maybe there's not much difference. Or maybe I am not a subtle taster. I also can't taste the superiority of an $80 bottle of wine when it's pitted against an $18 bottle.
I can taste the difference between a $100 wine and $400 wine, but it's maybe 20% better, if it's possible to flatten extra layers of flavour into a linear scale. It's easier to appreciate for different levels of quality from the same producer. My example is drawn from Casanova di Neri Tenuta Nuova vs Cerretalto. They're basically the same style, the Cerretalto just has extra.
Across different grapes and regions and it's like apples and oranges. Sometimes I want a savory Burgundy, sometimes I want a Coke. If you don't know what wine from a terroir tastes like, and hankering after that, don't spend extra on it.
I'd generalize that to cheese. Can't beat a good aged Comte (a raw milk cheese), but it's not everyday cheese.
I’ve had a few different specialty brands of milk and there can be a difference, but I think that has more to do with the cows (and their diet) than the process. Jersey cow milk is probably more different than raw milk than pasteurized is from raw milk.
Most of what people like about "Raw milk" is that it is not homogenized. The cream has not been emulsified thoroughly, so the mouth feel can be different.
You can sometimes find pasteurized milk that hasn't been homogenized in order to get the good mouth feel without drinking absurdly unsafe bacteria culture.
There's almost no discernible difference between unhomogenized pasteurized milk and raw milk, both tasted directly and in the final cheese. As a working chef* I had to be taught to detect the difference, and now that I'm not doing it regularly I doubt I even could.
* at the time at a michelin star restaurant, not to brag but because the finesse of my palate is directly relevant and likely to be called into question.
I'm a big fan of cheese and have researched this a bit. The consensus seems to be if two cheeses were made with the exact same process except for using past/unpast then you might be able to tell a difference (especially for younger cheeses) but one isn't necessarily better than the other. Over the years cheese makers have learned how to get the best flavor out of the base milk. So a pasteurized brie will be just as good as an unpasteurized brie but made slightly different.
I've tried doing taste comparisons between past/unpast but there's so much variation for even the exact same cheese that I've never been able to detect a meaningful difference.
Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.
For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.
we have a small dairy farm. We sell milk to a company which pausterizes milk soon. BUT
we have in the past made cheese for illegal exporters of cheese, and they require it be made of unpausterized milk. Apparently, they can't get enough unpausterized cheese in their country, so they habe to smuggle it. They can't disclose neither the cheese origin nor its nature; the consumers do taste tje difference.
Similarly, my father prefers the taste of unpausterized milk cuajada (non compact cheese) He says pausterized milk loses most of its flavor.
For the record. I prefer pausterized milk; I also notice the difference.
"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article".
I remember growing up, my dad’s family had cows and we would drink the milk raw. The main feature for me was how thick it was. Even the whole milk I buy at stores here is very thin.
It's also my understanding that whole milk isn't necessarily just "pasteurize and pass along"; it really means "3.25% fat".
All the milk has its fat separated out and re-added at specific percents, and the 3.25% for whole milk is just what whoever standardized this thought about typical for whole milk. An individual cow might have a mix that's a little more or less.
If you look around you can occasionally find higher fat milks; I've seen as high as 5% (without getting into half-and-half or heavy cream). You could probably just splash a little heavy cream in yourself if you aren't satisfied with the thickness of whole milk.
That would get in the way of Arstechnica's hyper liberal bias. I eat raw cheese because it tastes good. It's common in France, like in reblochon and Brie de meaux. There aren't mass deaths in France because of this.
There aren’t mass deaths in the US either (no deaths reported per the article). But there are definitely cases of listeriosis due to raw cheese in France. A recent outbreak was in 2025 and led to 2 deaths.
It is better. We have a decently strong cheese tradition in Sweden too, but French cheese is tastier.
I don't even like the French, their culture is obnoxious, I'd take every chance to shit on the French. But you just can't argue with their cheese, it's that good. Some of their wines are ok too, but I mostly prefer Italian on that front.
Our Constitution accounts for government agents gone awry so there is back and forth. The FDA can go as far as mandating a recall but they need evidence, which they obviously lack at this point or they would just mandate the recall.
This is some FDA operatives using the rules and a PR campaign to wage war on raw dairy, something that is not new in this country at all.
It's a great story for informing any suckers out there who bought this cheese that they should probably throw it out and avoid buying from the company in the future since they've got a long history of poisoning people and clearly don't care much about the safety of their customers.
I don't know what their QA looks like but I don't think it's too big a stretch to think they retain samples of every batch and culture for such pathogens. Just to have the ammo to fight back.
It is entirely possible mishandling could cause this. Like the many times I've gotten home from Trader Joe's to find the 'associate' unpacking the box sliced the product package open with their box cutter.
I get that the norms lean conservative and that's a good thing. But if someone says you should do a recall and the actual lab tests saying whether your product actually has toxin-producing bacteria haven't finished running yet, I can understand the desire to wait until the evidence is in.
They've got some evidence, 7 known cases over three states all linked to the same product. The history of problems from this producer makes it seem more likely to be true. A lot of companies would rather have their customers throw away their product and buy it again from a different batch than risk having their customers get violently sick or dead from their food because the people who get sick and survive can end up with a very strong aversion to the brand and/or product going forward, and voluntarily recalling the product just to be safe is good from a PR stance since it looks like you actually care about your customers.
> Pasteurization is a simple process of briefly heating milk and other products to a temperature that can kill disease-causing germs. The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits.
This is a bit disingenuous of the reporter to include this. The appeal of raw milk is that it tastes better. Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.
Personally, I'll stick with pasteurized milk. But if people knowingly want to take risks I don't see why we can't just slap a warning label on these products.
> Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.
Some raw milk producers and nut jobs claim that raw milk will cure or treat things like allergies, asthma, psoriasis, diabetes, high blood pressure, lactose intolerance, and arthritis. Those kinds of false claims along with their unproven claims on the nutritional difference are exactly what the FDA is supposed to address.
Flavor is ephemeral. Whether or not something contains a vitamin or cures asthma is not.
People’s blindness to the benefits of things like pasteurization, washing their hands, and vaccines is crazy to me. What’s the next trend? Don’t refrigerate meat because “big-fridge” is out to get ya?
Fermented meat is a thing. I know the thought of it is disgusting but corned beef is fermented meat. The best is when the bacteria eat at the connective and the meat gets a slightly foam texture. I make it about once a year.
I don't know if there's a catchy name for it, but if you spend a lifetime in an environment where many serious diseases have been eradicated or nearly eradicated by vaccines it's easy to start to believe that the vaccines do nothing. This is true of so many other things as well - people take norms that make their life possible/livable for granted until they're gone.
I don't really see a solution here. It just seems like human nature.
It's a pretty bold move to say "Naw, we'd rather poison people with feces than do a recall right now." Perhaps it's a good moment to consult your attorney.
Sometimes criminals are unethical and lie, sometimes they are not smart or empathetic enough to accept they are causing harm to people. This is not some challenge to help them bridge that gap to understand, it is just why police are allowed to use force to imprison people that break the law and harm others.
"Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years, according to Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer specializing in food poisoning outbreaks who has kept a record of the company’s outbreaks. Those outbreaks have been caused by a range of pathogenic bacteria known to be risks in unpasteurized dairy products, including E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria. A 2024 Salmonella outbreak connected to Raw Farm’s raw milk was linked to at least 171 illnesses."
If true, it sounds like this is just par for the course.
The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe. Although of course contamination does happen if a significant proportion of your cheese production nationwide is unpasteurized, that's just a numbers game. So yes, it is par for the course, but probably not at this level where the same producer shows up over and over again.
I guess this producer must be extremely confident to be refusing a recall in such a litigious jurisdiction as the USA. Or maybe they've just made the right campaign donations and feel safe enough...
> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.
"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.
The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.
Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.
And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.
I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.
At what point do they just get shut down?
Given that RFK is deep in the raw milk psychosis… maybe never.
One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".
Companies will never pay to do anything unless not doing it will open them up to a law suit. So, raw milk does have some risks just based upon the the fact it costs to pasteurize milk.
> One thing to be aware of, pasteurization adds costs to dairy products. So it is being done for a real reason, not just "because".
I expect this strongly depends on the dairy product in question. For cheese made at the farm, sure. But for plain milk sold in a supermarket, I expect the improvement in logistics far more than makes up for the cost in pasteurization. People don’t UHT-pasteurize their milk for fun — UHT milk is easier to transport and can be shipped and stored in larger lots and rarely spoils on the shelves.
Where I live, you can buy raw milk but only at a substantial premium.
Pasteurized != UHT
Pasteurization is heating to 70C and cooling it down quickly to kill pathogens. The milk needs to be refrigerated afterwards and used within 2 weeks.
UHT is heating it to 140C for 2s a cooling it to kill pathogens and their spores. It significantly changes flavor, destroys 90% of vitamins and changes some of the proteins structure. Lasts a year afterwards
> destroys 90% of vitamins
Gonna make you cough up a reliable citation on that one.
The kombucha folks don't seem to have a problem with vitamins of aseptic purees after processing and generally seem to have converged to aseptic as being superior in terms of nutritional content than any other mechanism including freezing and preservatives. And Vitamin C is notoriously fragile to heat. Generally, Vitamin C is far more fragile than anything in milk (standard pasteurization knocks down Vitamin C by about 50%!).
Would this do? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8844253/
Presumably, you’re American? In many parts of the world we regularly consume cheese made with raw milk. For many cheeses, raw milk is preferable.
European cheese producers have their own costly methods of managing raw milk cheese safety. They have much more surveillance of the entire process, like rapid testing of milk for STEC (the microbe involved in this outbreak) and adding bioprotective cultures during milk production. In France there is an extensive monitoring/alert system. They aren't just YOLO-ing it.
Currently the law requires substantially more testing (and lost product) for raw milk sales. It is hard for be to believe that pasteurization is a significant cost such that the choice is based on cost rather than a product goal.
Well if you harm someone by your contaminated product I believe that coming lawsuit could potentially be more expensive than warming the milk to 70 degrees for a minute. Especially in US.
I make cheese (ricotta and paneer) from raw milk all of the time at home. Raw milk is easy to buy here in Switzerland.
I get a noticeably better result with raw milk than pasteurized, and terrible terrible results from ultra-pasteurized milk. By 'better' I mean quantity per liter but also the size of the curds.
The thing that I find amusing is that I think people in the USA actually just chug raw milk like it's regular milk. Don't do that! You're supposed to heat to 60C minimum. When you make cheese you heat to higher - around 85C, when the milk surface turns foamy.
A lot of cheese here is from raw milk. I'd even say most but I don't know that for sure. But even though you aren't pasteurizing the milk (high temp under pressure for short time) you are killing the bacteria on the first step.
You're just pasteurizing the raw milk at home by heating it. But it's interesting that pasteurizing at home right before use still makes better cheese than store bought pasteurized milk. Wonder why. Perhaps raw milk is just superior for reasons besides its lack of pasteurization? In the US at least it's only the very premium milk that can be bought raw.
Ricotta and paneer appear to be high-heat cheeses, where pasteurization is implicit in the first step even if the milk wasn't pasteurized to begin with.
Cheddar, the kind of cheese allegedly at issue in this outbreak, appears to be a low-heat cheese, so you wouldn't start by heating the milk to pasteurization temps. If the milk isn't already pasteurized, the resulting cheese might be contaminated.
European soft cheese makers allegedly follow protocols to ensure that there's not substantial bacterial contamination in the beginning; they carefully handle the milk through the beginning of the cheesemaking process, after which the culture and salt and acidification stall any further bacterial growth; then aging cuts down any bacterial population to safe levels, and it's never reached a level where it could produce dangerous levels of toxins.
Competent American raw-cheese makers would do the same thing, but in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics, unscrupulous businesses will cut corners for profit. High contamination levels of the initial raw milk, or substantial cross-contamination after aging, is probably what led to this and the company's previous cheese contamination problems.
> in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics
You might be on to something. In the US, raw milk cheeses are not at all unusual. It's not even especially hard to buy raw milk, although (at least where I am) you generally need to go to a fancier grocery store or a farmer's market to find it.
But what is weird is that the farm in question literally calls itself "Raw Farm". There are many cheesemakers, both mass-market and high-end, that make both raw-milk and pasteurized-milk cheeses, but they don't generally go out of their way to brand their cheese as one or the other -- if you care, you can read the ingredient list. These companies' product is the cheese, not the rawness of the cheese -- if it tastes good, customers will buy more!
But Raw Farm seems to be a farm that makes a specific point of being, well, raw, and that's strange. Maybe it's a better idea to buy one's raw milk cheeses from an ordinary dairy :)
In the US, if you're actually seeking out raw milk cheese, watch out. If the milk is pasteurized but not legally pasteurized (inspected, licensed, documented) it must be sold as raw milk cheese. Even if you boiled it for an hour first.
Then there's also some raw milk cheese that is heat treated for less than the requirement for pasteurization, but still much hotter than required for the cheese process.
Depends entirely on the state. In Wisconsin, the "dairy capital of the world", its illegal except for incidental sales directly from the dairy farm.
Reason being they don't want outbreaks to be linked to Wisconsin's dairy industry.
When I make raw milk cheese (small commercial, USA) the milk gets only about 1-3 degrees (Fahrenheit!) above the cows body temperature.
Also our family has been drinking raw milk all our lives, and there are a lot of people who come to our farm and get raw milk to drink.
I'm not aware of anyone ever getting sick from our milk (unless lactose intolerant/allergic of course).
If you are heating your milk to 85C, I'm sorry, but that's not really raw milk cheese anymore. When I make pasteurized cheese the milk is heated to only 63C (albeit for 30 minutes).
Heating milk to destroy pathogens has a name. It was named after the guy who originally discovered the process, Louis Pasteur.
The well known process of Louisurising milk.
Isn't the amount of cheese determined by amount of fat/protein in the milk itself and pasteurized is sometimes skimmed?
The yield is determined by the components (fat, protein, and other solids) in addition to the process the milk has underwent, and the cheese recipe. In our cheese making there's not a noticeable reduction in yield on pasteurized cheese, but we do a lower/slower pasteurization.
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Good customer and pro-dairy "Health" Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may help his friends out here.
He himself is very pro-dairy, (thanks to lobby groups i imagine... Several dietary advisers appointed during his tenure have ties to the meat and dairy industry.
Or he's just a traditionalist as he's stated many times, and for a Western European cow (and all derivative products like milk, cheese, beef) are up there with wheat. Bread and butter is a common phrase.
Or there is some big conspiracy and he's trying to get rich at the detriment to his own health, or he's trying to get rich and his entire persona and diet is fake?
Well yes, maybe a bit of both? Under the current administration, the dairy lobby has moved from being defensive (protecting subsidies) to being offensive - leveraging Secretary Kennedy's love milk/dairy to expand their market share within federal health policy. These PACs have a lot of money to throw around, so I am naturally a little suspicious. And I'll give him putting steak at the top of the new food pyramid , but having cheese literally at the top?? That's too much...
what does traditionalist mean? He's antivax. He should pasteurize either. I hope he doesn't take flu shots or even go to the hospital because that is just unnatural. Who need medicine when he can just eat tomato leaves.
In this case, it's just being a bit more risk-adverse on new things. He's not trying to prevent all people from getting vaccines, he just doesn't want them mandated until they've passed FDA approval afaik. He's against things like petroleum-based food colorings, preferring colorings that have existed in food and deemed safe over a long time. He's anti-heavily processed foods, and believes that the "food science" that has gone into making some unhealthy foods literally addictive do more bad than good, and that we as a society should spend more time banning and regulating those things for the betterment of our people.
There are absolutely lobbies he'll align with, just don't pretend that if he had different views there wouldn't be others jumping at the chance.
While Americans food system needs an overhaul RFK is an antivax nutcase with blood on his hands.
Yeah, all these new-fangled technologies like... vaccines and... um, pasteurization.
When did Louis Pasteur die again? 1895? Okay.
> "There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."
> "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines"
He can claim he's not antivaxx, but he repeatedly makes statements that are pulled straight from the anti-vaxx playbook of lies.
Stop giving anyone in this administration the benefit of the doubt. They have demonstrated they do not deserve it.
"The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits."
Well, perhaps it has taste benefits?
There is no taste difference between raw and pasteurized milk. The taste comes from the container. If you have both in glass, there is no discernible difference. My father is a dairy farmer and bet his professor (many years ago) that he could taste the difference. The professor setup a blind taste test where he gave my father pasteurized and raw milk in glass cups. There was no difference.
"Nutritional value" is a very ambiguous. It's only in what you measured. Raw milk advocates are going to value things like bacteria and if proteins were changed. Pasteurization by definition is going to kill the bacteria and change the protein structure. The main benefit for pasteurization is that it makes milk a commodity. You can have unsanitary farms with high bacteria counts that don't make people sick. This is both good and bad. Good because it means more milk available with less disease. Bad because our bodies are complex and some bacteria is healthy.
My recommendation is that if someone wants to consume raw milk, they should have a personal relationship with the dairy.
the difference in taste comes from the amount of fat. raw milk tends to have more fat
It may depend on the milk quality and the dairy. There's definitely a taste difference between our raw milk and our pasteurized milk, and neither one is bottled.
You can even sniff the pasteurizer and smell if it's the raw milk or if it's been pasteurized.
Also when making cheese, the naturally occurring bacteria and enzymes in raw milk make quite a large flavor difference (from a cheesemaker's perspective anyways).
Depends on the pasteurization method. UHT will change the taste 100%, normal pasteurization might not. My grandmother used to pasterize her milk at a slightly higher than needed temperature, to separate the cream, and eat it on the side. Raw milk/pasterized milk with cream have the same taste, when you remove the cream though, it changes.
Honestly that's the best way to consume milk, pasterize it yourself, that will allow you to control the taste and the fat % you tolerate in your milk.
I find this hard to believe because there is a massive difference in tastes just between two dairies. You can also get low-pasteurization milk from the same dairy and the taste difference is also remarkable.
Yes, different feed, cow breeds, etc are all going to influence taste. You also need to identify the path that the low-pasteurization milk goes through to see if it has anything that will adjust the taste. My father's professor was able to control the variables such that it was the same milk, no contaminates, etc.
If neither sample is your usual brand you can get two different flavors, but still not be able to tell which was pasteurized. You could try to guess that the one you liked best was raw and be wrong.
I used to dabble in raw milk and I can confirm the taste is the same, surprisingly.
A local small grocery chain started stocking raw milk (with many warnings) and I decided to risk consuming it to see for myself. I couldn't tell the difference between it and ordinary full fat milk. I wondered if it was a fraud (commercial milk falsely advertised as Local Forbidden Delicacy Milk), but maybe there's not much difference. Or maybe I am not a subtle taster. I also can't taste the superiority of an $80 bottle of wine when it's pitted against an $18 bottle.
You're supposed to feel the superiority, not taste it.
I can taste the difference between a $100 wine and $400 wine, but it's maybe 20% better, if it's possible to flatten extra layers of flavour into a linear scale. It's easier to appreciate for different levels of quality from the same producer. My example is drawn from Casanova di Neri Tenuta Nuova vs Cerretalto. They're basically the same style, the Cerretalto just has extra.
Across different grapes and regions and it's like apples and oranges. Sometimes I want a savory Burgundy, sometimes I want a Coke. If you don't know what wine from a terroir tastes like, and hankering after that, don't spend extra on it.
I'd generalize that to cheese. Can't beat a good aged Comte (a raw milk cheese), but it's not everyday cheese.
(I mean, not every day, but every 2-3 days... I'm more of a St nectaire guy myself)
I’ve had a few different specialty brands of milk and there can be a difference, but I think that has more to do with the cows (and their diet) than the process. Jersey cow milk is probably more different than raw milk than pasteurized is from raw milk.
Most of what people like about "Raw milk" is that it is not homogenized. The cream has not been emulsified thoroughly, so the mouth feel can be different.
You can sometimes find pasteurized milk that hasn't been homogenized in order to get the good mouth feel without drinking absurdly unsafe bacteria culture.
There's almost no discernible difference between unhomogenized pasteurized milk and raw milk, both tasted directly and in the final cheese. As a working chef* I had to be taught to detect the difference, and now that I'm not doing it regularly I doubt I even could.
* at the time at a michelin star restaurant, not to brag but because the finesse of my palate is directly relevant and likely to be called into question.
Isn't most good cheese unpasteurised? Comte, Roquefort, Gruyere, Epoisses, Parmesan, even many (most?) small-producer Cheddars.
I'm a big fan of cheese and have researched this a bit. The consensus seems to be if two cheeses were made with the exact same process except for using past/unpast then you might be able to tell a difference (especially for younger cheeses) but one isn't necessarily better than the other. Over the years cheese makers have learned how to get the best flavor out of the base milk. So a pasteurized brie will be just as good as an unpasteurized brie but made slightly different.
I've tried doing taste comparisons between past/unpast but there's so much variation for even the exact same cheese that I've never been able to detect a meaningful difference.
Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.
For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.
Oh, yeah, agreed. That dairy sounds like a death-trap!
we have a small dairy farm. We sell milk to a company which pausterizes milk soon. BUT
we have in the past made cheese for illegal exporters of cheese, and they require it be made of unpausterized milk. Apparently, they can't get enough unpausterized cheese in their country, so they habe to smuggle it. They can't disclose neither the cheese origin nor its nature; the consumers do taste tje difference.
Similarly, my father prefers the taste of unpausterized milk cuajada (non compact cheese) He says pausterized milk loses most of its flavor.
For the record. I prefer pausterized milk; I also notice the difference.
It makes a little more sense for cheese as a cultured product.
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1 Michelin star is like _only_ in the top 0.1% of restaurants instead of the top 0.001%.
It’s still impressive, difficult, and time consuming.
Highly recommend you check out any starred restaurants nearby where you live. They tend to be expensive, but they are worth the high sticker price
I don't think you caught the sarcasm of parent
Do yourself a giant favor and read up on what it takes to get a single Michelin star. It's not a fucking Yelp review.
"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article".
I remember growing up, my dad’s family had cows and we would drink the milk raw. The main feature for me was how thick it was. Even the whole milk I buy at stores here is very thin.
That's mostly due to homogenization, a process that spreads the fat evenly through the milk and keeps it from resettling.
It's also my understanding that whole milk isn't necessarily just "pasteurize and pass along"; it really means "3.25% fat".
All the milk has its fat separated out and re-added at specific percents, and the 3.25% for whole milk is just what whoever standardized this thought about typical for whole milk. An individual cow might have a mix that's a little more or less.
If you look around you can occasionally find higher fat milks; I've seen as high as 5% (without getting into half-and-half or heavy cream). You could probably just splash a little heavy cream in yourself if you aren't satisfied with the thickness of whole milk.
Raw milk advocates claim is does shit like fix allergies and cure diseases.
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That would get in the way of Arstechnica's hyper liberal bias. I eat raw cheese because it tastes good. It's common in France, like in reblochon and Brie de meaux. There aren't mass deaths in France because of this.
There aren’t mass deaths in the US either (no deaths reported per the article). But there are definitely cases of listeriosis due to raw cheese in France. A recent outbreak was in 2025 and led to 2 deaths.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250813-deadly-listeria-outbre...
But is it better, or just more traditional? France is a country that cares a lot about food tradition.
It is better. We have a decently strong cheese tradition in Sweden too, but French cheese is tastier.
I don't even like the French, their culture is obnoxious, I'd take every chance to shit on the French. But you just can't argue with their cheese, it's that good. Some of their wines are ok too, but I mostly prefer Italian on that front.
Italian cheeses similar to French types from the alp regions are very good as well. Beppe and his cheeses in Rome.
There is no taste difference, it’s just cheaper to produce since you can skip heating it for a few minutes.
I love how the makers can "just disagree".
I'm Argentinian and if ANMAT (our FDA) recalls something, it's gone, no involvement from the manufacturer really needed.
They could revoke your license to make and sell food wholesale.
Our Constitution accounts for government agents gone awry so there is back and forth. The FDA can go as far as mandating a recall but they need evidence, which they obviously lack at this point or they would just mandate the recall.
This is some FDA operatives using the rules and a PR campaign to wage war on raw dairy, something that is not new in this country at all.
> Raw Farm, is rejecting the regulator’s findings and refusing to voluntarily recall its cheese.
The FDA has mandatory and "voluntary" recalls. The FDA could require Raw Farms to recall their products if they had a strong enough case.
This is mostly a non-story.
It's a great story for informing any suckers out there who bought this cheese that they should probably throw it out and avoid buying from the company in the future since they've got a long history of poisoning people and clearly don't care much about the safety of their customers.
I don't know what their QA looks like but I don't think it's too big a stretch to think they retain samples of every batch and culture for such pathogens. Just to have the ammo to fight back.
It is entirely possible mishandling could cause this. Like the many times I've gotten home from Trader Joe's to find the 'associate' unpacking the box sliced the product package open with their box cutter.
I get that the norms lean conservative and that's a good thing. But if someone says you should do a recall and the actual lab tests saying whether your product actually has toxin-producing bacteria haven't finished running yet, I can understand the desire to wait until the evidence is in.
They've got some evidence, 7 known cases over three states all linked to the same product. The history of problems from this producer makes it seem more likely to be true. A lot of companies would rather have their customers throw away their product and buy it again from a different batch than risk having their customers get violently sick or dead from their food because the people who get sick and survive can end up with a very strong aversion to the brand and/or product going forward, and voluntarily recalling the product just to be safe is good from a PR stance since it looks like you actually care about your customers.
> Pasteurization is a simple process of briefly heating milk and other products to a temperature that can kill disease-causing germs. The FDA has highlighted studies finding that pasteurization does not negatively affect the nutritional value of milk. Still, advocates of raw milk continue to claim, without evidence, that raw dairy has benefits.
This is a bit disingenuous of the reporter to include this. The appeal of raw milk is that it tastes better. Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.
Personally, I'll stick with pasteurized milk. But if people knowingly want to take risks I don't see why we can't just slap a warning label on these products.
> Whether or not it's 'healthier' is kind of ephemeral and not really for the FDA to decide.
Some raw milk producers and nut jobs claim that raw milk will cure or treat things like allergies, asthma, psoriasis, diabetes, high blood pressure, lactose intolerance, and arthritis. Those kinds of false claims along with their unproven claims on the nutritional difference are exactly what the FDA is supposed to address.
Flavor is ephemeral. Whether or not something contains a vitamin or cures asthma is not.
Not sure how to compare raw milk cheese made in the USA, versus raw milk cheese in EU region.
I wont drink raw milk cause there's all sorts of bad shit.
But raw milk cheese? Seems safe.
I think you can usually just assume us food standards are worse - same reason I wouldn't order steak tartare here.
It sounds like the farm in question also sells raw milk anyway so their standards for safety might be worse on top of that.
People’s blindness to the benefits of things like pasteurization, washing their hands, and vaccines is crazy to me. What’s the next trend? Don’t refrigerate meat because “big-fridge” is out to get ya?
Fermented meat is a thing. I know the thought of it is disgusting but corned beef is fermented meat. The best is when the bacteria eat at the connective and the meat gets a slightly foam texture. I make it about once a year.
You get what I'm saying though, right? When I say washing hands, I'm not discounting the benefits/viability of hand sanitizer.
Apples and oranges. Derailing an argument with tangential topics will never cease to piss me off.
I just thought they were raising an interesting fact. It's not like "lol antivaxxers" was much of an "argument" to derail anyway.
I'll have to revise my original comment to say: "don't refrigerate, ferment, can, cure, dry, brine, pickle..."
There was also a tiny "trend" a couple years ago for stupid people letting meat rot and eating it for psychoactive effects.
It was called "High meat" and it was more a trend in garbage news articles than reality but there was a tiny niche of youtube videos at least.
I don't know if there's a catchy name for it, but if you spend a lifetime in an environment where many serious diseases have been eradicated or nearly eradicated by vaccines it's easy to start to believe that the vaccines do nothing. This is true of so many other things as well - people take norms that make their life possible/livable for granted until they're gone.
I don't really see a solution here. It just seems like human nature.
It's a pretty bold move to say "Naw, we'd rather poison people with feces than do a recall right now." Perhaps it's a good moment to consult your attorney.
Sometimes criminals are unethical and lie, sometimes they are not smart or empathetic enough to accept they are causing harm to people. This is not some challenge to help them bridge that gap to understand, it is just why police are allowed to use force to imprison people that break the law and harm others.
I do not know if what the FDA that is true, but with RFKjr in charge you never know.
With that said, I will always avoid raw milk or products from raw mike since there are known issues.
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