The raw milk debate isn’t just for foodies anymore. It’s making headlines here and abroad as both sides seek to support their positions on the controversial topic. So what’s the fuss about? Let’s try to break down the raw milk basics so we can make educated decisions on hot topics, such as whether to consume the product or even to make its sale illegal.

The Pros

Raw milk advocates assert that milk taken straight from a healthy, grass-fed cow and immediately cooled and bottled is safer and more nutritionally beneficial than processed, pasteurized milk from factory-farmed grain-fed cattle. As ruminant animals, cows naturally thrive on a diet of grasses, while grains (which are not a natural cow food) may acidify their digestive systems, leading to the disruption of balance between beneficial and destructive bacteria. Milk produced from a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) environment may likely contain E. coli and other harmful pathogens that proliferate in an acidic rumen and spread through the animals’ feces, pus and white blood cells from udders that are infected and swollen from overproduction, and traces of antibiotics and other drugs and chemicals given to the animals to speed growth and increase production. This type of milk must be pasteurized to reduce such a high risk of contamination.

Cattle that are more appropriately cared for, allowed a natural diet and lifestyle of grass grazing, and kept clean and healthy without need for excessive drugs may produce milk that is less likely to be tainted with excessive pathogens, primarily because good quality raw milk contains beneficial bacteria and antimicrobials (like lactobacilli) that can keep the harmful pathogens (like Listeria monocytogenes) in check. Believers in raw milk say that this “self-sanitized” product doesn’t need heat processing. On the contrary, pasteurizing or heat treating this milk will destroy even the protective bacteria, so that if the milk happens to be exposed to a pathogen after pasteurization, it won’t have the means to curb the pathogen’s spread.

In addition to what many believe to be cleaner and safer, raw milk contains certain elements that may make it more nutritionally acceptable than pasteurized milk. For example, certain digestion-aiding enzymes are heat-sensitive and do not survive the pasteurization process. People with insufficient lactase levels may experience bloating, gas, and other problems when they consume lactose, a sugar present in milk.  Raw milk contains its own lactase, produced by lactobacilli (“friendly” bacteria), that allows some lactose-intolerant people to have little to no trouble handling the lactose in raw milk.

Another pro-raw argument that we’re hearing a lot of these days:  consumer freedom of choice. Regardless of the possibility of pathogen contamination in unpasteurized milk, those in favor insist on their right to choose what food or beverage they put into their bodies. Many feel that this right is violated by states that have declared the sale of raw milk products illegal.

The Cons

No matter how clean and healthy a cattle farmer keeps his animals, there is always some risk for pathogen contamination. It takes a minute amount of E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, Salmonella, or other pathogen to find its way into an unpasteurized product and make its consumers severely ill. An argument often made against the sale and consumption of raw milk is that its use is not merely a matter of individual choice: these foodborne diseases are transmissible, and a person who risks his own health by consuming a potentially dangerous product is also posing a risk to public health. The raw milk issue now becomes one of collective as well as individual rights.

Among the most noted raw-milk antagonists are the WHO, CDC, FDA, and FSIS, all of which advise against the consumption of raw milk and advocate pasteurization as a necessary measure for milk safety.

How Do We Choose a Side?

With strong arguments as well as corroborative studies on both sides, this is undoubtedly a complex issue deserving of much thought and continued scientific inquiry. Is pasteurization a magic wand that cleans our milk and unfailingly protects us from foodborne illness, or simply a disguise that hides from consumer view the repugnant results of nasty processing methods? If pasteurization allows for slipshod milk manufacturing that can promote E. coli simply because heat treating will render it dead E. coli in the finished product, shouldn’t we demand production changes that will actually eliminate E. coli pre-pasteurization? Or if raw milk is truly a severe risk to public health, what steps should we take to protect ourselves in those states where its sale is still legally permitted?

Tough questions, and even tougher choices. We’ve got to do our best to make decisions in the interest of food safety, and being informed is the first of many steps to achieving a safer food supply. We’ll keep you up to date as the raw milk debate continues.

“One of the next steps in this conversation is figuring out how do we ensure, through the help of the government, as well as local communities, that the foods that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be, so that we’re bringing some of these lessons home and we’re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools.”

The Edible Schoolyard is one program that’s doing its part to help kids learn early how to plant, cultivate, harvest, clean, prepare, cook, and serve nourishing and delicious whole-foods meals. Beginning as a “thriving one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School,” the Edible Schoolyard now has affiliate programs, including its first in New Orleans, where students are taught as part of their science and history curriculum a variety of lessons in food growth, culinary technique, and food-related cultural anthropology.

Programs like the Edible Schoolyard, along with continued support from a presidential administration that takes great interest in food safety, have the potential to make desperately-needed changes for the future of our food system.