Dairy has been in the news recently after the state of California recalled raw milk and cheese products found to contain the bird flu virus. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the nation’s top health job, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has endorsed the health benefits of raw milk and vowed to allow more sales across the U.S.
Raw milk has been a growing topic despite the established risks it poses. In 2023, raw milk made by the same California company involved in the ongoing recall, Raw Farm LLC, sickened 165 — mostly children — because it contained salmonella, which led to the largest recorded outbreak in more than two decades connected to unpasteurized milk. In addition, Raw Farm earlier this year recalled its raw cheddar product after five people who ate it were hospitalized with E. coli.
Public health agencies warn consumers any unpasteurized dairy product is more likely to contain germs and bacteria than a pasteurized product. But academics interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said it’s important to differentiate between raw, fluid milk and raw cheeses. Some raw cheeses can be safer to eat because they contain salt, acid and in some cases a form of penicillin that can reduce the likelihood of contaminants tainting cheeses.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates packaged milk and dairy in the U.S. when sold across state lines, but does not regulate the intrastate sale or distribution of raw milk.
Raw Farm’s recall is the latest since the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in October that it would start bulk testing raw milk for bird flu to catch outbreaks among dairy cattle.
Just days after the USDA committed to the new testing regime, the Connecticut Department of Agriculture issued a stop sale and recall of bottled raw milk from Nature View Dairy in Bridgewater, Connecticut. Earlier this year, children in New York and Pennsylvania were sickened by E. coli after consuming milk from a Pennsylvania Amish farm.
In Georgia, the state’s dairy farmers were given the green light in 2023 to sell unpasteurized milk for human consumption, but only one farm in the state has been licensed to do so, the AJC reported in October. Some local farms label their raw milk products “for pets,” as Raw Farms of California has also done.
Experts say in a perfect world where Americans could suckle directly from a cow’s pristine teat, yes, perhaps raw, liquid milk would be a fine drink. But they maintain that the many steps from the udder, to the milking machine to Georgians’ mouths means that contaminants normally killed with pasteurization could find their way into raw milk.
A study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center suggests fewer than half of U.S. adults know that drinking raw milk is less safe than drinking pasteurized milk, and many Americans do not understand the risks of consuming raw milk.
Still, less than 1% of Americans consume raw milk, and some 20 states explicitly prohibit the sale of raw milk, while 30 allow it, according to the FDA.
Pasteurization is the process by which milk is heated to a specific temperature for a set time to kill harmful bacteria commonly found in raw milk, such as listeria, campylobacter, salmonella, E. coli and, rarely, the bird flu virus. Illnesses caused by these bacteria can be especially serious for young children, pregnant women, the elderly and the immunocompromised.
The process was invented in 1862 by French chemist Louis Pasteur, and became widely adopted in the U.S. by the late 1800s to curb the spread of foodborne illnesses.
S. Mark Tompkins, director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia, said he doesn’t recommend raw dairy products in any form “as they may pose health risks due to a variety of pathogens.” It’s a stance echoed by both the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joe Micucci, a spokesperson for the National Dairy Council, said he understands the strong emotional investment that some people have in raw milk, but emphasized the risks of raw milk do not outweigh the benefits.
From 1998 to 2018, the CDC documented more than 200 illness outbreaks traced to raw milk, which sickened more than 2,600 people and hospitalized more than 225.
Is raw cheese safer than raw milk?
Since 2014, the FDA has been testing domestic and imported raw milk cheese and found that contamination was below 1%.
A French study found the majority of foodborne illness in France, one of the world’s highest consumers of cheese, was linked to meat and to inadequate cooking, cross-contamination during preparation and improper storage.
Few French people drink the kind of chilled pasteurized milk found in most American supermarkets, and even fewer drink unpasteurized, or raw, milk. Rather, 96.5% of French fluid milk drinkers consume UHT milk, which is pasteurized at ultrahigh temperatures, according to the French dairy industry. UHT milk doesn’t need to be refrigerated until it’s opened.
Kyle Allison, assistant professor of infectious diseases at Emory University, said he takes a middle ground in the raw dairy debate.
“I enjoy eating Roquefort and other blue cheeses, but wouldn’t necessarily go for raw milk,” he said. “I understand when people say pasteurization changes milk, but it’s also about balancing taste with the risk of exposure to pathogenic bacteria, especially in kids.”
Allison says, yes, raw milk can be nutritious — but it’s also the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and microbes. While he recognizes small farms try to reduce the potential risk, pasteurization reduces the risk almost completely in a product that tens of millions of Americans consume regularly.
One of the reasons raw milk cheeses could be safer than fluid raw milk is that popular varieties like French Roquefort, Italian Gorgonzola, English Stilton and Danish Danablu are made with penicillin producing-microbes in the cheese. “Which means that when we are eating those cheeses, we are probably eating low doses of penicillin,” he said. “The penicillin would no doubt have an effect on the microbiome in our gut.”
The biochemical reactions that the Penicillium roqueforti trigger in the raw milk give the cheese its blue veins, and intense taste and smell, said Imène Ferroukhi of the Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne, France. She said in France, the cheeses are produced under a strict set of guidelines for their manufacture and processing.
Then there’s the French paradox: a phenomenon in which the French have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, such as stroke or heart attack, despite diets that are rich in high saturated animal fat. Julien Cavanagh, a French-American neurologist at Emory University, says the fact that many European cheeses feature penicillin might be the reason.
“It’s especially true in Southwest France where the wine region of Bordeaux is located,” Cavanagh said. “It was hypothesized for a long time that red wine was a protective factor. But more recent research over the last 10 to 15 years tends to identify the consumption of cheese and, in particular, blue cheese, as a more credible factor as it seems to skew the metabolism of blood circulating fats and reduce inflammation.”
Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese in Wisconsin said award-winning cheesemakers like himself are melding modern dairy science with skills learned during apprenticeships in Europe to produce raw cheese in the U.S.
“The basic parameters of safety in cheesemaking, aside from pasteurization, are making the milk dry, salty and acidic,” he said. “This makes it inhospitable to pathogens. You could inject listeria right into Parmigiano-Reggiano, and it won’t grow.”
Hatch also likes a Georgia-produced cheese made in Thomasville, near the border with Florida. There, Sweet Grass Dairy makes both raw and pasteurized cheeses, including Asher Blue cheese, which is made with the Penicillium roqueforti found in French Roquefort, spokesperson Mallory Sofferin said.
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