7/2/2010 - Wholesome Milk – What is it?

The recent news about at least 16 people who were sickened, after drinking unpasteurized or raw goat milk from a dairy in Longmont, Colorado, points out the importance of modern food safety practices.

The Boulder County Health Agency believes that the raw goat milk may have been contaminated with e-coli.

Pasteurization of milk and other food products has been in use for over 100 years. Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard first tested the process in an attempt to prevent wine and beer from going sour. It was first applied to milk in 1886. Now, many foods, from almonds to juices to soy are pasteurized. It is a process that has saved countless lives.

Most of us have not experienced the farm environment past the pages of our nursery books. We imagine the barnyard to be a wholesome, fertile environment. The reality is that all of our foods start out with a fair amount of dirt. With dirt, we also get a large helping of good and bad microbes that live in it. That’s natural, but not wholesome.

“Wholesome” means to “promote the health of the body”. We carefully wash our fruits and vegetables to make them wholesome. We also clean our milk products to remove milk born micro-organisms through pasteurization.

While the argument continues that raw milk is healthier and tastes better, the facts are that responsible dairy operations pasteurized their milk to provide a truly wholesome milk product for the promotion of good health.

Molly Burgess - InlandEmpire.us