yt sure does love eating the crusty lactations of other mammals and getting sick from it dont they

Now this here is what really grinds my gears about raw milk products becoming the chud grift de jour. Raw milk cheese has long been a thing, and the cheeses made like this are delicious, top quality stuff. I actually know raw milk cheese makers who have been doing their job for over 40 years, winning prizes and keeping these complex, artisanal cheeses alive in a system that demands standardization, and the death of all craft because of the race to the bottom.

And you know what all of these old-school raw milk cheese makers have in common? They are obsessed with hygiene. They will clean their work surfaces, the milking equipment, double, triple clean, and then clean again for good measure. I've worked in very clean kitchens and chemical labs, and seeing them clean made me feel like a slob. Because the only way to make any raw milk cheese is to be the cleanest you could possibly be. First, for food safety reasons, but second, because if you're not clean, your cheese will taste like shit, and at that point, might as well pasteurize the milk.

Chud grifters don't respect the craft or the product enough to have this level of commitment. They will sell unsafe raw milk products because there's a demand for it, ruining the term for the people who have actually put in the work to make sure their food is safe and delicious.

I'm sorry, ASKED!? Shouldn't the FDA be making DEMANDS??

In Eating to Extinction, Dan Saladino talks about the loss of traditional cheeses because milk is now pasteurized, which means that all the indigenous bacteria are killed off, and they have to be reintroduced via commercial inoculants, which, since they're all coming from the same place, lead to homogeneity. But then you have stuff like this, where commercial milk production turns out to not be very clean and you remember there's a reason that the times have changed.

Fun fact: E.coli lives in mammalian colons. You are only ever exposed by poop or things that were exposed to poop. Most of the time when you ingest it, the ones that don't die before reaching your colon just hang out in it and you're fine. It's just the variants that come with a litany of disease-causing, immune-system-evading toolkits that cause problems.

You can generally avoid these issues by cleaning + sterilizing raw foods properly. Some things need to be sterilized upstream in the supply chain (like dairy) but others really can't be, practically (raw veggies) so you should ideally wash and then use a sterilizing solution.

explosive diarrhea to own the libs!

From the Bluesky thread

I had no idea a company could just decline to recall a toxic product!

Yes, most recalls are voluntary at the FDA's request. And most companies comply due to fear of litigation. But recently I've seen more refusals, notably by supplement manufacturers and other "health food" companies.

Our systems are so fucked. FDA is pushing FSMA 204 which is going to increase labor costs of food distribution and prices will inevitably go up, all in the name of food safety. They can't even enforce a known breakout. FFS...