Spoiled or clabber?

Raw milk, yay or nay?

I was recently talking with a nutritional counselor about dairy.

When I shared that I milk a cow twice a week to bring milk home for my family, her lip actually curled and she kind of flinched backward a little bit.

Like a pro, she quickly masked the reaction.

“Like, raw?” she managed to ask with some semblance of a straight face.

Yes, I love my milk raw and credit it with saving my teeth (all in all, I’ve been breastfeeding for close to ten years, so far).

Me & our youngest baby earlier this year (2024) trying on our new onbuhimo backpack (yes, the beloved Ergo finally wore out). Also, have you ever thought about how all breastmilk is raw? I know a friend who was mixing probiotics with her milk to help her baby with thrush and was surprised when it turned to yogurt on the counter!

Anyways, since raw milk is all in the news again after RFK Jr’s speech, I thought it seemed like a good time to share more of my experience with raw milk.

I have been seeing unbelievable bot-swarms on IG, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to have a genuine conversation over here on Substack.

If you enjoy creating online, why not start your own ‘stack?

I’ve been publishing here for 3 years now ←(click link to join my anniversary AMA) and I continue to find Substack a lovely place to share written and multimedia creations.

Raw, grassfed antibiotic-free dairy can be a powerful step toward health & local food sustainability when done right and for some people

Care of the cow brings good fortune.

Source: “Li, the Clinging, Fire“ from The I Ching or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm

In my recent posts in this Local Food Systems series, I shared about the benefits of grass-fed dairy from the perspective of the cow’s melanin being charged by sunlight during her long hours outdoors.

Pasture grazing also limits the amount of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) grass-fed cattle consume because grassfed cows are not relying on imported grain eaten out of season.

I think deuterium is something only a few people are thinking about right now since it is only beginning to reach the awareness when it comes to human health. But deuterium affects the animals in our food supply, too!

All quantum health principles that apply to humans apply to livestock, too, such as benefitting from a local seasonal diet low in imported foods and high in unfiltered sunlight.

Deuterium is “heavy” hydrogen molecules, with an extra neutron in the nucleus. Neutrons add weight, but don’t affect the electrical balance of the atom. This is like having the same strength, but twice as much weight. So you can see how even though this is at a really small scale, deuterium can add up to big consequences in biochemistry!

The two girls in the middle of the gallery above are the daughter and granddaughter of Molly, the Jersey cow in the milking tutorial I will link to later in this post.

Why is raw milk so scary?

Many people are really afraid of raw dairy—and if not “afraid” maybe I could say squeamish.

It’s true for me, too! The first few days of milking a new animal, I usually can’t get myself to drink her milk, either.

Intimate is the best adjective I can think of to describe what it’s like to milk an animal and feed the milk to your family.

Milking is Smelly. Warm. Mammalian.

In good time, though, the gratitude flows, and eventually you come to love each animal and her particular aura, which, yes, includes smell. But there’s so much more to it.

From a circadian perspective, milking, especially in an open barn, is an extremely powerful way to entrain your circadian rhythms each morning and evening.

Rain or shine, in fair weather or poor, when you are committed to milking, you have to get out there with your herd, and this is actually really healthy for your body’s rhythms.

The habit, the schedule, and the light and temperature exposure all work together to entrain your rhythms across the days and seasons.

Animals as individuals

When you’re there with a dairy herd in real time, each animal is an individual.

They have names, temperaments, quirks.

You know their offspring by name, too (in fact, said youngsters may be right nearby, vocalizing their impatience at how long it is taking for them to get their mama back!).

If it’s a longstanding farm, you may even know her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and sires.

This is how it was with the first Molly I ever milked, who was the herd queen of a flock of Alpine-Nigerian Dwarf goat crosses.

Queen Molly

Yes, many were probably turned off by this raw milk post before reading, and now we probably lost a few more by opening up the conversation not just to cow milk, but now raw goat milk, too!

Goat dairy? Really. Yuck, right?

I know, and I used to think those things, too.

It turns out, dairy is a tradition in many parts of the world, and from many mammals.

If you’ve never been up close and personal to milking, here’s a quick POV I taught earlier this year with my friend Stacie:

Milking Tutorial

But what I really wanted to talk about today is the raw milk bacteria.

Something I didn’t know before getting involved with raw dairy is how obvious it is to know if raw milk is spoiled.

I definitely felt the fear when I first got started:

What if there was bad bacteria in the raw milk and I couldn’t tell?

I felt this fear of raw milk when I started picking up shares from a local herd share I found on realmilk.com a decade ago.

I felt this fear of raw milk when I agreed to house-sit for a friend with goats and learned how to milk them, store the milk, and make cheese with the extra.

I felt this fear of raw milk when I brought home my first goats.

Since I sold my goats for a move a couple years ago, I had to find a new source of raw milk for my family in our new location, and guess what?

I felt this fear of raw milk all over again.

All this is to say: I get it with this whole fear of raw milk thing.

At the same, time, I’ve been drinking raw milk through all my motherhood experiences with 4 children since 2014–including through my pregnancies.

I have never experienced or observed any digestive upset in my family due to raw milk except for my husband, who cannot tolerate any uncultured milk whatsoever, whether raw or pasteurized.

In adults, the continued production of lactase to digest unfermented dairy is a hereditary trait and I shared more about that in this post here.

Which is why dairy is a sustainable & healthy practice for some, but not all.

The truth is, most of us spend very little time with agricultural products in their raw forms whatsoever, let alone animal ones.

Baby was pretty patient about allowing us women to brain onions.

Side story: I was recently on the Quantum-ly Healthy podcast and we were scheduled to record in the afternoon after one of my farm mornings at Dandelion Field Alpaca. It was the day to harvest onions, and we brought in scallions, reds, whites, yellows, sweet walla wallas, and the last of the white and red pearls! Wow, what a spicy and fun time! I almost panicked when I realized it was later than I thought (time flies when you’re having fun, as the saying goes!). Thankfully, Andeea and Laura were gracious with me coming in a little late and sun/onion crazy 🧅! Here’s where you can listen in and somewhere in the middle we chatted for quite a bit about why local food and NOT spending all my time in intellectual & computer work matters so much to me.

About the bacteria in raw milk

Did you know humans with the ability to digest dairy as adults (not everyone can) tend to have better Vitamin D status when living in polar climates?

I think that is just so interesting, especially since milk is thought to be low in Vitamin D and in “need” of fortification.

Since Vitamin D is so important for healthy pregnancy, I think that connection with dairy tolerance and Vitamin D is really interesting.

But what is even more interesting is the connection to folate, and this connection to folate gets at the connection to the bacteria in milk.

Ages ago, I also shared about how the narrative around folate doesn’t make sense.

So much so that I wrote 3 posts trying to get to the bottom of it.

What folate status seems to come down to is

a) gut health

b) circadian rhythms

c) living at a similar latitude as your ancestors

and NOT folate intake.

Whenever I hear it’s impossible to eat enough food to get your RDA of a nutrient, I suspect there is something missing in the story.

With relation to today’s post about the bacteria in raw milk—and this has really big implications for our efforts at reducing the incidence of neural tube defects—the beneficial bacteria from raw milk are among the very ones that produce folate for us!

And this also gives yet another reason to avoid commercial dairy and their antibiotic regimes, which may even be contributing to the incidence of neural tube defects in humans¹ via contaminated commercial dairy and contaminated water supplies from the runoff of commercial dairy operations administering antibiotics to their herds.

Only 50 of 855 participants (5.8%) intentionally used antibiotics and such use showed no significant association with neural tube defect (NTD) risk. However, 14 of 15 placental antibiotics were detected in 378 of 379 subjects (99.7%) and multivariable logistic analysis indicated that high levels of placental macrolides were significantly associated with increased NTD risk. Multi-pollutant exposure analysis suggested an increase in NTD risk with an increase in exposure to a mixture of placental antibiotics, among which macrolides were the most important contributor. In addition, the level of placental macrolides was positively correlated with the intake frequency of milk. Finally, mothers who drank river, well, or pond water had higher levels of placental macrolides than those who drank only tap water.

Conclusions

Intentional antibiotic use during early pregnancy may not be associated with NTDs, while inadvertent antibiotic exposure (IAE) during pregnancy is associated with higher NTD risk in offspring. Macrolides are crucial risk factors. Milk, and river, well, or pond water may be important sources of IAE.

Source: Qianhui, C., Yongyan, C., Jufen, L. et al. (2024).

These antibiotics disturb the gut microbiome which is supposed to be producing folate!

This is what I found out in my folate research seeking to disprove the narrative that it is impossible to meet the pregnancy RDAs for folate without supplementation.

The folate question and why we face such a big problem with it now makes even more sense when you learn raw dairy from farms that do not use antibiotics (like what our ancestors, for those of us who can digest dairy as adults, had) raises the profile of gut microbes that produce folate²³. Raw, antibiotic-free and grassfed dairy is very hard to find if you don’t happen to live on or near a small farm.

In this observational study, we investigated the effect of a dietary change on the gut microbiome of participants who undertook a 12-week residential cookery course on an organic farm, where the majority of food consumed and used for cooking, was locally-sourced, seasonal and produced using organic methods. Of particular interest was the use of unpasteurised milk and dairy products obtained from a small herd of Jersey cows on the farm. Most participants had not been using any unpasteurised dairy prior to the course and all used these products to some degree throughout their stay. We found that the main change in terms of microbiome composition was a dramatic increase in the participants’ Lactobacilli between pre-course and post-course faecal samples. This increase was strongly associated with the participants’ intake of unpasteurised milk and dairy products. In addition, a positive change was noted in relation to microbiome metabolites with an increase in valerate and, to a lesser extent not quite reaching statistical significance, propionate.

Source: Butler, et al. (2020)

So, while I don’t think raw dairy is right for everyone, if you are a mama whose ancestors lived in a dairy-culture with access to a small herd that abstains from antibiotic use, that raw dairy can be a nutritional powerhouse for you and your family!

Starting your own dairy culture

Yes, you can buy commercial starter (I recommend kefir, because it is particularly easy and also has an incredible nutritional profile thanks to both bacterial and yeast strains).

Or, here’s how to collect a culture unique to your dairy, with thanks and credit to the Dougherty’s at One Cow Revolution.

Like I mentioned before, it’s actually very easy to tell the difference between milk that has spoiled, and milk that has soured (clabber):

Your dairy ruminant is the perfect person to start a new clean culture for you, and the process is simple.

Wash a widemouthed mason jar—a pint jar will do—in hot soapy water and rinse well; then sanitize by pouring it full of boiling water from the kettle and letting it sit a minute. Wash and sanitize the lid as well; two-part lids are better than those white plastic ones they make now, which have ridges on the inside that are difficult to get really clean. Drain the jar upside down for a couple of minutes and then put the lid on, and take it down to the dairy with you when you go down to milk.

Now bring the cow (goat, sheep) up for milking and clean her udder well, as you normally would do before milking, making sure to brush off any dust or chaff on the hair around her udder, drying carefully, and stripping two squirts out of each quarter. Take the lid off your jar (set it carefully on a clean towel or somewhere else where it won’t pick up any contaminants) and milk directly into your clean jar until it is half full of milk. Then, put the lid back on, set the jar aside, and finish milking the cow. When you take that jar of clean, fresh milk up to the kitchen and put it in a warm place for twenty-four hours, it will grow you a nice garden of thermophilic lactobacilli, lots of strains, all specially fitted to your cow, dairy, and forage. If you put it in a mid-temperature place, like on the counter, you will emphasize its lovely mesophilic cultures. These will be very nice for cheese making; what’s left over you can stick in the refrigerator if you’re not going to refresh it every day or so.

To keep our cultures active, we always take the first (hence cleanest) couple of tablespoons off for a new jar of culture, growing it, of course, in a clean, sanitized jar with a clean, sanitized lid, and with our newest raw milk. Refreshed in this way, we find that our cultures actually improve over time, the best fitted lactobacilli coming to dominate the culture—until we forget to refresh it for a while, or we run out of yogurt and eat our starter up.

Source: The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management by Shawn and Beth Dougherty (2016)

So there you have it! Without the antibiotic residue and grain (ie, inflammation) of commercial dairy, grassfed raw dairy actually cultures itself quite easily without turning putrid. It’s actually more of an effort to prevent this process if you are attached to sweet milk.

One final little recipe that I find helpful is clabber cheese… which is simply after you make your ferment, to strain it in a colander through butter muslin or several layers of cheesecloth to the desired consistency. A half-hour to an hour will make it like commercial yogurt, and overnight will make it like ricotta (adding a weight will make it even more dense).

Then you can add a little sweetener and sugar (lemon zest or vanilla make lovely additions) for the children, or make it savory with salt, pepper and herbs for yourself, or use it (hide it) in cooking for folks who don’t want to know about your dairy experiments making it to the dining table.

The whey can be sipped, used in soups, fed to pets, or used to culture vegetables.

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Share your dairy story in the comments! Are you a raw milk family? Were you afraid of it when you got started? What do you do with your extra milk during the high-flow season?

1. Qianhui, C., Yongyan, C., Jufen, L. et al. (2024). Inadvertent antibiotic exposure during pregnancy may increase the risk for neural tube defects in offspring. Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety; Volume 275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2024.116271

2. Butler, M. I., Bastiaanssen, T. F. S., Long-Smith, C., Berding, K., Morkl, S., Cusack, A. M., Strain, C., Busca, K., Porteous-Allen, P., Claesson, M. J., Stanton, C., Cryan, J. F., Allen, D., & Dinan, T. G. (2020). Recipe for a Healthy Gut: Intake of Unpasteurised Milk Is Associated with Increased Lactobacillus Abundance in the Human Gut Microbiome. Nutrients, 12(5), 1468. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12051468

3. Rossi, M., Amaretti, A., & Raimondi, S. (2011). Folate production by probiotic bacteria. Nutrients, 3(1), 118–134. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu3010118