For people who have never seen a cow I’ll explain:

Cows are covered in cow shit. All the time. Even clean cows who get bathed regularly have cow shit on them. But listen to me. Normal dairy cows are not getting baths. They have cowshit on them, the splash back from their cowshit gets on udders. So does cow urine. Also listen mud gets on cow udders, cow hair, bugs, and other nasties will get in the milk. But most importantly: cow shit. There is so much cow shit involved with cows even in the cleanest and healthiest dairies. Cows shit a LOT. Also for some reason cows like to lie down in cowshit. You will have a whole pasture with no cowshit and they will find the most disgusting pile of cowshit you’ve ever had the misfortune to smell and they lie right in it.

When cows were milked by hand this was a problem- when cows are milked with machinery this is a problem. Cows are animals and they shit. A lot. And it’s going to get into the milk. And listen. You do not want to drink cow shit germs in milk. And milk can be filtered all you want and it is- but germs? gotta cook those fuckers out. So you don’t get sick from the cowshit.

TLRD: cow shit.

Also, the whole "unnatural process of pasteurization" is just raising the temperature to a certain point and holding it there-- how long depends on how high you do it. (In large quantities, this is often about 145F/63C for a half hour, but if you're working on a small batch, you can go for fifteen seconds at 161F/72C.

That's it. No weird chemicals. No sinister udder technique.

To be clear, farmers do wash and sterilise cow teats and milking equipment with iodine, they're not just squeezing sewage into your milk or anything. But it only takes one overlooked teat or little wrinkle or distracted worker to get bacterial contamination in the milk, and dangerous bacteria really, really love eating milk. All farming is messy; the occasional slug trapped in your lettuce or bug crushed into your flour won't hurt you, but all the stuff that babies love in milk is also stuff that harmful bacteria loves, and under ideal conditions a salmonella or e. coli population can double every 20 minutes. In the milk, it's gonna double slower, but it's gonna double a lot faster than you'd like, especially since the milk you buy is going to be between many hours and many weeks old depending on where you get it. All milk should be assumed to be contaminated until pasteurised. Buying raw milk from a dedicated farmer who knows and bathes all of her cows and milks them by hand and got that milk that very morning is safer than buying raw factory milk, but in the same way that driving 3 drinks over the alcohol limit is safer than driving 5 drinks over the limit. Just get the pasteurised milk.

Hey guys, with so much love, and as someone with an actual English degree:

Please just use Sparknotes if you're going to do this. I get it. I do. But chatgpt or other genAI shit doesn't actually know what's important for you to know, and in some cases it might fully make shit up. Use sparknotes. Failing that, talk to someone who did read it. I'm begging.

Tactical reloading of things that don’t need tactical reloads

I lost it at the toaster and couldn't make it past the smoke detector before reblogging

This is so satisfying to watch—