“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”
…
“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens.
I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them.
Later that day, I learned otherwise.
“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”
Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.
I came to a similar conclusion from a completely different angle. If the industry standard is for homogenization and pasteurization, then those provide a nice barrier to contaminated milk hitting shelves. With that in place, a dairy can operate with some dirt/filth in play and easily ship some unclean product. Remove that barrier, but don’t change practices at the dairy, and we get the problem we have now.
Europe gets away with shipping raw product, probably because the standards at the diary are higher since there’s nothing downstream to clean up any mistakes.