[bad_user]

If you're living at the country side, producing your own milk is healthier, can be a good hobby while you're young and a great occupation after you're retired. Manual labor is good exercise and can be fulfilling.

But I'd probably go with goats instead.

I don't think maintaining your own email server can be very fulfilling, but hobbies are a matter of taste.

[purple_ducks]

> producing your own milk is healthier

How's that?

[bad_user]

Growing up in communism, under the Iron Curtain, we weren't finding too much milk in the eighties at the store, so our source for dairy was the country side, friends, family, grandparents, so I grew up with raw milk.

Raw milk from grass fed animals has a very different, much richer taste.

For one you can control what you feed your animals. The taste and quality of milk varies greatly depending on what they eat. You can feed them high quality grass, although in winter some cereals are fine. Anybody that drinks raw milk knows that the taste of what they eat really is reflected in the milk. E.g. if you let them graze on a field with flowers, it will have a flowery taste.

Leave raw milk on the table to turn sour and you get yogurt. It's quite good too. And you can't do that with the pasteurized milk from the store, it doesn't matter if it's whole or not, doesn't work.

Goes without saying that with high quality raw milk it's quite easy to make cheese too, which again, you can't with the milk your can find at the store.

As for why it's more healthy, the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk. There are also weak indications that people with a lactose intolerance can tolerate raw milk better than they can tolerate pasteurized milk. It might be that it contains some lactase. Although this claim you should take with a grain of salt.

And in the US at least you can argue that the pasteurized milk you find in stores is ultra-processed. Read the following article:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-fo-62752...

Note that I'm not saying that you can't find a good source of raw milk from a farm with free range, grass fed animals and great quality control. But it's harder to do so and if you're living in the city, depending on the city, next to impossible.

I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it.

And if you grow it yourself, it's much like anything else. For example tomatoes no longer taste well due to being picked too early. Grow your own tomatoes in season and the difference is night and day.

[purple_ducks]

> I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it.

I'm in Europe.

> the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk

It doesn't reduce the nutritional quality substantially though does it?

Europe Food Safety Authority advises to not drink raw unpasteurised milk due to potential health risks (http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3940.htm) echoing what many national countries have advised "at a minimum, boil the milk before drinking it to kill potentially harmful bacteria"

Any perceived nutritional gain is marginal and is far outweighed by risk of illness.

[hexane360]

There's little evidence that raw milk has higher "nutritional quality". Taste you can make an argument for, and raw milk is definitely required for yogurt & cheese if you don't want to introduce your own cultures.

I'd also note that "pasteurization" can mean different things in different countries. In Europe it's usually more extreme than in the U.S., as the milk is heated ~60 °C higher for a shorter period.

[1]: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/drinking-raw-milk#claim...