[chrisg23]

My cousin in Europe drinks milk from one of his neighbors everyday. He does heat it first, I don't know how hot it gets and if it kills as much as the pasteurization process.

The benefit is you get the freshest milk possible less than a day old, from a cow you can visit and see that it is being treated well. And since its your neighbor you can ask what they feed the cow and say no if they are feeding them newspaper or other shit.

The downside of course is you have to live on or close to a farm, or in my cousin's case be in a country where its totally normal to have animals in your yard in the city. (City outskirts to be clear, 10 minute drive to the city center from his house if that.) I got on the roof once when I visited and saw over the wall his immediately next door neighbor's hogs.

About the risk: yeah its risky but humans have always drank raw milk until very recent times and still do in many parts of the world. You don't drink or sell milk from a sick cow or if the milk doesnt pass the smell test. Drinking raw milk is risky for most people because we live in packed cities and get our milk from factory dairy farms that could be hundreds of miles away or more, and the industry has evolved around the idea of let the animal be unclean, let the animal products be unclean, and then deal with sanitizing the dirty animal products. Milk gets aggressively pasteurized killing the bad bacteria but also the good. Meat (chicken mostly) gets bleached with chlorine. And there's color preserving injections all over to both make the meat heavier by volume and keep it from changing color through natural processes like oxidation. Have you ever seen natural pork be pink for more than a few hours after its been exposed to the air? The ham is a sham.

[southernplaces7]

>He does heat it first, I don't know how hot it gets and if it kills as much as the pasteurization process.

As a dude who regularly buys raw buffalo and cow milk for pasteurizing it at home, i'm pretty sure your friend is doing exactly the same thing, meaning that he's not consuming raw milk.

There's no industrial magic to milk pasteurization. Slowly heating it in a double boiler to 63 Celsius for 30 minutes or 73 Celsius for 15 seconds (while stirring it to prevent scalding or boiling and to prevent the formation of a surface skin of fat you want to stay inside the milk) will sterilize fresh raw milk into being completely safe for drinking and etc.

Useful step if you decide to try the same: cool the milk quickly afterwards in an ice bath, so that it goes to below 20 Celsius as soon as possible. This will prevent bacterial formation during a prolonged cooling process.

EDIT: If you do pasteurize milk at home, it will still be creamier and thus tastier than most store-bought milk. The reason why: because the fat content is higher. Commercial milk producers only need to leave 3.something % fat in their milk to legally call it "whole" milk (at least wherever I've lived). They skim the rest off for other dairy products like sour cream and etc. Raw milk directly from a cow often has well over that percentage of natural fat and you get to keep it all in place.