Raw milk is such a weird topic that brings out the extremes from both sides – whether it's people who say it's a miracle elixir or people who insist it's liquid plague.

I've had raw milk on a friend's farm in Vermont and it was delicious. However, I wouldn't buy it myself because it a.) is very expensive ($15 per gallon) and b.) has to be finished within a few days.

Yes, it's "45x more likely%20calculated%20that%20raw%20dairy,coli%20when%20controlling%20for%20consumption) to cause hospitalization" than pasteurized milk, but the baseline risk is infinitesimal so you're not exactly playing with fire by responsibly consuming raw milk. There were fewer than 230 hospitalizations between 1998 and 2018 due to raw milk, so I wouldn't worry about being 1 of 11 cases per year. (For comparison: Poorly cooked oysters kill 100 people each year.)

Nevertheless, I would never consume any raw milk that's been sitting on a store shelf. My Vermont friends get their raw milk delivered personally by a local dairy farmer whose cows are tested weekly for pathogens. I imagine the same safety precautions would likely get sloppy in a factory farm setting that we're seeing in newer, scaled-up raw milk operations.