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So far, thirteen lambs, and four bottle babies. Kind of eating up my available posting energy. This is my life right now.
It's a pretty good life.
For some reason, Facebook is refusing to post videos from this account no matter what I do. So, sorry about the link, but it seems to be the only way to give you a glimpse of the lambs.
www.instagram.com/p/DW4gF2qDqa3/
22 hours ago
I've been writing about raw milk over on Substack. Come visit.
susanwisebauer.substack.com/p/raw-milk-part-two
3 weeks ago
It's interesting to me that people keep saying "What about lettuce??" because I am also unenthused about bagged lettuce at the moment, given the Republican war on food safety. Parents should really consider reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" with their kids. I fear safety regulations around our food have been the victims of their own success and we'll be experiencing the full consequences--and subsequent reawakening--soon.
My earliest memories of my grandmother’s kitchen in the 60s include a counter with a pasteurizing machine. They were dairy farmers until my grandfather died and then just had a few cows for personal use.
Psss…I think you meant “infections” not injections in that last little bit, just clarifying not knit picking. 😊
I read both pieces and understand the bigger picture you are getting at (including the burden placed on mothers to meet an impossible standard of "best/perfect" for their kids). But I do want to push back on one important part. Yes, many children died from milk-borne disease. But pasteurization was only one side of fixing the problem. Equally important was the massive effort to vaccinate the cattle and eliminate most of those diseases. For example, tuberculosis being spread via milk was a huge problem. But TB has been eliminated in cattle in most of the US. In my state, there have been no cases of TB in cattle since the 1980s. American cattle have been free of brucellosis (which causes undulant fever) since the 1930s. You can't catch a disease from cattle that they no longer carry. And we also know much more about contamination and germs now. Today's raw milk is very different that that of the 1800s.
As the Alexander Fleming example shows us, anecdotes can be a great place to look for clues to the next breakthrough in science. Anecdotes are a kind of data. It is entirely possible that something about raw milk is contributing to the outcomes its proponents are claiming. This "something" may have to do with microbial burden or retained enzyme activity, but it may not. It could also have to do with its higher price or funny taste. Whatever it is, if there is something there, that would tell us important things about how the world works--and we should want to know what it is. That said, I have no plans to drink raw milk ever.
I remember drinking milk at a friend's house growing up. They had dairy cows. They also had this countertop contraption that pasteurized the milk before they drank it.
Oh look…. Rage bait for engagement. I’ll happily teach my children from SOTW, but that’s the extent of my belief in your “expertise”.
The author lost me at the Leanna Wen quote. I remember Dr. Wen from her stint as a Covid Expert. No doubt Susan Wise Bauer was an avid practitioner of #soundscience during those years, when we were given all those Dr. Wen-endorsed reasons for staying 6 feet apart and wearing flimsy cloth masks outside. The bottom line is that SWB is a credentialist and expertphile and has a deep-seated bias against common sense. She probably believes that eating beef is bad for the planet as well.
The comments are going to be fun. Grab a bag of popcorn 🍿 .
More people die from bad lettuce than from raw milk. We started drinking raw milk about two years ago, and my kids are rarely sick anymore. I don’t have a control group of course, but it is interesting!
For some of us, drinking raw milk wasn't a choice, it was just that we lived on dairy farms and that was what there was. In England then only law involved is that you can only sell it direct from the farm with no middle man, so we
Decentralized food systems like raw milk require the individual to take on the risk management roles usually handled by large-scale regulatory bodies.
I was raised on a farm and we even pasteurized the goat milk we collected by milking before feeding it back to the babies (kids) because it cut down on the diseases that were passed on to them through it.
I have my own cow and the milk is so dang delicious! Can never go back to homogenized and pasteurized!
I only drank raw milk hitchhiking through Cuba, it was too warm, grossed me out. However, given the situation, I think that was the least of my worries
I continue to be so impressed by your honesty, integrity, and willingness to offer your scholarship at the (possible) expense of your readers/business.
It's always interesting to see what people do and how they act when their eyes see something they don't like or that they disagree with.
I appreciate your thoughts on this. Well done!
Excellent, Susan! Keep writing and giving the truth!
Very enlightening! Thank you
So glad you are doing this, fighting the good fight. Thank you! It is very hard for folks to discredit anecdotal evidence on their own, especially because anecdotes often come in the form of narrative, via sentimental and striking stories, and they touch us not at the level of rationality but rather at the level of emotion.
Better yet, do some reading on the reason we ended up with pasteurized milk.
If lettuce were given the same scrutiny as raw milk, we wouldn’t be serving uncooked vegetables in restaurants. Think about it. Why is raw milk singled out so much? It wasn’t just the tuberculosis issue—it was also the very real abuses you didn’t mention, where adulterated “milk” (often mostly chalk and water) was sold to the urban poor. But that problem is long past. Now we just have laws that burden any small farmer impossibly so- I am not surprised at the push-back, and I hope it succeeds. In Oklahoma I couldn’t even get non-homogenized milk. In Nevada I could at least buy it pasteurized. In South Carolina it was available but insanely expensive. In Missouri I can finally get it through cottage laws. I personally can’t tolerate homogenized milk, and I suspect many people would do better without it. I’d love that genuinely studied by non-biased agencies, but it likely won’t be. And while I don’t love politicians telling people what to do, when the “healthy” school lunches I see consist of fried meat, white bread, and ultra-processed snacks, maybe what we really need is for the medical community to take a harder look at what actually supports long-term health.
Raw milk is excellent, store bought milk tastes like chemicals for some reason.
I haven't read it because I don't live in the US so the obsession with politics isn't relevant to me. I will say that all 7 of my kids are being raised on Raw milk. We go through about 30L a week, could easily use more. I absolutely love it and my kids thrive on it. In terms of illness, it's much like anything, know your source, do they test the milk daily? Etc.... Getting Listeria, Salmonella etc from a supermarket lettuce is a common occurrence so unless those that are the loudest about its dangers are also advocating for the banning of lettuce or cooked chicken then they are being hypocrites
I love this piece by Walt Hunter--both his reflections on how his students are now reading, and the changes he's made in the writing requirements for his course.
Generously excerpted below, but do use the gift link to read the whole essay.
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I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?...I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them...
Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that.
To give the students time to read, I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a “writing” class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed “flash essays,” with prompts I gave the same day. No trudging back from the library with 10 pages on Woolf in the special season of Cleveland weather we call “stupid cold.” Long, research-based essay assignments had always worked well for the top students in the class, the ones who were already trained to write. But I’ve rarely seen, over the course of my career, the kind of development I hoped for in the majority of students whom I asked to write that way...
When we started Walden, plenty of students were turned off by Thoreau’s long-winded musings on the real-estate market in New England. Two classes later, Thoreau was a friend for life. His timeless needling felt timely: “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep half our life.” Despite his flight to the woods, Thoreau was more easily distracted than any of us—by birdsong, by a train whistle, by the sound of ice cracking. He could barely sustain a single thought without jumping to an unrelated idea. Walden is a book that freely indulges in distraction—not to dull our senses, but to keep ourselves awake, curious, delighted, enraged. Thoreau’s world sends us constant notifications, and by doing so, asks us to reject the “vain reality” where we have been “shipwrecked.” The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up...
[T]the whole notion of having to defend literature or the humanities in the first place may have us wrong-footed. It’s not only what you learn from reading Moby-Dick—notwithstanding Melville’s extensive knowledge of 19th-century whaling—but what you are doing when you are reading Moby-Dick. You are neither learning a transferable skill nor escaping from the world’s demands that you do. You are not word-maxxing or optimizing information for efficiency. You are engaged in a singular practice, one with its own primary justification.
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Stop Meeting Students Where They Are
www.theatlantic.com
What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.3 weeks ago
“With its own primary justification”—YES!!!
I always thought the idea was to meet them where they are, but then guide them where they need to be, not to just let them stay where they are.
Thank you so much for posting this! I've been given a position to teach literature and composition at a local co-op and the current teacher looked at some of the books I've chosen so far and stated, "Oh, you'll never get them to read all of that." This just happened yesterday and I've been doubting myself since. I've also been praying all morning. I open up Facebook, and here you are, still providing me wisdom on this homeschool path since I picked up TWTM when my son was 4. 😊
This is a good article, I enjoyed it. I have been asked to be classical lead at my small school and I would like to see more reading in literature class. In my history class we trounce through texts, we have little debates in class, and we do our best to put ourselves in a time not our own to understand decisions made, actions avoided, and question from a hindsight view. My students complain my class is so hard, but than most are in the 90's--and I am a difficult grader. The students can do so much more, and when they know, after experience, that they can do it, that there is a joy in the purpose of knowledge--the reading and the conversations never cease.
Attention is a finite resource that requires structural protection. By removing the friction of long-form, take-home assignments, the instructor reallocated cognitive energy back to the primary goal of deep reading. Systems
