Insane. Anecdotally, as a drinker of raw milk (2 gallons weekly) and maker of my own raw milk cheeses, I'm well, alive, and writing this.
Scientifically, it can drive you nuts, the absolute ignorance of the FDA on the topic. Not to mention the USDA - and the fact its upper management tends to come from agribusiness concerns. Until they understand the goal is not sterilization of all bacterias and yeasts, but rather the environmental encouragement of the microbes we want in order to outcompete the ones we don't want, we're lost as to millenia of food culture. It's so exasperating.
Small case in point - don't know where it stands since I'm no longer considering taking my French-alpine cheeses professional - but a few years back, out of NY, a USDA inspector on her own decided wood shelving was "inherently unsanitary," and shut down a creamery until they retrofitted their aging room shelving with plastic or stainless. To the tune of 10's of 1000's of dollars. The idea caught fire, and all of a sudden inspectors everywhere were giddy with a new rule, completely unsupported by science (in fact, quite the opposite).
I and hundreds of others flooded anyone and everyone we would with science proving that not only was wood a sensible choice, it was the safer choice. Why? It was loaded with good microbes, strong microbes we wanted in our cheesemaking, who out-competed pathogens exceedingly well.
It's part of the larger issue - we don't need to rid the world of pathogens in our foods; we just need to make them unwelcome with the help of the natural, microscopic world.
