I visited a local gourmet shop in Brooklyn to see if they carried any raw milk. They had organic cow’s milk, which was pasteurized, often at a higher temperature since it’s less in demand and requires a longer shelf life. I had to ask the gentleman behind the counter if they carried any raw milk and he told me the order comes later in the week and he’ll put one aside for me. Although raw, this shop carries only goat’s milk. Quietly walking to the back of the store behind open view, he soon returned with a plain quart size bottle of milk with a red cover and completely unlabeled. I asked, “How do I know this is raw goat’s milk?”

“You just have to trust us,” he answered. He then said it comes from a rabbi on a farm in Morristown, New Jersey. A friend of mine purchases the same milk, except she feels safer buying hers pasteurized for her children, and this rabbi sells his goat milk both raw and pasteurized.

My three-year-old loves it and I took a sip – it didn’t taste bad at all, despite the reputation goat milk and cheese has for its strong taste. One of the advantages sited for goat’s milk over cow’s milk is that a calf is much larger than a human and therefore its mother’s milk has a much higher fat content than people can tolerate. Goats, however, are built smaller and their milk is found to be most similar to human milk.

Chaya Eidel Freeman, who usually doesn’t drink cow’s milk at all because she’s lactose intolerant, tried Shmeel’s milk recently. “It didn’t bother my stomach at all,” Freeman says. “My mother used to drink milk straight from the cow,” Freeman says.

The enzyme lactase, naturally found in milk that aids with digestion, is lost during pasteurization. This probably explains why people can handle raw cow’s milk better.

Routine pasteurization began during outbreaks in the 1920s that had more to do with unsanitary farming conditions that made the milk unclean, carrying diseases such as E Coli, Campylobacter and Salmonella and not because essentially there’s a problem with raw milk.