But does it not seem odd that raw milk can be safe enough for a whole population in one country - France - and hugely unsafe in another - America?
My question would be: why is it so unsafe in America? It is clearly not inherently unsafe, if Europeans are busy consuming it on a daily basis.
It might have something to do with our farming methods, our food distribution methods, or our food storage methods at point of sale.
However, I'd say it's unlikely the problem with milk is at the farms. Big Agra has created problems mostly in crop harvesting and meat slaughtering, but not so much in dairies at the point of production. However, our food gets ridiculously shipped, trans-shipped, and re-shipped all over this freaking huge country before it finally ends up in a store. So I'd be more likely to put it down to problems in transit. ETA: Or I could be mistaken, and the farms are just as bad as everyone else, viz clintl's link. /ETA
At the same time, it's also cultural. Americans are far more obsessed than many other nations' people with sanitariness in our food, even if it's just an illusion. I think it comes from my grandparents' generation, who grew up in the days of raw milk, saw illness and death connected with it, and then saw the Miracle of SCIENCE! and the Miracle of INDUSTRY! eliminate those problems. I recall people of that time -- those who grew up to adulthood in the 1920s -- taking enormous national pride in food industry reform, and such like. I think part of it goes back to the American obsession with NEW! as being better than OLD, and raw milk was part of the Old Ways from the Old Country, to be tossed with the rest of our Old Baggage.
But it's hard to argue against that cultural prejudice in the face of a combination of a food distribution system that is dependent on food being sanitized, and a population so ignorant that just this week the metro Boston transit authority had to issue a public reminder that there's such a thing as germs, and yes they do clean the trains every day, but they can't help it if the riders get sick because they're licking the damned hand rails or whatever it is they're doing instead of washing their hands, what -- were they raised in barns by wolves or something? (That's a slight exaggeration, but there was a tone of exhaustion in the MBTA announcement about public health on the transit system.) There's a reason why I might drink raw milk in France but would never touch it in the US.