I'm close enough to the source that I know it's name - Daisy, the fact that Daisy is brown, warm and fuzzy, and that Daisy made my daughter squeal in delighted surprise when Daisy licked her head. We buy "milk rights" from a friend's cow. Close enough for ya?

The milk I drink is often less than 8 hours old (and the eggs I eat are always less than a week old).

I worked on a Dairy farm in Upstate NY when I was a kid. Knowing what I do about how I handled the milking machines, how the cows lived and how the milk was handled, I'd agree that sterilized milk is far better than real milk.

As far as "prevented untold thousands of deaths" - well, that's asking me to prove a negative, which can't be done. I can tell you that in my network of friends, I can count about 250 individuals who drink nothing but raw milk from a variety of sources, both super-local like me and from small farms and not a one has EVER gotten ill from it, much less died. Again, this is locally sourced, small-scale (under 25 cows) production and nothing at all like a milk processing plant.

Having worked with large-scale production operations in the past, I can see why you might like irradiation. On a purely logical basis, it's the most effective way I can think of to get nasties in the food killed without dumping chemicals that leave residuals in the food, no matter what. That said, I prefer a process that does not have cows up to their bellies in feces, I prefer eggs from hens that aren't under a stack of other defecating battery-caged hens, with occasionally dead hens rotting away overhead. I prefer my pork from pigs that were enjoying hickory nuts and table scraps the day before I enjoy them as bacon, not pigs fed re-processed chicken feathers and slaughterhouse drain-slurry. I think irradiation is a powerful, effective and safe tool for killing pathogens that should never have been introduced into the process in the first place. I think that the mass farming methods produce "cheaper" food in short-term costs and much. much more expensive food when you factor in "3PP" economics and some basic morality.