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Have Canadian consumers lost their minds? At a time of heightened anxiety about deli meats contaminated with the deadly listeria bacterium, it boggles the imagination to think of people actively seeking out raw milk to drink. But that's exactly what's been happening at Michael Schmidt's organic farm in Southwestern Ontario.

Food safety regulations, which require all milk for sale in Canada to be pasteurized, are skirted through the legal loophole that allows people to drink raw milk from cows they own. So urbanites who don't have cows in their garages but who want to drink unpasteurized milk have bought shares in Mr. Schmidt's animals.

Cow-share programs allow people to get around pasteurization laws intended to keep consumers, especially children and pregnant women, safe from milk-borne pathogens such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria, the latest bacterium to join the average Canadian's vocabulary.

Mr. Schmidt's unflinching battle to gain the right to market his unpasteurized milk has been ongoing since his cow-lease program was set up in 1994. He was in the news again last week, facing contempt of court charges for violating a 2007 health order to stop selling raw milk.

Appearing without legal counsel, Mr. Schmidt has argued that all he sold were his milking services to the off-site cow owners. Enthusiasts say raw milk straight from a cow is pure, wholesome and natural — indeed, the perfect food, with enzymes and antibodies sure to improve health. It is recommended as perfectly safe for small children and expectant mothers, citing sterile barns and stainless steel milk containers as proof that levels of lethal bacteria are negligible as long as the product is kept in a refrigerated environment.

According to the share owners, the main barrier preventing more people from enjoying the benefits are the corporate interests of large dairy farms and their industrialized food factories, protected by a complicit public health bureaucracy. At its core, then, the fight to drink raw milk is wrapped in a broader, consumer-driven rejection of industrialized food production, with the right to choose what one consumes considered a basic civil liberty.

What is so striking about this rhetoric is how astonishingly similar it is to criticisms hurled at early 20th-century public health officials as they pushed for mandatory pasteurization in Canada. Their vision was to improve public health by reducing the incidence of a host of milk-borne diseases, such as bovine tuberculosis, scarlet fever, brucellosis and diphtheria, which are especially dangerous to infants and young children. New Brunswick's infant mortality rates in the early 1920s were the highest in Canada; for every 1,000 babies born, a staggering 150 would die before their second birthdays. Babies in the rest of the country didn't fare much better. Blamed were dairy cows with bovine tuberculosis and unsanitary milk, so teeming with deadly bacteria it was often called white poison.

While campaigns to eradicate bovine tuberculosis were slow getting under way, another solution was pasteurization, the namesake of 19th-century scientist Louis Pasteur, who devised the brilliantly simple heating process that kills micro-organisms.

But there was loud opposition to pasteurization among dairy farmers, milk distributors and the general public. Complaints varied: It was too expensive. It was government interference in citizens' diets. The new milk, run through machines, tasted bad. And it just wasn't pure or natural. So argued New Brunswick politician F. L. Potts in the 1925 election campaign, when he thundered: "If the Lord had wanted us to drink pasteurized milk, he would have put a cooler on a cow!"

Much to Potts's dismay, however, pasteurization won out. Toronto was the first city to pass mandatory pasteurization bylaws in 1915, with Saint John and Saskatoon following in 1923. It would take another 40 years for the laws to spread across Canada and be complemented with a program to eradicate bovine tuberculosis, but the impact was dramatic. Infant mortality rates plummeted and Canada gained an international reputation for its work to create a safe milk supply.

After the 1920s campaign to pasteurize Saint John's milk was over, the health minister there reflected that "as time goes on, the advantages of pasteurization will be more marked and we will wonder how the public tolerated the old order of things for so long." Surely, we will not now let fears of industrialized food lead us to chase an idealized vision of "natural" milk, right back into that old order of things.

Jane Jenkins is assistant professor of science and technology studies at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.