How many times do human hands touch milk between the time it leaves the cow until it reaches your table?

Answer 1

Using modern milking techniques and equipment, human hands should not come into contact with the milk. Milk is transferred through pipes from the cow (milking cluster) to processing (pasteurisation / sterilisation) to the packaging material.

Even before modern milking techniques and equipment hands rarely touched the milk. When milking a cow by hand, you don't get your hands covered in milk -- and there's no reason to touch it while pouring it from the milk bucket to a larger container.

Answer 2

Here's a general guide to the process that gets milk to your table. Count the hands that touch the milk. On the farm, someone has to milk the cow or hook up the automated milker (though some milkers are fully automated units). The milk goes into a Plumbing system and into a tank, and from there, it is pumped to a tanker. Hoses are hooked to a tanker, it is filled and then it off loads through more hoses at the plant. The milk is pumped to various areas where different amounts of butterfat are centrifuged out. Then its off to the pasteurizer and on to get a bit of cooling. In packaging, the milk is put into containers. None of what happens in the plant involves people handling milk or even the individual packages. Packages go into crates and into the cooler, and this is also highly automated. People don't manually move individual containers or even the crates; it's done by machine. It is more efficient to use a machine, and the use of machines greatly reduces injuries to workers, particularly the "lifting and carrying" injuries. From the cooler, a machine loads the crates into a truck to be delivered to an intermediate cooled storage location or to go right to the store. The milk crates are then pulled and put in the store. This is often done by machine (like a forklift), but a person with a hand truck can move crates of product, and usually without touching the containers. The containers are not handled individually up to this point unless something "weird" happens. There's no reason to, and it is inefficient to do so. In the store, someone stocks the individual containers. You know what happens next. You grab the containers, and then the checker and box person move them (unless you use the automated check out). Then it's all you. The number of hands that actually touch the milk are very few, and there isn't even much touching of the package, except to shelve it, check it out, and bag it. You might consider giving your milk containers a brief wash on the outside before you put them in the chiller. Make no mistake that testing of samples is done at a number of places along the route the milk takes to get out the door of the plant, but this is a fairly clean process. Milk flowing through a pipe is sampled through a little valve. Or out of a large container with a dipper. Very few hands come into contact directly with the milk. But cheese? That's an entirely different story.

Answer 3

Zero. Milk does not get touched by human hands because of the possibility of contaminating it. Milk is milked from the cow by an automatic milking machine. The milk is then transported through various pipelines to the holding tank where pastuerization takes place. When the milk truck comes, a hose is inserted into the tank, which sucks the milk from the tank to the milk truck. The truck then transports the milk to the factory, unloads its load there into another holding tank, and automated machines are used to separate butterfat and other consituents into dairy products like ice cream, yogurt, butter, and whipping cream. The machines make and package the dairy products together, and then people at the end of the line have to package these up in bulk to send them to the grocery store and put them in the dairy section of the store.

Answer 4

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