A wolf on the Dutch region ‘the Treek’ and a child who has been bitten. Imagine it was your child. A chicken egg from your own garden, where your chickens are free to roam, and your PFAS intake rises to dangerous levels. Imagine you have free-range chickens. In South Tyrol (Italy), a child has become seriously ill from an STEC infection caused by raw milk cheese; just one child, but imagine if it were your child. For decades, hundreds of small mountain cheese makers have survived, but now mountain cheese is considered dangerous. The parents affected are using what happened to their child to bring about a change in the consumption of raw milk cheese.
What would I do if I were the parent of a young child? Would I still give him or her raw milk and raw milk products? Would I still go for a walk in the areas where wolves are living nowadays? Will the government take measures? How will decisions be made?
When fear reigns supreme
“Fear is a poor counsellor”, as the saying goes. If you let fear guide you, life becomes unbearable, impossible to live. Danger lurks everywhere and you can be robbed in any city. You can’t go anywhere anymore, you distrust every food, fellow human being or park, and you withdraw. When we believe that we are entitled to a risk-free society, the joy of living, the enjoyment of flavours or the thrill of doing something crazy disappears.
Wolves, PFAS or STEC cause fear. The world is changing and as modern humans we no longer have a real relationship with nature and the dangers it brings. We have forgotten how to live in a natural way and have become spoiled in our urban environments where supermarkt food is always available and there are no wolves to be found. Risks are part of society, and you need to understand them as well as possible, know where they lie, so that you can then live life to the fullest. But above all, we are not very good at dealing with death or risks. We sometimes believe we are immortal and that we will all live to be 90 or 100 without any problems.
What choices would I make?
At first glance, the problem lies between the general and the personal narrative. The general narrative is rational and anonymous, dealing with risks and opportunities, while the personal narrative is about your child or family being affected. We know that people die every day in traffic accidents or from eating contaminated food. We are aware of the risks of flying or driving, but we see them as general risks that will not affect our family. When something does happen, the impact is bigger if it happens close to home, if you know the family where a child has died, or if you know the farmer who caused the risk.
A second problem lies in the tendency to generalise risks too quickly, or to dismiss a problem with one-liners. Because of the bubbles we live in and simplified news messages, too little attention is paid to the background of risk and death. The recent outbreak (July 2025) of listeriosis caused by French soft cheeses was discussed very little on the Dutch NOS-news website. If you take the trouble to look at the French Ministry of Health website, you will see, first of all, which factory is involved, that the cheese is made from pasteurised milk, but also that one of the two fatalities had numerous underlying health conditions. As with COVID deaths, the question is always whether you ‘die from COVID or die with COVID’. During the COVID pandemic, underlying chronic conditions were an important factor in whether you died from COVID. This is relevant information that contributes to your fear of a disease or of a potentially contaminated food product. Did the Listeria infection push a seriously ill person over the edge, or were they already at the end of their life? It is often not mentioned, but it is relevant information if I want to take the risk myself.
Dealing with…
…PFAS. Although I have no idea where PFAS is processed or used, there is a fundamental distrust of everything produced by the chemical industry. Perhaps my studies in ecology and toxicology have contributed to this, as I know more than the average citizen. There is a critical reluctance towards anything that is unnatural, man-made, especially if it comes from the chemical industry. Eldrin, dieldrin and DDT are the persistent chemical precursors of PFAS, so we had already been warned. Due to its fluorine compounds, PFAS is even more persistent than those substances; we can hardly get rid of it anymore. So should we want to use it? Or release it into the environment?
…wolves. I don’t know the nature of wolves, I’m not sure how we should deal with such large predators in overcrowded regions. In other countries where bears, wolves or lynxes still live, people are much better informed about how to behave when they encounter them. We still have a lot to learn about how to deal with such animals.
…raw milk. STEC in milk and cheese, Listeria recently found in pasteurised cheese, these are risks. If you want to avoid the risks completely, you should stop drinking raw milk (STEC) or eating cheese (Listeria). But even pasteurisation is not always the answer to reach a zero-risk. Large, but rare food outbreaks have been reported after consuming pasteurised dairy products. The desire to avoid any residual risk (zero tolerance) is motivated by the desire to protect the last sick, elderly person. In the case of STEC, it is also about protecting young children. It requires knowledge on the part of consumers and livestock farmers about how to safely consume or produce such raw milk products. Warnings on packaging, such as ‘not intended for children under 5 or 10 years of age’, help to alert people to potential risks. Training for livestock farmers and cheese makers on how to produce raw milk dairy products as safely as possible is essential. There are different conditions for producing safe raw milk dairy products than for pasteurised dairy products. More attention needs to be paid to the cold chain, but especially to hygiene during milking when it comes to STEC. Above all, a higher selling price is needed, a different valuation of the product, as the livestock farmer has to make more effort to guarantee safety as much as possible. Given the taste, the richness of the cheese culture and the potential health benefits of raw milk products, I would take the risk. If the farmer can demonstrate that they work hygienically, I would also take the risk of giving raw milk to my (grand)children.
