Michael Wale meets dairy farmer, Steve Hook who was a forerunner in production of raw milk….

Here’s a surprising fact for you. The Queen Mother and the late Queen Elizabeth II were said to have had a taste for unpasteurised milk and kept a herd of Ayshires at Windsor castle. Now it seems, the young are following their example, something that has surprised dairy farmer Steve Hook.

Hook, in partnership with his father, has battled over the years to sell the unpasteurised milk from their 80-strong herd of Friesian-Holstein on their Hailsham, West Sussex farm. But now he reports that youngsters are coming to the farm’s shop in London’s Borough Market,  and asking where they can get hold of milk that has not been pasteurised. Hook told me : “The future looks good. Consumers are becoming more involved in what is happening in the food industry. Consumers will lead to change. I have always found it hard to get the information out there. But young people are sharing information online on TikTok, and Instagram. It’s a different narrative about their food. It’s being sourced by influencers and nutritionists. They are interested in where their food comes from and how it affects them”.

CONTROVERSY OVER UNPASTEURISED MILK
There has always been controversy over the safety of unpasteurised milk. Even to exactly where and how it is sold to the public, although when I was brought up on a farm in Sussex, we used to drink the milk our cows had just produced completely untouched for breakfast everyday, and no doubt many readers do the same to this day.

But it was the Hook family who led thefirst big public battle when in 2012 they made an agreement with the giant London Oxford Street store Selfridges to sell their milk from a machine. The Food Standards Agency ruled that unpasteurised milk was only permitted to be sold to members of the public direct from the farm where it was produced. Hook claimed that as it came direct from his farm via a machine it was legal. He was charged and appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court in May 2013, only for the case to be withdrawn, after he agreed not to sell his milk on non-farm premises. Despite that experience he later was to start a relationship with the Food Standards Agency, for whom he has praise, telling me: “The policy makers who dealt with the unpasteurised milk business were open minded and very committed to having discussions with the stakeholders, the farmers, retailers and the consumers.”

Main picture: Steve Hook with one of his calves

This article extract was taken from the February 2024 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, and hear more from Michael Wale about Steve Hook’s raw milk mission you can buy the issue here.

To receive regular copies of The Country Smallholder magazine featuring more articles like this, subscribe here.

For FREE updates from the world of smallholding, sign up for The Country Smallholder newsletter here.