Even as outbreaks involving raw milk continue to mount, the movement is attracting followers of faith-based food safety into the fold.

In New Hampshire, Kathie Nunley started milking her back yard cow, Dixie, six years ago. But a Jersey girl like her produces up to seven gallons of milk a day, "So we had to offer the extra to our community," says Nunley. "What we didn’t know is everyone wanted it."

Even with three cows, Nunley has a wait list of more than 70 raw milk customers as more and more people want to know where their food comes from.

"The closer our food is to the way it started the better off we are," says long time customer Pinky Rines. "Tastes better, is healthier."

NECN reports New Hampshire stands to loosen the rules on who can sell raw milk. A bill on the Governor’s desk would allow backyard dairies like Nunley’s to sell up to 20 gallons a day without a license. That cap is currently set at five gallons a day.

Same story in Chicago where the Sun-Times reports Max Kane, director of a Chicago food-buying club, said that raw milk eases the excruciating gastrointestinal distress he’s suffered all his life. Last winter, Kane rallied a disgruntled coterie of raw milk revolutionaries in Chicago’s Independence Park.

Several in this group of “mothers and others” defied federal law by transporting 100 gallons of raw milk from Wisconsin to Chicago.

Chicago mother Elise Kloster brought her children to the event in Independence Park, where they enjoyed treats of raw milk and cookies offered to assembled champions of the unpasteurized.

Kloster prefers raw milk because “you know it’s whole, so it’s really very flavorful and rich-tasting, and it changes with the season, depending upon what the cows are eating. Some batches are very mild; others have much more farm-flavor.”

David Hammond concludes by proclaiming, “it’s our natural right to consume whatever the hell we want.”

Except parents are supposed to look out for kids.

A mother told OPB News in Oregon her two-year-old has been hospitalized for 28 days after drinking raw milk connected to an E. coli outbreak, and she recommends not giving children milk that hasn’t been pasteurized.

She had strokes early on and pressure in the brain and most recently had a surgery to remove some dead bowel and colon. And now has a ostomy, that will get reversed in six to eight weeks."

In the last few weeks as many as 21 cases of food-borne illnesses have been traced to raw milk from a farm outside of Willsonville, Oregon.

A table of raw milk related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/rawmilk.