Updates from the Raw Milk Warfront, Plus a REAL Food-Safety Scare
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David Gumpert, author of The Raw Milk Revolution, blogs regularly over at The Complete Patient.
In recent months he’s been following closely the uptick in raids on dairies selling raw milk. The strangeness of these raids is the aggressive quality they’ve taken. Imagine a peaceful, pastoral scene. Happy Jersey heifers grazing in a field, the farm stand waiting quietly for customers. And in storms a squad of police officers with heavy-duty guns drawn, as if the milk is going to put up a fight, or as if their violent weapons were aimed at the errant bacteria that might be lurking in the bulk tank, ready to harm unsuspecting members of the public.
This is ridiculous.
From Gumpert’s most recent post,
The key to countering the Massachusett’s Department of Agricultural Resources assault is not only united resistance, but keeping in mind the big picture. MDAR wants people to be confused about the regulations so that, depending on its mood and the political pressures of the time, it can interpret the regs as it wants. It’s important to remember that the campaign against raw milk has been going on for 100 years, and gradually the government has gotten its way.
So for a time, this state or that one may have a peaceful situation. Massachusetts had a peaceful situation since the early 1990s, when the current permitting system for raw dairies was instituted. But then, at the beginning of this year, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, likely at the urging of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pressured the MDAR to crack down on raw milk distribution. Quick as a wink, MDAR went after four buying clubs. Emboldened by that success and dissension among raw milk proponents, MDAR moved on to the Ruthman herdshare last week.
The raw milk raids are no accident, or even a symptom of ignorance on the part of the government. They’re actually part of a stated federal policy goal to reduce the number of states that allow such products to be sold. This is NOT about protecting people from E. coli, this is about corporate control of food, and the end result is that our right to choose the foods we want is being stripped away.
Raw milk, like any food, can make people sick if it isn’t treated properly, but visit a small dairy that sells the stuff. Hang around for a milking and see the care that goes into sanitizing the stainless steel equipment. See the process involved in making sure nothing’s wrong with the cow’s udder or the milk. I imagine that you’d feel safe enough to drink the stuff. Go to a massive dairy where the cows never see a blade of grass, walk in their own manure all day, and suffer from mastitis (which leads to pus or somatic cells in the milk), and I imagine you wouldn’t feel the same way.
That milk should be boiled into sterility before being sold to unsuspecting consumers. The raw stuff is, more often than not, treated like the valuable food ingredient that it is.
Raw milk is not where the food safety battles need to be fought. Large producers are the real vectors for disease, and medicine-resistant strains of bacteria. Just this week millions of eggs were recalled because of a Salmonella outbreak. Think of the scale of that potential hazard! Think of all the kids eating scrambled eggs for breakfast. Millions of Salmonella eggs.
Small producers who care for the soil and the creatures they raise should not be forced to bear the burden of proof for the whole, unsustainable food industry. Theirs may just be the only food safe enough to eat.
