The Fight for Food Rights is Dirty Business

A friend of mine sent me a link today from the  UK Daily Mail online, the headline of which was

Raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurised, study reveals.

Kimberly Hartke of Hartke is Online!, rebutted the article at the Weston A Price website, claiming the study blatantly cherry picks the data to make raw milk seem more dangerous than it really is. 

“What consumers need to realize, first of all,” said Sally Fallon Morell, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, “is that the incidence of foodborne illnesses from dairy products, whether pasteurized or not, is extremely low. For the 14-year period that the authors examined, there was an average of 315 illnesses a year from all dairy products for which the pasteurization status was known. Of those, there was an average of 112 illnesses each year attributed to all raw dairy products and 203 associated with pasteurized dairy products.

“In comparison, there are almost 24,000 foodborne illnesses reported each year on average. Whether pasteurized or not, dairy products are simply not a high risk product.”

But here’s what I know for myself.

There are actually two kinds of raw milk, which the article fails to point out and the CDC and FDA and other governing bodies gloss over and deliberately obfuscate.

Raw milk from certified raw dairies that has been produced by cows that eat their natural diet of grass and greens on pasture and is properly handled has rarely been shown to cause any illness or disease. In fact there are many studies showing just how safe properly handled raw milk is, and what a superior product it actually is.

Raw milk from factory farms producing milk that is *intended* for pasteurization on the other hand is downright deadly, and can (and does) cause disease and death. Cows raised on factory farms are held in confinement their entire lives and are fed a diet that is foreign to ruminants, consisting mostly of grains–mostly GMO soy and corn, but also other “people” foods are often mixed in like table scraps, cookies, doughnuts, other miscellaneous junk foods, as well as animal products. The cows are often sick, which means they are fed antibiotics as a matter of course, but that doesn’t stop them from getting mastitis and other infections. The udders are usually not cleaned prior to being hooked to the milking machines, and so manure as well as blood and pus from infected udders is pumped into the milk vat along with the milk. The cows themselves only have a life expectancy of 2-5 years, compared to the normal life span of a healthy cow raised on pasture of 20-25 years.

They lead a miserable life, produce milk not fit for human consumption, and in order to make it marketable, the government insists (for very good reason) that the toxic swill be boiled in order to kill all of the pathogens present. Keep in mind that boiling does not actually *remove* the manure, blood, pus, or the leftover, now dead pathogens. Even pasteurized, this now dead swill is something I would NEVER drink.

God designed milk to be a perfect food. After all, it is the sole food of baby cows until they can eat grass, just like human milk is the only food of human infants before they can handle solid foods. It is wonderful fresh, but when allowed to ferment and culture, it increases in it’s nourishing properties.

For thousands of years, humans have consumed exclusively raw milk and dairy products. They also used milk from ruminants that were raised the way God designed them: on pasture, out in the sun and rain, living happy, healthy lives eating grass, forbs, legumes and forage. God acknowledged milk’s value as a whole food when He called the Promised Land “a land flowing with milk and honey.” That milk was guaranteed raw and whole.

Milk was not pasteurized wholesale in this county until the Industrial Revolution, when cows began to be raised in confinement (in big cities like New York where they were raised IN the city) and fed (initially) swill from distilleries. The cows were sick, the people milking them were sick, and people were dying. At first, only milk from these places was required to be pasteurized. To learn more about the history of milk and pasteurization, check out The Untold Story of Milk: The History, Politics and Science of Nature’s Perfect Food by Ron Schmid.

Today’s conventional milk is a highly politicized and monetized product, controlled mainly by large corporate factory dairies, powerful lobbyists, and the government. Really raw, certified milk is produced on small family farms and accounts for a significantly small percentage of milk bought, sold, and consumed in this country. Milk produced on these small family farms have never been proven unsafe, despite the government and Big Dairies attempts to vilify it.

Small farmers who have been raising dairy cows for generations are being forced out of business, despite the fact that their milk has NEVER caused a single incidence of death or illness. Farmers like Dan Allgyer, an Amish dairyman from right over here in Lancaster whose farm was shut down by the federal government just last week. Or my friends Mary and Bart over in Hamburg whose dairy operation was shut down. They are being forced to sell off all of their dairy cows and goats. Another friend of mine who runs a certified raw milk dairy in Glenmoore, PA, is receiving constant harassment, despite perfect compliance. And certified raw milk is perfectly LEGAL to produce, buy, sell, and consume in PA– even in grocery stores. We are one of the few states to allow it. But the federal government is putting pressure on farmers even here.

There’s nothing wrong with properly handled raw milk from cows raised in the manner God intended them to live. But there is something VERY wrong with a government that would destroy families and their livelihood and prohibit its citizens from accessing and consuming healthful whole life giving foods.

To learn more about real raw milk and the fight for whole unadulterated foods, you can check out http://realmilk.com/, http://livingfood.us/milk/home.htm, and http://www.westonaprice.org/.

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