I’m always amazed about controversies over things that you wouldn’t imagine could be so controversial.
When I was pregnant, I read Jennifer Block’s Pushed in which she explores the world of obstetric care. She unveils the impossible situations of doctors caught between a patient’s well-being and pressure from insurance companies who are motivated by slanted court cases. She shows how, despite the more favorable situation of giving birth with a midwife, home birth can be unnecessarily risky in rare cases. I think her book mostly stresses the fact that the government should not have so much say in how we give birth. Laws about these matters put women in bad situations that put their own health or their baby’s health at risk. In some rare cases, women receive court orders that they can’t push the baby out, but must give birth by c-section. Doctor’s orders are judge’s orders too.
While most women may not encounter these problems, it could be because they don’t question the system. What baffles me is that state governments feel the need to make laws about such things. In some states, it’s illegal to give birth with a midwife. Insurance companies pressure doctors not to allow women to give birth vaginally after once giving birth by C-secetion. But, shouldn’t a woman be able to choose how and where to give birth (especially if she is healthy and there are no complications)? She will instinctively do what is best for her child, and doesn’t need a disinterested government to tell her what is best.
However, I don’t want to talk about birthing today. Lately I’ve been learning more about food and have been amazed at the controversies surrounding it. This morning I watched a clip from ABC’s 20/20 with John Stossel, who was arguing that irradiating all food would be the best choice for our health. He tossed aside the arguments of those opposed and claimed that ABC research had found that irradiated food is the only safe food. He made the opposing side look like terrorists and idiots. Alwasy one to question, I wondered where ABC got their information from and what their angle is.
I did a quick search of John Stossel and food and found this article, which shows ABC’s track record with this kind of information. I’m not sure why they feel the need to blatantly lie to the masses about food. I can only guess that as a large television company, they get a lot of their money by advertising for big industrial food companies, that would prefer not to have their methods challenged. What better way to get the masses on board, than to use a show like 20/20 that is supposed to look hard at the facts and give you good perspective on a matter. Hmmm.
I mentioned Nina Planck’s book, Real Food, in my last post. I’ll be ever thankful that I won that drawing for the free book. It got me very interested in raw milk.
While I’m still doing my research on raw milk, I’m finding out that it’s just another big controversy! In some states, and in Canada, it is illegal to sell milk that has not been pasteurized, even if you’re selling it off your farm to people who specifically want the untouched milk. In this beautiful article by Nathaniel Johnson, you can learn about Michael Schmidt, a man who has been arrested and had his farm infiltrated by armed men who treated it like some kind of drug sting. They even had undercover officers obtain samples of the milk.
I just wonder, if someone has researched the stuff, and believes that the benefits of clean raw milk outweigh the slim risks (and I am specifically talking about clean raw milk, not just ANY raw milk here) shouldn’t they be free to drink it? Why is the government so interested in stamping out interest in raw milk? Sure, the FDA says that it’s because raw milk is a health risk. But as we’ve learned in past years, peanut butter, spinach, chicken, beef, green onions (from Taco Bell), and even, in the case of America’s worst salmonella outbreak, pasteurized milk. And all of those things are approved by the FDA.
The FDA also approves foods that contain trans fats, hydrogenated oils, and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs, which they don’t even require to be labelled). And if GMO’s can cause tumors in the vegetables they inhabit, could they cause tumors in me? Could they make me sick? There’s really no good way to track or research this because the government does not require them to be labelled, says Andrew Kimbrell in The Future of Food.
So, is the FDA trustworthy? You don’t have to watch much of The Future of Food to realize that the government has been bought by big industries (and yes, I’m sure this includes the big dairy farmers) to push their agendas. Some government officials flip-flop between working for the government regulating administrations and working for Monsanto, one of the big pesticide and GMO creators. Sketchy.
So, why would a dairy farmer be so strongly opposed to people drinking raw milk? From the research I’ve done, it looks like it’s cheaper to produce milk in unsanitary ways, ways that are unhealthy for the cows. A typical dairy farm feeds the cows a diet of grain, which is an unnatural diet for a cow. This causes the cow to be more susceptible to harmful pathogens. Indistrial dairy farms also keep their cows in unnatural environments, not on grassy pastures, as they are meant to be. All of these conditions allow for germ-infested milk. This is why the infections passed on through milk had become so rampant by 1932, when pasteurization of milk became standard in the US. By then many dairy farms had become industrialized and unhealthy for the cows. Not pasteurizing the milk coming out of a normal dairy farm today would be disasterous. And changing dairy farm practices enough to make milk safe would be more costly than the big dairy farmers care to think about. So, the pasteurization continues.
Raw milk, when it comes from clean cow that lives in it’s natural pasture envrionment and eats grass, it’s natural diet, will produce safe and healthy milk. This raw milk is full of living organisms (much like you’ll find added back into pasteurized milk to make yogurt) that are beneficial for your health. It also has lactase that is supposed to assist you in digesting milk. Some people who are lactose intolerant suffer when drinking milk because their bodies don’t produce much lactase on it’s own. Pasteurized milk is harder to digest for these people. A lot of the beneficial aspects of milk are altered or killed in the process of pasteurization, even making the Calcium harder for your body to absorb.
Pasteurization advocates tend not to cite any studies when they deny the benefits of raw milk. They resort to what I call the “Nuh-uh” tactic. As I read through the FDA literature, the mostly just gave lists of illness outbreaks that may or may not have been caused by raw milk. It appears that pinning an illness on a food is a very imprecise science. I was also struck by the insistence of their emotional appeals. Raw milk advocates give raw milk to their children! They are threatening their children’s lives! We must stop this at all costs!
While I think it’s fine to insist on caution when purchasing raw milk (and from what I can tell, caution is needed), I don’t think you can condemn raw milk altogether. If a cow eats a grass diet (natural) and lives in a pasture (natural), not a manure filled pen with a million other cows, and the farmer is conscientious about hygeine, raw milk should be safe.
And what about the emotional appeals? Apparently the FDA thinks that raw milk advocates are bad parents for subjecting their children to the dangers of raw milk. But I’ll bet that raw milk advocates tend to know exactly what their children are eating, whether its the raw milk, the veggies from the farmers’ market, or chicken and beef from a farmer friend. The FDA however, in not requiring GMOs to be labelled, puts a mom who purchases baby formula in a bad position. How does she know that some of the ingredients have not been genetically modified? If her baby reacts badly to something in the formula, how will she know if it was a reaction to a GMO or an allergy? If GMOs can’t be tracked, how can we know how they affect us? But these are not questions that concern the FDA. They’re more concerned with a few yahoos who want to drink raw milk (me included). I guess their parenting advice is to do what they tell you, no questions asked.
I think that if you know where your food (milk) is coming from, you’re more likely to make a safe choice than choosing something on a grocery store shelf that was produced hundreds of miles away in a factory you’ve never seen. Local is better. As Nina Planck says, it’s better not because it’s the ‘virtuous’ choice, but because it’s less risky and probably tastes better too.
I’m thinking that I agree with Wendell Berry when he asserted that every time the American people forfeit a responsibility they don’t want, they lose freedom. We’ve lost freedom in obstetric choices, we’ve lost freedom in food choices, what else can we lose freedom in?
Do you know what’s in your food?
Maybe next time I’ll give myself a full haircut! 
