There’s a dangerous sense of superiority shared by Minnesotans who buy raw milk and serve it to their families.

Even if we did have a sense of superiority, which I don’t think we do, what makes that inherently dangerous? It’s not like we’re advocating on behalf of pathogens, which is what this irresponsible editorial would have you think. What’s dangerous is having the eating population think for themselves because we can draw conclusions that differ from the FDA and USDA.

The editorial goes on to cite a few examples of bad conditions at farms I wouldn’t buy milk from, but never mentioning the kinds of farms I would. They do not mention the stings on farms that have had no incidents nor out-of-compliance conditions. They don’t mention the millions of people who drink raw milk and have never had a health issue, who have in fact, noticed improvements to their health.

It cites studies, largely funded by those who stand to gain from the sale of pasteurized milk. Because as people know, corporations and politicians are far more credible than nature.

Is this what passes for journalism today—marginalizing a niche group by antagonizing the rest of the population?

As we have been saying long before the USDA caught on: know your farmer and know your food.

h/t to David.

Update: I wanted to add this information to the mix (h/t to Don):

Every year in the US there are:

• 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
• 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
• 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
• 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
• 106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.
• The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

So, why isn’t this being pursued with the same fervor?

This revelation has been out there for a few months and there are already several articles covering this topic. I’m posting some references here for those who may have missed it elsewhere.

At the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund site:

The FTCLDF lawsuit claims that the federal regulations (21 CFR 1240.61 and 21 CFR 131.110) banning raw milk for human consumption in interstate commerce are unconstitutional and outside of FDA’s statutory authority as applied to FTCLDF’s members and the named individual plaintiffs in the suit.  In its answer to the complaint, FDA made its position on the issue of ‘freedom of food choice’ a part of the public record.

• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a new ‘fundamental right’ under substantive due process to produce, obtain, and consume unpasteurized milk lacks any support in law.” [p.17]
• “There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.” [p. 25]
• “There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.” [p. 26]
• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” [p. 26]

Here’s the actual FDA response to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund complaint (PDF), containing the disambiguation of our non-rights.

At the Complete Patient site

I’d like to personally thank the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for articulating its food-rights policy.

At least it’s all out in the open. Now it’s up to consumers to let the regulators and politicians know how they feel about this joint government-industry enforcement campaign to deprive citizens of health-giving foods of their choice.

And this article at Mercola.com, FDA Says You Have No Right to Real Food Unless They Give You Permission First

If you go by these assertions, it means the FDA has the authority to prohibit any food of their choosing and make it a crime for you to seek it out. If, one day, the FDA deems tomatoes, broccoli or cashews capable of causing you harm (which is just as ludicrous as their assertions that raw milk is harmful), they could therefore enact such a ban and legally enforce it.

What this means is that freedom of food choice is a myth if you live in the United States, and this simply is not acceptable.

Well, now you know. Eat accordingly or you just might be a Food Renegade!

On a practical level, the USDA’s policies and regulations are skewed towards the industrial producers. It is difficult and often impossible for a small farm to take advantage of their opportunities or to comply with many of the regulations.

Among the many stories in USDA’s Small Farm Focus Gets Mixed Review, this is an example of just how inane some of the regulations are:

The Crains have also run into snags interpreting requirements of the EQIP program. After a new fence was built, they were told it didn’t qualify because they had used the wrong wire and it would have to be torn down and rebuilt if they wanted to collect a cost share. “I could see it if he used baling twine to cut cost, or something like that, but my husband knows how to build a fence,” she said.

A frequent complaint is that the USDA imposes a one-size-fits-all culture and the one size is huge. From USDA Red Tape Stands in the Way of Humane Slaughter Techniques and Local, Sustainable Meat Production:

Many of the problems forcing small operations out of business (and preventing would-be investors from building new plants) can be traced back to red tape imposed by the USDA. According to the Food and Water Watch report, the USDA’s regulations favor huge facilities that can spread the costs over hundreds of thousands of animals. Complying with policies is too onerous for many small operators. Extensive record-keeping and ever-fluctuating safety criteria add additional burdens. And Food and Water Watch reports that there have even been accusations of USDA inspectors singling out small facilities for harsh treatment because they make easier targets than national corporations with their staff scientists, legal experts, and well-paid government lobbyists.

There aer similar sentiments in this article: Will USDA Food Safety Plan Squeeze Out the Little Guy?

So, frankly, I don’t know what to make of the USDA’s Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program.

But meanwhile in Washington:

Three Republican senators have complained that a USDA effort to educate the public about where food comes from slights “conventional farmers who produce the vast majority of our nation’s food supply.”

Sens. Pat Roberts of Kansas, John McCain of Arizona and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia complained in a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that his agency spent $65 million last year on a program “aimed at small, hobbyist and organic producers whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons at urban farmers markets.”

To make their point, they try to scare people by threatening starvation:

Roberts is a former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and currently sits on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee along with Chambliss, the panel’s ranking member.

He said this week that they never meant to sound dismissive of small farmers and niche producers, or their customers.

“The more people that go to the farmers markets, the more people understand agriculture and they eat a better diet,” Roberts said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, it ought to be encouraged. . . . But you can’t go back to Walden Pond agriculture and expect to feed America.”

Contrary to popular perception, there is plenty of evidence that small farms are more productive than large ones. In agricultural economics, this is known as the “inverse size-productivity relationship,” first pointed out by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. If you stop to think about it, it makes perfect sense. A farmer who has only five acres of land knows every square foot of that land. She knows the best spots for the corn, the tomatoes, and the beans. She also plants a diversity of crops that are adapted to the various microclimatic and soil conditions; by doing that, she optimizes the use of her land. On a large farm, frequently only one crop is planted in a field regardless of the variation in soil conditions, and wide swaths of land can be wasted every time the large tractor turns a corner.

On the other hand, mega-farms are simply successful at feeding themselves. The largest 10% get 70% of the subsidy money (that’s our tax dollars, going to help really rich people). By the way, ever wonder why everything in your supermarket seems to come from California? Ever wonder why California cows are happy cows? California leads the nation in farm subsidies.

Anyway, it’s still good advice to know your farmer and know your food, even if the USDA is supporting it. As the saying goes, a stopped watch is still right twice a day.

Here in CT, raw milk can be sold in retail stores and I am quite grateful. My milk comes from Stone Wall Dairy in Kent, which is an hour away. I don’t know if I could make the trip every week. I only know of four raw milk producers in the state, and none of the others are any closer. Besides, after three years, I am fond of these cows and their farmer.

To deal with precisely that kind of situation, raw milk consumers in MA organize buying clubs. Members take turns driving to the farm to collect the milk for the group.

Because these clubs are unregulated, MDAR wants to make them illegal. But these are contracts between private citizens, which do not require regulation.

Of course, if the buying clubs get shut down, the small dairy farmers will effectively be put out of business. Qui bono?

Thanks to David Gumpert (author of “The Raw Milk Revolution), Mark McAfee, of (Organic Pastures Dairy), and others for taking the time to testify and support those who did.

Freidberg spent a year living in Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country (Google map), and uses examples from that experience to explain her thinking about about fresh food and locavorism.

In Fresh, Friedberg writes:

The health of a local food economy depends to a large degree on its wealth — not only in terms of household spending power, but also (and arguably, more importantly) in the public resources available for everything from road maintenance to irrigation to community gardens. … So many farmers, with encouragement from American and European aid agencies, instead depend on the kind of export trade that local food activists love to hate.

At the talk, Friedberg said,

Eating local food is great,
but it will not solve any global food problems.

True enough, but is the primary goal of the local food movement to solve global food problems? I’m hoping the local food movement solves our local food problems and that by extension, alleviates the pressure that traditional western consumption habits place on the rest of the world on many levels.

My personal food model is to eat local fare for the foods that can be grown locally and to source the other foods. I eat fresh CT fruits and vegetables in season and I freeze, can, or dry them for the off-season. I have access to local dairy and meat products year-round. For those foods that can’t deal with a New England climate (coffee, chocolate, tropical fruits, and Mediterranean delights like olives and pistachios), I am open to the world market and make my selections based on other criteria (organic, fair trade, relative proximity, and so on). I am not suggesting that my model is perfect or that it be adopted by anyone else. It works really well for me so I make information available on this blog for anyone who is interested in this model or wants to make their own variation on a theme.

Is the author trying to say that we locavores in the world’s wealthiest nation[s] are creating economic problems for those in the poorest nations because we failed to consider the downstream effects of our actions? And which author? I need to read the book to determine if this is the premise of Freidberg’s book or the point Pasanen chose to hone in on. It seems as though one or both of them is pinning global food problems on the locavore movement!

I see our locavore movement as a series of small but powerful steps that can be taken by ordinary individuals to address the many food security issues we face as people, states, and countries. We are slowly repairing our own damaged food systems here in America. I am convinced that as more people, states, and countries adopt similar models, more and more global food problems will be solved.

To suggest that the pioneers in this movement need a “little more humility, a little more questioning, a little more moral ambiguity” hardly seems fair or helpful. That this movement, still in its infancy, has not solved all of the global food problems yet or possibly even made some things worse before most things can get better, hardly makes it a legitimate target for those who profess to care about food systems or global economics.

According to Wikpedia, “Agriculture represents 32% of [Burkina Faso's] gross domestic product and occupies 80% of the working population.” That locavores somehow bear any responsibility to the economy of Burkina Faso seems somewhat manipulative. Does Burkina Faso’s own political history (with French and English meddling, followed by factional infighting and coups) bear no responsibility? Does the country’s current political system bear no responsibility? Are there any corporations involved in Burkina Faso’s food supply chain? Just wondering…

Pasanen wrote,

It is a privilege, Freidberg inferred, to be able to choose among the huge variety of fresh foods shipped in from around the world, or to choose to eat only locally grown foods.

I’m hoping that American locavores use our privilege for good. I’m hoping that we keep doing what we’re doing and when we solve the problems in our own damaged food system, we will have a brilliant model to offer the rest of the world.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, during the writing of this post, I have consumed a papaya (organic from Hawai’i) and a glass of CT fresh raw milk (not at the same time).

Raw Milk Tee

I went to Meet the Author, David Gumpert at Molten Java in Bethel. Gumpert wrote The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights. Not a bad crowd for 6 PM on a Wednesday—farmers, consumers, raw milk advocates, bloggers, journalists, locavores, children, and avid readers. David Gumpert was warmly introduced by Ed Hertz (the Milkman).

Gumpert talked about how he got into raw milk from business writing, about the apparent obsession regulators have against raw milk and the lengths they have gone to in an effort to eradicate it. He says the issue isn’t just this one product, raw milk, but that “raw milk is a proxy issue; it is symbolic of other issues.”

When asked why they’re going after raw milk drinkers and suppliers with such a vengeance, Gumpert and the audience speculated:

• Raw milk consumption is associated with the lunatic fringe; raw milk drinkers are the modern-day hippies
• Regulators feel that the problem of food-borne pathogens has already been solved. Why re-introduce it?
• Commerce. Follow the money. Are the large commercial dairy producers anxious to see their profits slip away?
• If raw milk can heal our chronic conditions, would we need as many pharmaceuticals?

Gumpert spoke about the FDA public relations campaign against raw milk and how the old press releases would always say “drinking raw milk is like playing Russian roulette with your health.” Evidently, people don’t trust the FDA, because raw milk sales would go up after each of these campaigns! So the FDA started going after the raw milk producers: small farms.

Gumpert spoke about the upcoming food safety legislation. He told how it gives all decisions regarding food standards to the FDA, greatly increasing their jurisdiction. The FDA could impose universal irradiation and put an end to raw food in general. The bill is supposed to protect us from food-borne illnesses but is really tilted against small farms. The bill has passed in the House and is coming before the Senate this week. If you’re at all inclined, now would be a good time to call our Senators. By the way, the FDA is currently working on regulations for creating compost. Another by the way, the new food safety bill fulfills our (the USA’s) obligations to the WTO and WHO.  WTF?

It is important to realize that raw milk advocates are not against food safety. As Chris Hopkins of Stone Wall Dairy said, he “would rather go from fixing a symptom to fixing the problem.” He explained how pasteurization merely fixes a symptom of a poor process. He said that we now know how to make good, healthy milk holistically.

Attendees had a chance to sample raw cows milk from Stone Wall Dairy, raw goat milk from Butterfield Farm, and low-pasteurized un-homogenized milk from Ronnybrook Dairy.

Gumpert let us know we can look forward to a new film about raw milk called Farmageddon.

Check out this book review by one of the event’s attendees.

Read David Gumpert’s take on the evening.

Looking for raw milk? In this area, you can get raw milk at:

• Holbrook Farm
• New Morning Natural Foods
• Chamomile Natural Foods in Danbury

See my Foodshed page for more local food sources.

The Raw Milk Revolution

Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 6 PM.

Molten Java is at 102 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, CT 203-791-9747

The event is co-sponsored by Relay Bookhouse (next door) and the Milkmen USA.

There’s also a great commentary on this book (or inspired by this book) over at La Vida Locavore.

Brian Moyer, director of Rural Vermont, a nonprofit farm advocacy group, uses the image of an hourglass. “At the top of the hourglass we’ve got the farmers,” he said, “the bottom part is consumers and in the middle, what’s straining those grains of sand, is the infrastructure that’s lacking.”

Given that there’s a demand for product, even in (and particularly because of) the bad economy AND there is plent of it to go around, there seems to be a pretty obvious solution here: build more slaughterhouses.

This isn’t a new idea. People have ideas and desires. What’s the hold-up?

See what happens when hype and political opportunity get out of hand. Perhaps people should stick to getting their food from real farmers. Tip: if there’s no dirt under the finger nails and Jimmy Choo’s on their feet, they’re probably not real farmers.