The Fight for Raw Milk – Nature’s perfect food

It was a sad day when I walked into my local Whole Foods Market and first realized the good stuff was missing. I decided to focus on this for a short essay in a class I am taking.

Here goes…

New food production practices and regulations have left us increasingly alienated from the sources of what we eat. Recently, food production and distribution in the United States has seen an unprecedented amount of change.

Our food is increasingly dominated by fewer companies and larger farms. The unbridled aggregation of production and resultant mega-corporations such as Tyson and Smithfield have left the consumer with dwindling options for obtaining locally and naturally produced foods.

California, along with Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Washington State have all served as a recent battle ground in the fight for older methods of food production. Within the last month, Whole Foods Market has made the exemplary decision to pull all raw milk products off its shelves in all of these states. Raw milk is cow’s milk unpasteurized and unhomogenized. Both pasteurization and homogenization permit mass production and distribution of milk. Beneficial compounds are removed from the milk during the process, and the milk loses all of its good bacteria which would otherwise live in symbiosis with the human body. Many people, myself included, swear by the benefits of unaltered milk.

Mass produced milk must be pasteurized because of the distance it is shipped and the conditions of the cows producing it. These cows are fed corn as opposed to their natural diet of grass. This leads to bacterial growth in the stomachs and eventually milk of these cows. They are fed a steady diet of antibiotics to combat this problem, but much of the bacteria have grown resistant to these drugs; consequently, pasteurization must be employed. Conversely, cows that produce raw milk at farms like the Caravale Farm in Pinoche, California are strictly pasture fed leading to a healthier cow and safer milk.  For that reason, there is no need to pasteurize the milk of these cows. Raw milk produced in this fashion has been consumed safely for about as long as humans have domesticated animals.

The consumers’ right to drink milk in its natural state has been consistently challenged.  The expanding distance between us and the origins of our food accurately parallels the growing distance between our own bodies and the rich vibrant health we are being deprived of. The recent Whole Foods controversy is just one of these many conflicts we are being sickened by today.

Whole Foods announced its decision and explained that they needed to establish a uniform safety standard for these producers before they could continue to sell these products. It is widely held by industry insiders that the real reason for the move is the pressure placed on Whole Foods by insurers. The safety of these products needs to be insured.  Although there have been no deaths and only two cases of illness correlated to raw products, insurers have made it too costly for Whole Foods to carry these products on their shelves. This is not the case, however, for products that continue to be sold from Whole Foods that include spinach, strawberries, tomatoes, and beef – all of which have seen deaths as a result of bacterial contamination.

The loss of Whole Foods’ support has been hard on raw milk producers, and has left them scrambling to find another way to bring their product to market. Luckily, they have established a patchwork network of local cooperatives and farmers markets, but they have still lost significant business. The recent raw milk controversy seems to be a microcosm for problems plaguing the entire food industry. Efficiency of manufacture, not tradition, dominates.

Monsanto, a seed company, offers another harrowing example of the abuses of industrial food production. The company maintains a vast number of patents on seed varieties. Nearly all farmers of corn or soy rely on Monsanto’s seeds. If one of the few farmers who do not employ these seeds happen to be located adjacent to a Monsanto crop they run the risk of law suit due to cross pollination. Small farmers have little hope of fighting companies of this size. Monsanto in particular, maintains a large and highly paid legal team. Monsanto also operates as a revolving door for high-level government employees in congress, the judicial branch, and various regulatory agencies such as the FDA. Monsanto highlights an industry-wide tradition of legal and regulatory bullying. Tyson, a meat packer, is another company notorious for preying on small organic chicken farms. It is naturally very difficult for small local farms to defend themselves because they are by definition small and local.

A growing body of media now covers the alienation of food production and agitates for change. Books such as Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Good Calories Bad Calories, take a historically grounded perspective on our food. All of these recent books attempt to explain the apparent paradox of society getting richer while its members get increasingly sick. They all agree that we have lost touch with the way of life we evolved in. The movie Food Inc. summarizes nearly all these modern controversies over food. The film holds that the consumer can save himself as long as he makes strong choices at the supermarket. The recent, Raw milk controversy is another battle the consumer must fight to keep his/her food simple and natural.

Sorry to preach, but if there’s one thing I love its a happy healthy cow.

After All he's done for you

Fight for your rights and look good nekkid friends.