Urban Devotees Of Raw Milk Soured By Health Raid On Farmer

I listened to the raw milk fiasco on CBC's The Current, on Wednesday. The critic of raw milk sales, Dr. Hazel Lynn, failed to answer any of Michael Schmidt's claims that belied the dangers of raw milk. Specifically, he asked why milk was being targeted, and not other raw products? <br />
<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2006/200611/20061129.html">http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2006/200611/20061129.html</a><br />
What immediately comes to mind would be the Great Spinach Scare that actually killed a few people. Mr. Schmidt's operation has not harmed or killed anyone to date. Yet he is shut down, and the spinach growers/distributors carry merrily on.........<br />
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It is my contention that governments in general favour large, concentrated operations, rather than independent, small-scale ones, if only because the CEOs of mega-corps give generously at election time, and it involves one quick stop, while 10,000 small farmers are apt to ask persnickety and penetrating questions.........<p>---<br>"No kingdom could be ruled without lies - - for lies are the things we use to build our reputations."........<br />
King Arthur <br />

<a href="http://www.mercola.com/2004/apr/24/raw_milk.htm">http://www.mercola.com/2004/apr/24/raw_milk.htm</a><br />
"Public health officials warn that raw milk poses the risk of transmitting bacteria such as listeria, E. coli and salmonella, but pasteurizing the milk kills these bacteria while extending the milk’s shelf life, which also happens to be more profitable for the dairy industry."<br />
<p>---<br>"No kingdom could be ruled without lies - - for lies are the things we use to build our reputations."........<br />
King Arthur <br />

Related to my contention:<br />
<a href="http://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/11/30/100MileChef/">http://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/11/30/100MileChef/</a><br />
<a href="http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/02/08/SlaughterUsedTo/">http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/02/08/SlaughterUsedTo/</a><p>---<br>"No kingdom could be ruled without lies - - for lies are the things we use to build our reputations."........<br />
King Arthur <br />

I have been drinking raw goat's milk for years. If the herds are small enough, they don't fall under a quota. Besides I buy it from people I know. We have a local farmers market for fruit (little is localy picked), vegetables and even bread & pasteries. We have a local farmer who also has a license for his butcher shop. We (the locals) know him and his humane practices. However, there is no one "I know", who sells raw cow milk. Perhaps a person could buy it if it were to be used as feed for pigs. I'm uncertain if the farmer would need proof that the buyer did infact own pigs. Most people my age were brought up on raw milk if they were from a farm. I recall most farmers had separators and all of them served me raw milk when I worked for them.

Being in good health just because you weren't raised on processed foods, isn't reason enough for the Government to allow it. What's the point of Medicare if everyone was healthy.

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Expect little from life and get more from it.

I remember separators when we visited the farm, mainly because I had to crank it. Sure made good ice cream though!
(hey! I was a kid! whaddya expect me to remember?!)

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"No kingdom could be ruled without lies - - for lies are the things we use to build our reputations."........
King Arthur

I remember separators as having what seemed like a couple of hundred pieces that you had to take apart to wash, and then put together again.
My parents raised their children and numerous other people's children on goats milk...never a problem. No lactose intolerance, no allergies.

There's something about the legality surrounding (of all things) the distribution of dairy products in this country that has always bothered me, even as a child. I could never understand why there were laws surrounding these food items. I can recall thinking that the X-files should have done an episode on this item, where "something" was being put in the milk by the government.

When selling perfectly healthy food is illegal, it has to make you wonder why.

My Mom told me stories of milking the cow and how they used to drink it "raw" all the time - there was nothing else and no refrigeration at the time. Clearly no one in her family got sick from it otherwise the practice would not have been done.

I wonder how the spin doctors got everyone into accepting the processed version of dairy - it probably took many years and a lot of propaganda effort. I hear they are working on turning cheese into a pasteurized version that probably will taste like crap.

I'm left thinking that we can probably unravel decades worth of brainwashing in only a few years. Probably the best thing the Ontario government did to help out, was to bust this innocent farmer.

"The critic of raw milk sales, Dr. Hazel Lynn, failed to answer any of Michael Schmidt's claims that belied the dangers of raw milk. Specifically, he asked why milk was being targeted, and not other raw products?"

I thought that she did try and address it by mentioning cheese and other dairy products as having far less harmful bacteria due to the kinds of processing that took place in making the products.

It's true that other raw products such as fruits and vegetable have caused problems, but my understanding is that in all cases it was due to external contamination from bad fertalization or cleaning with contaminated water. In the case of milk, the claim was that no matter how clean your processing was, the harmful bacteria would always be present in the milk.

But then there's meat from chickens and cows that cause a lot of sickness as well as a few deaths each year, yet there it is available for anyone to buy in raw form. I suppose the argument is that people are expected to properly cook the meat before eating it, while milk is mostly consumed uncooked.

With respect to consuming raw milk, what Hazel failed to mention was how high or low the probability is for getting dangerously sick, specifically when compared to consuming other food items. Furthermore, she failed to discuss the operation that was busted, where the farmer rented out his facility for his clients to milk their own cows. Her claim that lengthy storage due to transportation distances in Canada caused bacteria to multiply to dangerous levels made no sense at all with the case at hand.

One other thing that was left out by Hazel, was mention of all the crap that gets into milk products such as hormones, pesticides, and drugs used by nonorganic farmers to beef up production.

But all of this skirts around the main issue - where people are being told what they can and cannot eat through government legislation. Even well informed people who know full well what they are doing are being denied their right to eat a basic food item. It is one thing when people are eating something that they are unware of, or have been mislead into thinking that it's one thing over another, but these people knew exactly what they were consuming and no fraudulant or dangerous activity of any kind was being commited.

Everyone involved knew what they were doing, and furthermore no one was being harmed from it, so why did 20 armed police officiers have to raid this farm?

Besides the issue of our right to consume what we wish this brings up several more issues. There is growing evidence that the move towards “sterilizing” or otherwise killing all the bacteria (good or bad) in our food and daily lives is what is leading to the ever increasing incidence of severe allergies. I personally believe that unless you are exposed to small amounts of the myriads of bacteria present in our world in your youth you will never build up any resistance to fend of that occasional major infection. Seems like farm kids that play around the cattle and farmyard rarely have any problems with E. coli or the like despite their surroundings.
The other part of this is that if we look at past incidences of food contamination it is invariably made worse that it might otherwise have been by the fact that in many cases it either originated or was spread to large volumes of food AT THE PACKING PLANT. This once again reinforces my belief that farm fresh food is best if you can get it. If the health dept wants to say that raw milk must be used with caution and that stringent cleaning regimes must be maintained in the milking parlor and the herd, then that’s fine and also true. To dismiss it as containing listeria, E. coli and salmonella and therefore must be banned is not only incorrect but an over reaction, as was the raid upon Mr Schmidt's farm. I don’t know why it takes 20 armed MNR officers (MNR?) to do this when IF he was doing wrong (and it seems he was not directly selling it so he was not) a single official with a court order to cease and desist was all it needed. The same point has been made by his (and mine) MPP Mr Murdoch who is to introduce a bill to at least reexamine the whole issue of raw milk.
I wonder how many Dairy farm familys ship their milk to the processing plant and then drive to town for milk, not many I bet. How many of these familys drink unpasturized milk and how many become ill from it, it would be interesting to find out. (its been many years since I’ve been in a milk house, is the milk pasteurized at that point or at the plant?)
As a final thought anyone who has ever drank WHOLE milk knows that pasteurized or not it bears no resemblance to that white watery stuff on your supermarket shelf!


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When you are up to your ass in alligators it is difficult to remember that the initial objective was to drain the swamp

<blockquote> I wonder how the spin doctors got everyone into accepting the processed version of dairy - it probably took many years and a lot of propaganda effort. I hear they are working on turning cheese into a pasteurized version that probably will taste like crap. </blockquote> Look at the campaign that was generated to outlaw marijuana......... <p> One of the links I posted mentioned that a simple "beneifit" is the shelf life extension, good for industry, even though it leaves the product nutritionally useless......</p> <p>---<br>"No kingdom could be ruled without lies - - for lies are the things we use to build our reputations."........<br />
King Arthur <br />

"One of the links I posted mentioned that a simple 'beneifit' is the shelf life extension, good for industry, even though it leaves the product nutritionally useless......"

Yes, I saw that, however with or without legislation the industry can still pasteurize its milk and thus extend the self life. I have to assume there's more going on here.

One possible explanation is that in order to get everyone drinking the pasteurized version, they first had to make sure that no one could compete with the unpasteurized version. In other words they thought that no one would buy the stuff unless forced to do so by monopolizing the entire production system.

That theory fits in well with the Gestapo tactics used to shut down the farm in question. Any competition is viewed as threat to the industrialized milk industry.

Now I'm so curious, I'm going to seek out some raw milk to compare.

Some members of my family would have bought shares in these very
cows which are now ... I suppose ... under arrest in Ontario. All that
stopped them was the logistics of picking up the milk.

Why did they want raw milk for themselves and their growing children?
Because they knew people whose health problems had vanished after
they turned to raw milk.

You'd think people would automatically have the right to do that.

My in-laws are dairy farmers. Every time I'm over there, I open the fridge and there is a bucket of milk (manually skimmed of cream and fat by my mother-in-law) as well as a jug of milk (fill your glass from the jug and the jug from the bucket). I have never gotten sick from this milk. My neices and nephews (of which there are a dozen now) have never gotten sick from this milk. None of the family and frequent visitors have ever gotten sick from the milk. And it tastes just fine.<br />
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That said, I can understand the government's lack of appetite for sanctioning unpasteurized milk for mass distribution. Since most people in this country live in the cities (80%+) with no ready access to farm fresh raw milk, the product will need to be harvested, stored for transport, transported to packaging and distribution, go through packaging and distribution and then transport to the store for final purchase. This usually takes a couple of days. Unlike pasteurized milk, raw milk spoils easier and can (I'll stress that this is a "can" and not an "always" or "does") contain some pretty harmful bacteria that can be picked up either at the farm or the packaging plant due to unclean implements, udder infections, etc. Pasteurization takes care of the vast majority of these possible pathogens, and increases the shelf life of milk - thus enabling distribution into the urban jungle most of us live in. <br />
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If the government were to allow mass sale of raw milk, the first (and every) case of illness due to any sort of raw milk contamination would implicate the health ministry, the government in general as well as give them bad press. According to the US FDA (I couldn't find a Canadian stat - sorry) 200-300 people get sick from raw milk each year. So let's say 20-30 in Canada for arguements sake. That's a lot of lawsuits against a major industry, a major lobby as well as bad optics for any government that allows this sort of practice. <br />
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<a href="http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2004/504_milk.html">http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2004/504_milk.html</a><br />
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I'll continue to drink pasteurized milk from the supermarket at home and raw milk at my in-laws. If someone wants to skirt the laws, you can always do what Soberra's wife did - buy a share in a cow. If you have ownership of the cow, there is no requirement to pasteurize. There are only laws against the sale of raw milk to the public. But I don't expect that without a rather large public outcry that there will be any move to regulate or allow raw milk sales since the political risks currently far outweigh any benefit.

"Since most people in this country live in the cities (80%+) with no ready access to farm fresh raw milk, the product will need to be harvested, stored for transport, transported to packaging and distribution, go through packaging and distribution and then transport to the store for final purchase."<br />
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The Japanese have a 'fettish' or 'obsessiveness' for 'fresh'. If they go to the store, they want their container of milk, which has 'Packaged on' rather than 'Best Before', to have not only todays date, but this morning's time.<br />
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This has let to the Japanese milk industry to become not only small and numerous, but fast and efficient. But that has it's drawbacks too.<br />
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<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2000/07/16/milk000716.html">http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2000/07/16/milk000716.html</a><p>---<br>"I think it's important to always carry enough technology to restart civilization, should it be necessary." Mark Tilden<br />