As Raw Milk Moves Into Mainstream, Scrutiny Expands—Is That a Good Thing? FDA and Sustainability--an Oxymoron?

There’s an interesting phenomenon going on now around raw milk. It is gradually, but very definitely, moving more toward the mainstream. Increasingly, the media are writing more objectively, the latest example being Jill Richardson’s even-handed assessment of the politics of raw milk on Alternet.

One of the things that tends to happen as you move from the fringes to the mainstream, though, is that you tend to come under increasing public scrutiny. We’ve seen one example in the intense focus on the outsourcing practices of Organic Pastures Dairy Co., which Jill Richardson’s article highlighted (and continues to be a subject of intense debate on my most recent couple of postings).

We see another example in the four-part series comparing raw and pasteurized milk that has unfolded on the blog of food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler, who is close to many state and federal regulators, and has been notable for his anti-raw-milk stance in the past.

I have commented previously about two other parts, since they have been notable for the depth and detail of their assessments, and for their acknowledgments of a number of arguments made by raw milk advocates—for example, that milk intended to be sold unpasteurized is invariably handled differently than, the conventional supply intended for pasteurization (even if they are, overall, less than supportive of raw milk).

Now, Part 4 of the series was just posted, and it is similarly notable for its depth of analysis. It assesses data about illnesses according to pathogens from raw and pasteurized milk, and concludes that while raw milk is implicated in more cases of campylobacter and E.coli O157:H7, there hasn’t been a single case of listeriosis from raw milk.

More significant, it goes even further in its acceptance of raw milk than the other sections. In certain respects, it seems another slam, as it heavily criticizes the Weston A. Price Foundation for promoting health claims about raw milk and for challenging public health findings about raw milk outbreaks.

But a careful reading of the piece reveals a new level of scrutiny, suggesting a previously unknown level of acceptance. For example, it explores milk labeling in California, pointing out that labels of raw milk show no significant differences in key vitamins compared to pasteurized milk. (Maybe Mark McAfee, or another raw dairy producer, can help educate us on why the similarities.) This is something I hadn’t been aware of before, given all the emphasis by proponents on raw milk’s nutritional value. (I’m sure part of the issue here is that key nutrients contained in raw milk, like enzymes and good bacteria, aren’t accounted for in the standard ingredients and vitamin labels.)

It also explores such issues as taste and value. Indeed, it comes across as something of a consumer guide to assessing different kinds of milk.

Finally, and perhaps most important, it conveys an assumption that raw milk is here to stay, as a mainstay of our dairy options. Some of this may have to do with the fact that the piece focuses on the California market, where raw dairy products are sold at retail, but it represents a much different tone coming from sources like the Marler Blog than existed even a year ago.

It concludes with a warning to consumers to avoid black market milk. That’s an interesting warning, since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in pushing so hard to stamp out all sales and other distribution of raw milk, in effectis doing its best to make it primarily a black market item.

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Jill Richardson of Lavidalocavore blog, during a tour of Tierra Miguel Farm, near San Diego, as part of Symposium on Food Systems and Public Health. Raw milk wasn’t a scheduled topic of discussion at a food safety symposium I attended in San Diego for several days this week, but it came up anyway, and in a surprising way. (I guess at this point, I shouldn’t be surprised at anything involving raw milk.) The occasion was a keynote address by Michael Taylor, a senior adviser on food safety at the FDA. 

I found intriguing his effort to link food and health in assessing safety and the importance of food. “Abundance is not enough, but people need access to foods that can contribute to healthy diets,” he said. “It’s important to prevent food-borne illness, but also to maintain public confidence. The last thing you want is for people to stop buying fruits and vegetables.”

Interesting notion, this idea that healthy foods help maintain good health. But then during a brief question period, an attendee launched into an assault. “We used to have access to raw milk, no longer. We used to be able to order rare meat, no longer…” The man wondered if leafy greens would be next on the FDA’s attack list, presumably through stronger requirements for irradiation. Taylor seemed not to understand the accusations, or the question. “The food supply has never been pristine, or antiseptic,” he began, and then seemed to mumble something as he exited the stage, and quickly left the event. The idea that the FDA is indeed pushing toward sanitation of the food supply was something Taylor didn’t want to deal with.

The verbiage coming out of the FDA and other food safety organizations is definitely shifting. There was lots of talk at the San Diego conference about “sustainability,” supporting “local food systems,” and the benefits of farmers markets. How deeply do they believe such verbiage?

By the way, I got to meet Jill Richardson, author of the Alternet article mentioned earlier on, and founder of the Lavidalocavore blog--she attended part of the symposium that included a tour of a local veggie and fruit farm committed to sustainable practices. She didn't seem fazed by her introduction to the raw milk enthusiasts via dozens of comments on her Alternet article. She's pictured above.

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I just returned to the East Coast from San Diego, on my way to Charlottesville, VA, to speak at a special book signing event tomorrow (Saturday) evening with Joel Salatin (sponsored by the Virginia Independent Copnsumer and Farmer Association). If you’re in the area, stop in and say hello.

The Raw Milk Outsourcing Issue Forces Us to Face Up to Serious Safety Qs Around Policing, Confidence and Standards

The question of whether Organic Pastures Dairy Co. outsources dairy products has been lurking on this blog like an old sore that won’t heal. Each time it looks as if it’s resolved, it really isn’t, and it reappears.

It’s been a pet issue of Amanda Rose, Concerned Person, and Mary McGonigle-Martin.

Now, it seems as if Bob Hayles has helped us focus in on the critical issue of yes-no—has Organic Pastures been outsourcing milk or cream for use in production of dairy products?

Frankly, I haven’t been sure what to make of this matter, which is why I haven’t said much. I do explore it some in my book, The Raw Milk Revolution, and explain Amanda Rose’s theory that outsourced product may have been the missing link in helping explain how Organic Pastures milk could have become contaminated so that six children became ill.

My difficulty with the issue has stemmed partly from my business background, where outsourcing happens routinely in all kinds of businesses, including food businesses. So long as outsourced products meet with the selling organization’s quality standards, then it’s usually not seen as necessary to announce it.

But in observing the debate, and the apparent closure via Mark McAfee’s admission following my previous post that he has misstated about outsourcing, and that outsourcing has occurred during 2009, I’ve come to appreciate its significance, as applies to raw milk. Yes, butter and cheese may be different from milk and cream, but the differences aren’t easy for even avid raw milk drinkers to understand, and apparently open to some debate. I’ve come to conclude that the issue is much more important than I wanted to allow, for at least three reasons, all relating in one way or another to the matter of safety:

1. Raw milk is positioned by many supporters as a raw food vulnerable to contamination, but made safer because it is obtained directly from known farmers. “Know your farmer” is the mantra of many raw milk consumers. So is the notion that there are two supplies of raw milk--the conventional factory farm supply and the raw dairy supply. The implication of both these ideas is that personal knowledge and relationship help ensure that the milk is produced by people who care, and thus use the highest safety standards.
2. Raw milk is under attack by regulators, and thus under close scrutiny. It’s almost as if its producers must live up to a higher standard. Scott Trautman, the Wisconsin dairy farmer, points up this dilemma in my previous post by arguing that raw milk producers have to self police, to prove to the regulators that they are serious about the regulators’ safety concerns.
3. Finally, and this may be most important: there is a perception that at least some raw milk producers are not fully committed to safety. I think the perception has developed because some raw milk advocates seem to immediately deny every allegation of contamination and illness. And the argument is sometimes suggested that grass-fed cows can't produce contaminated milk because of competitive exclusion.  It shouldn’t be surprising. I think it's part of the bunker mentality. When you're under attack all the time, you see enemies everywhere, even when friends come to help.

But here’s the irony: advocates of raw milk do believe very seriously in the highest safety standards for raw dairy production. They just don’t do a good job of communicating this belief. I know because I just received my copy of a booklet produced by the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, “Raw Milk Production Handbook” (available via the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund web site). For some reason, this booklet is only available the old-fashioned way, in print and by snail mail. But a quick look through it makes clear a strong commitment to safety, down to the smallest details. Here are a couple quotes:

“The floor of the milking area should be an impermeable material, usually concrete. Metal is also fine, but rather costly, and it weakens over time. Wood absorbs pathogens and water and therefore is not an appropriate flooring.”

“Water for washingthemilking equipment must be 165 degrees F leaving the water heater and no less than 145 degrees F leaving the item you are washing. When purchasing a water heater, make sure it can reach these temperatures—most cannot.”

There’s lots more on storage and handling, milk testing and sample taking, and about bovine diseases. WAPF and FTCLDF need to get this material available prominently online.

I appreciate that Mark McAfee has been willing to discuss this issue ongoing, and to his credit, acknowledge his misstatements. But it’s not clear he appreciates the true import of what’s happened. He states following my previous post, “When arguing this point over and over and over....my ‘classes’ of raw milk sometimes get crossed up....so shoot me,” and thereby indicates only grudging acceptance. I know he and other raw dairy farmers understand the enormity of their responsibility—they do need to communicate that in their interactions on all levels.

One new question lots of raw milk consumers are going to be asking their farmers is this: “Do you outsource?”

Industry-Regulator Pile-on at Trautman Farm in WI May Offer Us a Peek Into Next Phase of Raw Milk War

Scott Trautman with his wife, Julie, and their three children. Among the array of tactics the federal-state regulatory authorities have trotted out in their war on raw milk—sting operations, harassment, questionable pathogen findings, legal initiatives—one potentially devastating tactic has remained on the sidelines: getting the dairy processors involved. The reason processors hold so much leverage is that nearly all raw dairies sell at least some of their milk to dairy co-ops and private companies that pasteurize and Trautdistribute the milk products to dairies. Now, in Wisconsin, Scott Trautman, owner of the Trautman Family Farm, has been cut off by both state authorities (by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection from selling raw milk) and his processor (from selling milk for pasteurization), leaving him to dump up to 40 gallons of milk each day.

The reason the processor cut-off is such a problem is that in the dairy industry, unlike most other industries, there is little competition among processors. This helps explain why conventional milk prices are so low, and dairy processor profits so high. If you part company with your processor, you’ll be lucky if you find one other processor in your region, and very often, like in the case of Scott Trautman, you won’t find any.

What makes this situation especially ironic is that the whole melee seems to have resulted over safety…and it continues over safety.  Trautman says  he complained in August that the processing organization handling his milk--Foremost Farms USA, which is under the umbrella of the National Farmers Organization—weren’t using effective safety. For example, he  complainted that he was left with an unclean bulk tank because of the processor’s extraction problems.

According to an article in The Country Today, Foremost and NFO officials attribute their cutoff of Trautman to his sale of raw milk. Selling raw milk is illegal in Wisconsin, but has been tolerated over the years, and hundreds of dairies in the state are understood to sell it.

This is the first case I’ve heard of where processors have used the excuse that they don’t want to be tainted by a dairy’s raw milk sales to jettison the dairy. Everywhere else, even in places where the raw milk issue has been fought very hard, like New York and Pennsylvania, processors have continued to deal with raw dairy producers.

Trautman isn’t bending under the twin assaults on his livelihood. “They’re not getting the best of me,” he told me yesterday. “I’m trying to rally our raw milk producers in this state to form a raw milk producers group.”

High on  the group's agenda: raw milk safety. “I’m looking especially closely at the Vermont law” just put into effect this year, which spells out specific safety specifications, yet offers dairies flexibility in how they achieve the specifications. “I want us (in Wisconsin) to say we consider ourselves under Vermont law.”

He encourages other Wisconsin dairy farmers to go public with their raw milk sales. “They (DATCP) say they investigate every case of selling raw milk. Let them investigate us all. They can come and lock me up. Put me away.”

He adds that in his view this isn’t a health issue. “This is less about raw milk and more about family farms and freedom to choose.”

Scott Trautman and his family has been in the dairy business for only two years. “We started with two cows, then four cows, and so forth,” he says. Now he has 25 cows on seventy acres.

He notes that while he sells other products besides raw milk, it’s the raw milk that brings customers back to his farm repeatedly to buy things like beef, pork, and eggs.

He also notes that it’s curious that DATCP and the processor both came after him at about the same time in September.

So what’s the problem with processors cutting off raw dairy producers? For starters, there are laws on the books that prohibit this kind of behavior—they have names like  “restraint of trade” and “racketeering." These are practices that were supposedly stopped in the early 1900s to protect smaller businesses from being bullied by monopolies or near-monopolies. Who’s protecting whom, now?

Buyers Club Crackdown Continues: WI Moves on 5th Amendment Rights Illustrate Need for Clarity on Raw Milk

The buyers club crackdown, which saw members of a Georgia buyers club being forced to pour out their own milk, has now moved to Wisconsin. There, Max Kane, the head of the Belle’s Lunchbox buyers club that supplies raw milk customers in Chicago, has a court date December 21 to tell a judge why he shouldn’t answer questions from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection.

The Wisconsin DATCP previously subpoenaed Max Kane last spring, seeking information about the buyers club. He showed up at the session with copies of the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions, and protested that he wouldn’t testify in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self incrimination.

He says the Wisconsin authorities have since responded that they are willing to grant him immunity against prosecution, in exchange for his testimony. When he refused that, he says, they offered him a further deal: just shut down your buyers club and we’ll forget the whole thing. He’s refused that as well.

He says that providing any information about his buyers club will potentially open him up to prosecution by the federal government, via the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “I know that once I give them information, I will have a big target on my back, because the FDA will be waiting to go after me. They haven’t given me immunity.”

Max Kane has reason to fear the FDA. If you’ll recall, he obtained emails that incriminate the FDA in a plan hatched earlier this year to crack down on Midwest buyers clubs. And the judge on December 21 could conceivably rule that Max Kane is in contempt of court, and throw him into jail. There are precedents for such action, particularly against reporters and editors who refuse to hand over lists of sources in new stories involving suspects in criminal actions.

Clearly, Wisconsin is on the war path against raw milk. A number of raw dairy farmers in the state are understood to have received warning letters about their sale of raw milk.

Part of the problem in Wisconsin is that the rules about distribution and sale of raw milk are unclear. At times, the state has been permissive about herd shares and buyers clubs, and at other times (like now) it hasn't been. It allows so-called “incidental sales” of raw milk by dairy farmers--sales supposedly not central to the dairy--but the exact meaning of that term has never been spelled out in court.

A number of states operate like Wisconsin. They prohibit or don't specifically allow raw milk sales, but at different times they tolerate such sales to varying degrees via herdshares and buyers clubs.

That ambiguity, which allows regulators to crack down whenever the mood strikes them, is part of what makes disagreements about raw milk so complicated. One of the things I especially liked about food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler’s proposal a few days ago about allowing sales of raw milk directly from farms was his backing of a clear approach for distributing raw milk. I don’t think his way is necessarily the best, but it is clear and understandable, and in the current atmosphere of high emotions and rancor, clarity counts for a lot. That’s what the various sides should be working towards: clarity, rather than trying to get small-time distributors like Max Kane to violate Constitutional protections and forcibly testify against themselves.

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As mentioned in the comments following my previous post, there is an interesting assessment of the raw milk debate (with some controversial comments about Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures), along with quotes from The Raw Milk Revolution.

And this nice review of my book. Thanks also to Gwen Elderberry for her very complimentary words in the reader comments on Amazon.

Which Side in the Raw Milk Debate Most Values Human Life? If That Is the Question, We Have a Long Road Ahead

The concept of “beginner’s mind” in Zen Buddhism advises us that, no matter how advanced we might think our knowledge of any subject, we should always seek to approach it from the perspective of the beginner.

I felt as if I was being pushed to adopt beginner’s mind yesterday while speaking to a group of about 40 attendees at the Bioneers by the Bay conference in New Bedford, MA, when I tried to answer tough questions from several about the government’s most recent campaign against raw milk over the past three years. While the conference explores all kinds of issues around sustainability, it has an environmental orientation, which explains why probably three-fourths of the attendees at my presentation weren’t super-familiar with the legal and regulatory problems around raw milk over the last few years. But they were young--most seemed to be in their twenties and thirties--and extremely curious about raw milk, and why it is so controversial.

Here were some of the questions I received:

• Is raw milk really dangerous?
• If not, why is there so much opposition to it by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and many state agriculture and public health people?
• Why is the FDA devoting such extensive resources to stamping out raw milk, when there are so many other real problems for it to tend to?
• How worried are Big Ag and Big Dairy about inroads being made by raw milk's growing popularity?

 I should say that the attendees didn’t automatically agree with me when I explained things from my perspective. For example, one attendee grilled me on my contention that, based on statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, showing an average of 50-100 reported illnesses each year from raw milk over 33 years, it isn’t a public health hazard. He said it wasn’t necessarily a low number if the number of raw milk drinkers is low.

I tried to explain that while it’s true we don’t know the number of raw milk drinkers (this isn’t a number American public health scientists are clamoring to obtain), that based on some partial government research, the number is most likely one million or more, making the number of illnesses low in that context.

I had more difficulty trying to explain why the FDA is so opposed to raw milk, when it clearly isn’t a public health hazard. A number of the participants were convinced the aggressive anti-raw-milk campaign results from a combination of Big Ag and Big Pharma being threatened by the notion that we can use nutrient dense foods like unpasteurized milk to improve our health.

I explained that while these are certainly factors, I saw the bigger problem as a serious division based on belief systems. The dynamics of that belief system are described well by Tim Wightman in his comment following my previous post.

Even here, though, a few of the participants weren’t completely satisfied. What exactly did I mean about differences in belief systems? I tried to explain how differences in the approaches of conventional and alternative medicine, along with differing attitudes toward prescription drugs, skyrocketing rates of chronic disease, and toward the idea of "good" bacteria.

Surely there had to be something more, a few suggested, to justify the sometimes bizarre sting operations, undercover activities, and harassment of the sort that most recently occurred in Georgia. Yes, I had to admit, there was likely another factor involved: Not only do many of the regulators disagree vehemently about the dangers of raw milk, but they thoroughly disparage those who support raw milk. In fact, I told my listeners, it’s fair to say that people like John Sheehan, who runs the FDA’s dairy division, along with supporters like Bill Marler, simply dislike advocates for raw milk. Sheehan has shown his disdain by refusing to allow any discussion with raw milk advocates, by himself or any of his subordinates.

After the Saturday session, I went back and re-read the seemingly conciliatory comment from food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler, in which he suggested support for raw milk sales from the farm. And I noticed this concluding sentence I had skimmed over before: “I do know that there are people so in need of a raw milk fix that they believe a few sick or dead people is just a reality they are willing to live with. I am not."

It’s one thing to intellectually disagree with others, but when you decide your opponents are morally bankrupt, finding common ground becomes much more challenging. To suggest that raw milk drinkers value human life less than your side is, shall we say, not one of the suggestions you’ll find in Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.