During the 1990s, when I was involved in running two businesses, I hired several dozen employees, and got on well with most of them. I had to fire a few—one of the most traumatic things I’ll ever do—and tried to be as sensitive as I could in smoothing what is an inherently difficult process.

There was one termination, made necessary because of declining business, that didn’t go well, though. It was someone who had worked for me for six years and, hard as I tried to soften the blow, such as with severance pay and an offer of a well-paying part-time contract on a consulting basis, this employee refused the consulting offer and was adamant about not leaving. I finally fired her, and a few months later, I received a notice from the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination that she had filed a complaint against me for not giving her time off to help care for her young daughter. It was a trumped-up charge, since I always honored requests by employees to attend parent-teacher conferences or piano recitals, or to stay home with a sick child.

When I learned from a lawyer specializing in employment issues that defending the complaint could cost me $50,000 to $100,000, I decided to try to settle with the former employee. She accepted an offer of a few weeks additional pay, and while that ended the matter, I felt I had been violated. I realized how easy it is for a disaffected employee to make life miserable, and terribly costly, for a small employer, and resolved never to again become involved in a business where I would have employees (as opposed to contactors).

I was reminded of that incident when I read the comment on my previous post by Alison in Ohio about her fears of selling raw goat’s milk. She has clearly been so scared by the Melissa/Mary vendetta against Mark McAfee that she doesn’t want to take the risk of being caught in such an embroglio. Like me, she had decided that the way to avoid the pain was simply to avoid the game. And who can blame her?

Yet I want to say to Alison: I hope you don’t give in to your fears. I have come to realize the error of my decision to swear off any future hiring. Ken Conrad in his comment on the same post talks about “the preponderance of good.” I agree. Most people are honest and reasonable. A few aren’t, but ambitious serious people like you who want to provide healthy products shouldn’t let the unreasonable ones dissuade you, any more than I should let the one unreasonable employee dissuade me from ever hiring others.

If there is anything this country needs, it is individuals willing to take the risks to launch sustainable farms and sell or otherwise distribute raw milk. (Herd shares are still tolerated in Ohio, from what I understand.) The raw milk war won’t be won by individual farmers like Mark McAfee going it alone and controlling 95% of a state’s market. As much as I admire him, I don’t think it’s healthy for any one enterprise to have a monopoly in any market.

Every business needs some competition, or else it inevitably becomes lax and lazy, and prone to errors. This is the last thing the raw milk business needs.

I know I have previously expressed fears about being in a business that provides products that are ingested, given the legal climate in this country. But it is a fear you can live with.

Part of what needs to happen is that consumers have so many opportunities for acquiring raw milk, along with untainted eggs and chickens like you raise, that the state and federal authorities and corporate lackeys that support them have no choice but to step aside. That will expand the market many times, enabling farmers like you to earn a decent living from farming, and consumers everywhere to have access to nutritionally active products.

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Friends sometimes ask me what my blog is all about. I’ll tell them the best way to find out is to go read it, and then they’ll say something lame like, “I don’t read blogs, so tell me.” And I often have a difficult time giving what investors like to call “the elevator speech”—the 30-second synopsis—about thecompletepatient.com. I usually wind up saying something like, “It’s about a lot of things—about people’s concerns about their food sources, about government harassment of farmers, about sustainable farming, about alternative versus conventional medicine, and lots of other subjects. We have really active discussions.”

But I always feel like I’m not capturing the essence of it. The positive comments concerning my most recent posting got me thinking more about it, because there are concerns expressed about whether overall commentary is becoming too personal or snippety. (And I will allow that Melissa is on-target with at least one of her comments: I don’t mind personal criticism, maybe because as a journalist I’ve long had to deal with controversy.)

I think if I had to describe the most important function of this blog, it would be that it serves as a forum for the growing numbers of people who are disillusioned with our society’s approach to health.

In so doing, the blog allows for conversations that might be viewed as kooky anywhere else. But once these conversations get going, participants often realize the conversations are only kooky in the context of a society that has surrendered its decision-making and oversight on health matters to an establishment that is haughty in its arrogance about the connection between food and health. The study excerpted by Miguel following my Wednesday post, about the connection between Crohn’s disease and a similar ailment in many cows, is a good example. Most unsettling is the possibility that pasteurized milk could be passing Crohn’s around—and that the medical establishment in its arrogance refuses to acknowledge the connection, and thus possible treatments. I am drawn to this kind of information not only because it says so much about our health system’s biases, but because my sister has suffered for years from Crohn’s, always wondering what in heck happened for her to be saddled with this awful condition.

What is striking to me is that the conversations have become so wide-ranging. I hope they can continue that way, so we can all continue in this important learning and sharing process.