Lots of people aren’t taking well to the Michigan Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) strong-arm tactics against the Family Farms Cooperative, as well as to being deprived of the right to consume the foods of their choice. Since my BusinessWeek.com article was posted last Thursday evening, the co-op members and various supporters have been busy organizing themselves to convince MDA to quickly conclude its investigation and give the co-op clearance to continue distributing raw milk (though it’s important to note that no one has been charged as yet with any crime). Among the activities:
* Members have established a web site, which is posting updates about Michigan’s actions against the farmers and providing an email newsletter. The site also includes a mechanism for easily donating money to help the family of Richard and Annette Hebron, the farm family managing the co-op, whose home was raided by Michigan state police and MDA agents, who confiscated their computer and all their co-op business records.
* Members are organizing a letter-writing campaign to Mitch Irwin, director of the MDA. They want to keep his fax machine humming, so they are requesting people to coordinate the sending of their messages according to their last names; people with names starting with the letters A-H should fax on Monday, letters I-M should fax them on Tuesday, letters N-Z should fax on Wednesday, and then start over on Thursday (his fax: 517-335-1423).
* A legally-trained nutritionist has taken up the co-op’s cause and is representing the organization with the MDA. The nutritionist, Aajonus Vonderplanitz, is president of Right to Choose Healthy Food, and he drew up the co-op’s original documents covering leasing of the cows that allows raw milk to be distributed to members. Last Friday, he submitted a two-page etter to Mitch Irwin of the MDA, in which he argued that "based on the facts that the milk is privately owned and all health-department regulations have been rejected by our members as unhealthy and disease-causing, MDA has no jurisdicition over our healthy food and healthy-food choices." He included another 52 pages studies and other data supporting the safety of raw milk. (The Hebrons, for their part, are also requesting that donations be made to Right to Choose Healthy Food, P.O. Box 176, Santa Monica, CA 90406-0176.)
* Some 722 people have voted in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s survey(highlighted within an article) , "Would you drink raw milk?" and 77% said they would. All of the 18 people who have thus far posted comments accompanying my BusinessWeek.com article have objected to the MDA’s actions.
One other thing: a reader of this blog requested that I (and presumably others writing about raw milk) discontinue using the term "raw milk" and instead refer to "fresh milk." I think this is a good idea. The problem is that "raw milk" has become a shorthand means for the media to describe unpasteurized and unhomogenized milk. Referring to "fresh milk" might be okay for those individuals who consume the product, but many people, unfortunately, aren’t even aware that it’s possible to buy and consume milk that hasn’t been processed, so to them, the term "fresh milk" simply describes pasteurized milk that was just within the last day or two delivered to the store. In other words, the new terminology may be too confusing at this point in time.
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