This Food Fight Isn’t Over By a Long Shot

Organic Pastures may have humiliated California agriculture and public health bureaucrats by aggressively, and successfully, resisting their harassment and intimidation techniques designed to put the dairy out of business, but Mark McAfee, the dairy’s owner, isn’t naive enough to think the battle is over. The bureaucrats will bide their time, and await new opportunities to harass Organic Pastures or other raw milk dairies, and in the process interfere with our rights to eat the foods we want.

So McAfee is planning to organize a nonprofit organization, as yet unnamed, to stay on the offensive, and change the complex web of laws and regulations to better protect producers of raw milk. "This battle will rage even greater when we return to the shelves," says McAfee. "People are pissed." He says he’s already raised $500,000 to get the organization going, and engaged an expert in California agriculture and dairy laws.

If you have any doubt about the government’s determination to deny consumers the right to purchase raw milk, I suggest you go to the web site of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Search for "raw milk," and you’ll see that the "Best Bets" consists of one item: a 69-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled "On the Safety of Raw Milk", in which slide #3 exclaims: "Raw milk is inherently dangerous." The remainder of the slides are takeoffs on that point, including the listing of 14 "myths" about pasteurized milk that sound more like the creation of straw men than any claims I’ve seen presented by raw milk advocates; they focus more on the benefits of unpasteurized milk than the dangers of pasteurization. The slide show concludes with a quote from an FDA official stating, "Drinking raw milk or eating raw milk products is like playing Russian roulette with your health."

That same fear-mongering mindset extends down the governmental line, to state and county agriculture and public health bureaucrats. It is the mindset of ideologues, and idelogues don’t care about facts (such as that many fewer people get sick from raw milk than from packaged spinach) or what people really want.