Apart from my sad interviews with struggling Ohio raw-milk dairy farmers, the most intriguing conversation I had reporting my latest BusinessWeek.com column on the state’s uber-enforcement was with Lewis Jones, head of the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s (ODA) dairy division.
He wouldn’t tell me how old he was, but my guess from his photo (published with Wednesday’s post) is that he’s in his 60s. In addition to running ODA’s dairy division, he served for two years beginning in 2004 as president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture’s (NASDA) Dairy Division. So he’s achieved some national recognition among his peers.
I wanted to learn why he has been so aggressively going after producers of raw milk in Ohio (as well as in California) and asked him about his own feelings about raw milk.
“I grew up and drank raw milk myself,” he told me. “Growing up, I liked the taste of raw milk. I really did.” But during his high school years, he began drinking pasteurized milk, and never looked back. “A number of times, I tried going back to raw milk and the taste wasn’t there.”
But he doesn’t think other people should have the choice he had because he is convinced that “there was a reason for pasteurization.” The reason is that contamination of unpasteurized milk can appear at any time, under the cleanest of conditions. He recalled that the sale of raw milk was legal in Ohio for farmers who had received special licenses before the 1960s. By 2002, only one farm with the license remained, and several of its customers inexplicably became ill that year. “It was a very clean farm that had a food-borne outbreak…You cannot control what pathogens might be communicated.” (That dairy gave up its raw milk license in 2003.)
I should mention that Jones and an ODA associate, LeeAnne Mizer, were extremely open and frank with me. There were none of the cop-out excuses common in other states’ departments—We can’t comment on pending cases, etc., etc. They forwarded hearing and other documents promptly and were available on short notice for interviews.
They say they see themselves simply as upholding the law–that if the law changed and become more permissive about raw milk, they would enforce the new law. But in the meantime, they sound like more than regulators. They sound like advocates. "Science has provided us with a great alternative," says Mizer. "That is pasteurization. I can’t imagine why people would want to go back on science."
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